One Step Ahead

An hour before our interview Jamian Juliano-Villani decides she would rather not. “To be honest I feel like the less I talk about the work, the better,” she texts. “Cooler that way.”

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For the past decade the artist has been building up to her recently debuted exhibition, “It,” at Gagosian’s West 24th Street location. After a significant pause since her last solo show, it’s her big return back into the spotlight. Twelve new works are culled from an assemblage of art historical references, personal anecdotes, bits of writing, and her archive of found visuals. 

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Cannibalized into large, smooth, colorful scenes, Juliano-Villani’s images swallow their parts and spit out something new, cohesive, and impenetrable. There are Mise-en-scènes, still lifes, and text-based works (like one that reads “Steamy Little Jewish Princess"). Pull back the layers, and you’ll find an autobiography of sorts. At the heart is a love of art and a fascination with consumer culture. And each artwork, if you can crack the code, holds a story. Take Ashley, 2024, for example: The title of the work that shows two Jean-Michel Basquiats reclining in burgundy chairs (Juliano-Villani herself is a twin) references the artist Ashley Bickerton, who first introduced Juliano-Villani to Basquiat’s experimental band, Gray, and who was her North Star before his untimely passing in late 2022. 

Elsewhere, Robbi 1, 2, and 3, 2024 all reference Juliano-Villani’s father of the same name, as well as the moniker of the commercial printmaking business that he ran with her mother. And then there is Elvis and Me, 2024 a self portrait that sees the "King of Rock" and Juliano-Villani (a former music critic) standing side-by-side in matching worn-in white button-downs tucked into dark pants (the artist sporting her signature high-waisted sweatpants and sneakers). The two stare confidently out, shoulders slightly slouched, from a muted pink backdrop, and one of her hands clutches Elvis' crotch. 

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Introducing herself into the work is a new development for Juliano-Villani, but the artist is no stranger to the spotlight. Born in Newark, New Jersey, she moved to New York soon after art school and cut her teeth working 50-hour-weeks as a studio assistant for artists including Erik Parker, Jules de Balincourt, and Dana Schutz. It wasn’t long before she was noticed for her surrealist, comical, and initially cartoon-like trompe l'oeils. In 2015 two solo exhibitions—her debut at the now-closed JTT gallery, "Crypod," and her first solo European show, “Nudge the Judge,” at Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin—put her on the map, and her star has only risen since. In one image from the latter exhibition, The Entertainer, 2015, a blow-up doll is caught mid-song playing the piano in shiny blue pumps in a green room. The uncanny scene captures the artist's the Fluxus sensibility, where high and low dissipate symbols congeal in an irreverent mash-up. 

Juliano-Villani moves fast. Her secret to staying ahead of the game might as well be, in part, to stay in constant flux. The artist’s artist opened O’Flaherty’s in 2021 with Billy Grant and Ruby Zarsky. The gallery quickly made waves in the downtown art scene with a program that wasn’t afraid to take risks. As a gallerist, she has championed the late and great Bickerton, introduced New York to the prolific works of Vienna’s Christian Ludwig Attersee, and breathed life back into openings with cigarette-smoking indoors, after-parties that flow out into the street, and a series of performances by Gelitin that involved sudsy slippery slides, butthole-painting, and lots of foam. Not to mention the stellar, architectural exhibition “Donna Dennis: Houses and Hotels,” which opened at the gallery the same night as “It” and has already generated a buzz of its own.

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So while Juliano-Villani is running ahead between the studio and her gallery and the various talks and happenings that follow her, here I am mulling around outside of Gagosian. My head is still spinning with images from her debut show and a list of questions I would like to ask the artist—like, What is your unrealized idea?—the artist who somehow manages to be everywhere while maintaining an elusive quality. Who runs on chaos, who says what she wants, and who knows that art is no place for the faint of heart and once proclaimed in an interview: “Whenever I get an assistant, I put them through hell the first day. I make them watch people die online, do poppers, and see if they can wake up the next day at 9 a.m. If they do, they are hired.” Instead, today Juliano-Villani is at home, concocting a parfait of red bull-infused berries and sour cream–for this magazine—with her twin sister, and probably already on to the next project, and the next.

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‍“Jamian Juliano-Villani: It,” is on view through April 20, 2024 at Gagosian at 541 West 24th Street, New York, NY.