Julien Nguyen

{{#set:Bad_content=bio }} {{#set:Bad_content= }}

---

Julien Nguyen
Born	1990 Washington, D.C.
🏳️ Nationality	American
🏫 Education	Rhode Island School of Design, Providence 2012 Städelschule, Frankfurt 2015
💼 Occupation
🥚 Twitter	Twitter=

label65 = 👍 Facebook

Search Julien Nguyen on Amazon.

Julien Nguyen (born 1990) is a Vietnamese American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. He is known for his formally and materially inventive figurative paintings that depict a multitude of subjects, ranging from the intensely personal to the historical, religious, and mythological, to create visually striking images that pose questions about contemporary life and its place within the history of art, politics, and civilization.

Early Life and Education

Nguyen was born in Washington D.C. in 1990. He grew up in Manhattan Beach, California and graduated from Mira Costa High School. Nguyen attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence until 2012 and the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany until 2015.

Career

Nguyen has mounted solo exhibitions at The Swiss Institute Contemporary Art in New York, The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Stuart Shave/Modern Art in London, Neue Alte Brucke in Frankfurt , The Kunstverein München in Germany, and his work has been included in group shows at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles and in New York City.In 2017, Nguyen's work was selected for the Whitney Biennial and one of the paintings Nguyen completed for the exhibition was acquired by the museum for its permanent collection. In 2019, Nguyen was included in the Forbes 30 under 30 list in the Art & Style section. In 2020, Nguyen was included in Cultured Magazine's 30 under 35 list of young artists.In 2020, Nguyen will have his first solo exhibition at Matthew Marks in 2020. The Gallery represents his work.

Exhibitions and Works

Superpredators (2016)

Nguyen's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles was on view in the month leading up to the 2016 election at Freedman Fitzpatrick gallery. As Travis Diehl notes in a review of the exhibition published in Artforum, the shows title is taken from a term "Hillary Clinton used...twenty years ago in reference to supposedly ruthless, remorseless young gangbangers." Diehl concludes his review with the suggestion that "Nguyen’s RGB redux of sixteenth-century tropes sure feels like an indictment of the self-satisfied, pastel, and abstract twenty-first. Add to this a marked mannerism—hands leaking into points, bodies torturously stretched—that isn’t style so much as a symptom of a corrupt age." The exhibition that saw Nguyen developing for the first time his now signature style, was also included in Frieze Magazine's critics guide by Olivian Cha. Cha's review of the show narrowed in on Nguyen's uses of perspective In his 2019 essay on Nguyen's work published in Artforum, Zach Hatfield expands on Diehl and Cha's analysis, contending "the title, with its sci-fi and Clintonian connotations, snappily hinted at the artist’s flair for merging politics and pop culture. Here, extraterrestrials and princely waifs stalked Boschian realms in mannered tableaux that toyed with suffering, want, whiteness, and spectatorship." Hatfield continues, "there are usually several registers of antiquity in any given Nguyen painting: the 1980s as a kind of pre-internet Eden; early modernity; the mythic past that early-modern painters so assiduously depicted; the future antiquity that will eventually glaze our online present. “Superpredators,” with its electoral red-and-blue palette, left all of these legacies skewed, skewered." Flash Art Magazine published an interview with Nguyen on the occasion of the exhibition.

Executive Functions and Executive Solutions (2017)

In the 2017 encaustic on panel works, Executive Function and Executive Solutions, produced for that year's Whitney Biennial, and later acquired for the museum's permanent collection, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee, Nguyen utilized the design of the front page of the New York Times as the infrastructure of his paintings. In his 2019 essay on Nguyen's work published in Artforum, Zach Hatfield described the scene's that comprised each panel as each "boast[ing] satanic nymphs, skeletons, and nudes while evoking artists like Sandro Botticelli and Giorgio de Chirico" Hatfield continued "here was the paper of record, that bastion of both compassion and complacency, reimagined as comic book, as peeling altarpiece, as final draft of History. The overall impression, as is so often the case with this artist’s work, was of innocents and demons alike poised at last on the edge of eschaton." In an article on the biennial in W Magazine, Stephanie Eckhardt, echoing Hatfield's sentiment, wrote of Nguyen's paintings that they "seem to foreshadow the apocalypse."

