Description

Emerging in the 1980s, Julia Wachtel became known for her paintings employing cartoon characters appropriated from sources as every day and relatable as greeting cards and magazines, deliberately commenting on our quickly evolving visual culture. One of Wachtel’s earliest paintings, Just the Two of Us shows two young women, one in an elaborate gown reading a letter and the other a school girl standing in front of the moon; both figures are based on images from greeting cards. That both of the female subjects are shown as desirable or sexualized is not a coincidence, speaking to the ways that representations of women have been formed by the appetites of men.