Jamian Juliano Villani 003

Let's Kill Nicole

Dates
21.06.2019 | 21.09.2019
Gallery
London
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Massimo De Carlo London is pleased to present Let’s Kill Nicole, an exhibition by the New York based American artist Jamian Juliano-Villani. Let’s Kill Nicole alludes to a friend, most likely in grade school, who makes a violently irrational suggestion, such as killing a bully or a friend. That suggestion is the vortex of the show. Overtaci, a deer-cum-human figure, finds its origin from the obsessive work of a Danish outsider artist, Ovartaci. Ovartaci spent majority of her life as a patient mainly hidden in the Risskov Psychiatric Hospital in Aarhus, Denmark. Juliano-Villani reimagines the artist’s muse as a teenage American lacrosse player framed by a parents’ camera lens. The stale obsessive humanoid is frozen in activity, with the athletic shorts rolled up all the way up. When a veteran retires they are usually given a ceremonial water salute with firehoses and jets, saluting them for their work. In two paintings, Big Amy and one small - Little Amy, a mirage vision of Amy Winehouse as a child is airbrushed in a desert, an ocean, being saluted by dolphins and lizards. The lowly beach style of boardwalk t-shirts and trinkets is used to memorialize Amy. She is a blip of a cheap angel in British culture. Let’s Kill Nicole focuses on banal drama. There is irrational and melodramatic behaviour; a guilty dog with a bagel knife in his mouth, the butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno reminiscing over old CDs, and a naive monster truck mural trying to break out of the facade of the gallery. This is Juliano-Villani’s second show with the gallery.

The Artist

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Jamian Juliano-Villani

Jamian Juliano-Villani was born in 1987, Newark, New Jersey, and she now lives and works in New York.


Jamian Juliano-Villani's paintings are a mesmerising blend of chaos and vibrancy, enticing viewers with their unmistakably cartoonish pop. But underneath the surface of American popular culture's zaniness, you'll find a co-existence of humour, eroticism, fragility, and trauma. Composed using borrowed images from movies, memes, stock photography, art history, and printed matter, her acrylic canvases, airbrushed to precision, reflect the unpredictable pandemonium of everyday life.


Her work is represented in prestigious American public collections such as: Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.