Ex Forti Dulcedo (2018)

For his first solo exhibition in London, Nguyen presented ten paintings that recast some of Christianity's most archetypal scenes in the history of art, with lovers and friends from the artist's life newly inhabiting the sacred poses of holy figures like St. George, Christ, or the Virgin Mary. In an article on the exhibition in Frieze Magazine entitled "The Gospel According to Julien Nguyen," Mimi Chu suggests that the artist's reworking of archetypal scenes with the "androgynous, inflammatory and highly eroticized" bodies of "dainty millennials" as models "pick[s] up on the taboo undercurrents of conventional religious depictions." Chu continues, "by leaving portions of the work unfinished, Nguyen unmoors the figures from their places in the biblical narrative and leaves them floating in an ambiguous space." In a review of the exhibition in Artforum, Eliel Jones concludes "the artist asks us to consider the significance of these ancient Christian stories in contemporary life." In an essay on Nguyen's work written by Zach Hatfield also published in Artforum the following year, Hatfield cites Nguyen's use of Eastern references. like manga, in his re-interpretations of traditional Western scenes, arguing that in this exhibition "the conflations of identity and devotion already implicit in [Nguyen's] project...became more pronounced."

The exhibition was accompanied by the publication of the first and only monograph on Nguyen's work to be published on Nguyen's work thus far, released by the gallery and Cornerhouse Publications with contributions by Jenny Borland, Charlie Fox, and Hardy Hill.

Spiritus Mundi (2018)

For Nguyen's first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, the artist produced his first moving-mage work, a short film entitled "Spirtitus Mundi." In the press release for the exhibition the piece is described "as a reenactment of a scene from the director’s cut of Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic Nixon, in which former US President Richard Nixon and then-Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms leverage one another in a terse power struggle." Where "what begins as a strategic negotiation of funding and rank escalates into an ominous rumination on geopolitics, hubris, mortality and corruption." Mirroring the move Nguyen made in the paintings in "Ex Forti Dulcedo," His "reinterpretation" of the film "sees the roles of Nixon and Helms recast with friends from his life in Los Angeles...Costumed in a distorted approximation of political dress, and set in an Orientalist office, these attractive, vampiric young men inhabit their positions through a strange and darkly humorous role-play, grappling with a history that lies just beyond the brink of comprehension." In an essay on Nguyen's work written by Zach Hatfield also published in Artforum the following year, Hatfield contends that though the film's "medium marked a departure, it retains the appropriative tendencies and puckishness of Nguyen’s oils." Hatfield continues "Nguyen heightens the borderline camp of the original scene, adorning the room with Orientalist décor and costuming his limber, attractive actors in slightly oversize suits. Their dialogue, which starts as a tense Faustian confrontation before easing into a lyrical meditation on death and evil, immediately feels off, fumbling, half-understood: American power as an unrehearsed read-through of an inherited script. But there’s also a libidinal anxiety that peaks when Helms describes US intervention in Chile as 'not an operation so much as an organic phenomenon. It grew. It changed shape. It developed . . . appetites.'"

Returns (2019)

Nguyen's first survey exhibition and his second institutional solo show in the United States was presented at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati in 2019. In the press text the show's curator Steven Matijcio, writes of that the exhibition "is anchored with resilient, if no less partial subjects who speak to Nguyen’s underlying navigation of his Vietnamese heritage in a complex post-colonial arena...His virtuosic technique serves as foil in this regard, moving in and out of the pristine finish we expect from the Renaissance to highlight the amorphous, sometimes grotesque ramifications of his content." In his essay on Nguyen's work written in Artforum, Hatfield relays that "the shows title "Returns,” was chosen by curator Steven Matijcio as a nod not only to Nguyen’s canonical revisionism but also to economic meanings, to how the painter may be returning a defective item, tradition, or world and bartering for something newer."

Work in Fashion

Collaborations with Ottolinger (2018-2020)

Since 2018, Nguyen has collaborated with the Berlin-based fashion brand Ottolinger. The fashion house has used Nguyen's painting as prints for a number of their pieces in two of their collections to date. The garments have been worn by celebrities such as Bella Hadid, SZA, and Jordyn Woods.

References

{{#set:Technical tag=Article from Wikipedia}}{{#set:priority= }} {{#set:PageName=Julien_Nguyen }}

This article "Julien Nguyen" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Julien Nguyen. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.{{#set:Article=true}}

---