Julia Wachtel

Julia Wachtel (; born 1956) is a contemporary American painter associated with the Pictures Generation. Since the late 1970s, her work has been based in the appropriation of imagery from mass media and popular culture. Starting with magazines and greeting cards, she later turned to the internet, social media, and clip-art for her source material. Her signature style involves silkscreening these elements onto canvas alongside hand-painted panels. Wachtel often builds multi-panel compositions that pair cartoon and other commercial imagery with photographs of pop stars, political figures, post-industrial landscapes, and media spectacles.

Critics and institutions have consistently noted the way in which Wachtel distills images, undermining their original logic and leading the viewer into an examination of a media dominated world. Flash Art writes that her style creates "a new disrupted space" for imagery, compelling viewers to recontextualize the media they consume on a daily basis. The Cleveland Museum of Art describes her as an artist who "appropriates popular imagery to critique an increasingly media-saturated society," and argued that her shift from print to internet sources has made her work "more relevant than ever." Comparing her to Mike Kelley, Frieze describes Wachtel's work as a "darkly subversive use of popular culture and objects as a form of social commentary."

Wachtel's work is held in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Blanton Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, MAMCO Geneva, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Phillips Collection, and the Zabludowicz Collection.