Julia Wachtel: Thirsty for Myself

Image: Julia Wachtel, Thirsty For Myself, 2019, oil on canvas, 60 x 121 inches. Photo: Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of the artist

Jan. 19-March 9, 2024

Reception Thursday, Jan. 25

5-7:30pm, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery

Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery is pleased to present the first Philadelphia exhibition by Julia Wachtel, Thirsty for Myself.

Educated at Middlebury College, Vermont; the School of Visual Arts; and the Independent Study Program, Whitney Museum of American Art, Wachtel originally emerged as an associate of the Pictures Generation whose subjects focused on appropriated contemporary media in the late 1970s. During that period and the decades that followed, artifacts from our mediated society were morphing from mechanical reproduction into the digital era. Wachtel pioneered in critiquing and reconstructing the visual language of mass culture with great irony and wit while engaging in deep critical discourse about popular culture and politics, the construction of identity and emotion, and dominant narratives about consumption. 

Through silkscreen printing and oil paint, Wachtel’s appropriated images are interrupted by visual breaks that resemble pages as recorded against a scanner bed, stripes caused from printer heads being out of alignment, or entropic glitches running across a corrupted digital file. By juxtaposing high and low, clean and dirty, and right and left symmetry, Wachtel duplicates and displaces her imagery, allowing the resulting ambiguity to lead her viewers in unlearning received conceptions of power and intent. By implication, no one is innocent, as we are all immersed and complicit in the Society of the Spectacle. 

The exhibition is a part of (re)FOCUS, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts/1974, a citywide festival that recognized women artists. With over 150 exhibitions, panels, lectures, workshops and demonstrations, it was one of the first large-scale surveys of the work of contemporary American women artists and signaled the inception of the American feminist art movement. (re)FOCUS 2024 is also a Philadelphia citywide festival showing how women-identified and BIPOC artists have moved from the periphery to the center of the art world. Like its 1974 predecessor, (re)FOCUS is a collaboration among Philadelphia's large, small, and diverse visual arts institutions. 

Free and open to the public.

Wachtel has been exhibiting since 1979. She has had over two dozen solo exhibitions including at American Fine Arts, Helena Anrather Gallery, Mary Boone Gallery, Diane Brown Gallery, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, Nature Morte Gallery, New York C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center Mall, New York, NY; Fashion Moda, Bronx, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati,Ohio; Super Dakota, Brussels, Belgium; Galerie Georges-Phillipe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris; Crypte de l’Eglise del’Assomption, Rosnay-L’Hopital, France; Eglise de Aumenancourt, Marne, France; Passages, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Troyes, France; Vilma Gold, London; Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway; and Galerie Faust, Geneva, Switzerland. 

Her group exhibitions include shows at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Michael Benevento Gallery, L.A.C.E. Gallery, Margo Leavin Gallery and Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles; University Art Museum, University of California at Santa Barbara; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Museum of Contemporary Art Westport and Westport Art Center, Westport, Connecticut; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Phillips Collection and Von Ammon Co, Washington D.C.; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, New Jersey; Bard College, Annadale-on-Hudson, New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Brooklyn Latino Space and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo, New York; Hillwood Art Gallery, Long Island University/C.W. Post Campus, Greenvale, New York; Institute for Contemporary Art, P.S.1, Queens, New York; American Fine Arts Co, The Artist’s Institute; Artists Space, Basilico Fine Arts, Cheim & Read Gallery, Drawing Center, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Bess Cutler Gallery, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, Algus Greenspon, Helena Anrather Gallery, Derek Eller Gallery,Fiction/Non Fiction, Foxy Production, Lisson Gallery, Massimo Audiello Gallery, Metro Pictures, MoMA, Nature Morte Gallery, Daniel Newburg Gallery, Perrotin Gallery, Room East, Andrea Rosen Gallery, Simon Watson Gallery, White Columns and Whitney Museum of American Art, all New York, New York; Knight Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina; Cincinnati Art Museum and Carl Solway, Cincinnati, Ohio; Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; Vanguard Gallery, Philadelphia; Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes College, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; The Contemporary Austin, Texas; Texas Gallery, Houston; The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City; Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum, Graz, Austria; The Albertina Modern Museum, Vienna, Austria; Galerie Catherine Bastide, Jablonka Gallery and Super Dakota Gallery, Brussels, Belgium; Saidye Bronfman Centre, Montreal, Canada; FRAC Poìtou-Charantes, Angoulême, France; Les rencontres d’Arles, Arles, France; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Le Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dole, France; Le Magasin, Grenoble, France; Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Galerie Montenay Del Sol, Louvre and Museum of the Applied Arts, all Paris; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France; Hans Meyer Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany; Galerie Für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, German; Achim Kubinski, Stuttgart, Germany; Edinburgh International Art Festival, Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, England; Institute for Contemporary Art, Saatchi Gallery, Vilma Gold Gallery, Zabludowicz Foundation, London; Armada, Milan, Italy; De Selby Gallery, Co; Amsterdam; L21 Gallery, Majorca, Spain; KODE Art Museum, Bergen, Norway; Spiritmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden; Kunsthalle, Bern, Switzerland; Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland; Art & Public, Cabinet, Galerie Pierre Huber, Musée D’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO) and Zabriskie Point, Geneva, Switzerland.

Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; American Medical Association, Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Chase Manhattan Bank, The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Progressive Corporation, Cleveland, Ohio; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels Zabludowicz Collection, London; Fonds Régional d’Art Conemporain, Région Basse Normandie, Caen, France; Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Poitou-Charentes (FRAC), Angouleme, France; Absolut Collection, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland.