JAMIAN JULIANO-VILLANI
b. 1987, United StatesJamian Juliano-Villani is a contemporary American artist known for her vividly surreal paintings, which draw from a frenetic mix of popular culture, art history, and mass media to create hyperreal images teetering between humour and horror.
Early Years
Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1987, Jamian Juliano-Villani grew up in the suburbs with a strong awareness of commercial imagery, suburban banality, and low-brow aesthetics. Her early exposure to this visual detritus would later inform the manic energy of her paintings. She studied at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, where she received her BFA in 2013. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Juliano-Villani has also operated the artist-run gallery O’Flaherty’s since 2021 with painter Billy Grant and actor-musician Matthew Brown, further expanding her subversive footprint in the contemporary art world.
Artworks
Jamian Juliano-Villani’s artworks fuse cartoon surrealism with biting psychological undertones, creating kaleidoscopic scenes where reality and absurdity clash with comic violence and deadpan despair.
Pop-Minded Paintings
Juliano-Villani’s breakout works from the mid-2010s propelled her into the spotlight for their dynamic compositions, which overflow with hyperactive, appropriated imagery. Paintings like The Softest Ass in the East (2015) and Try and Be Happy (2014) feature anthropomorphic figures, anthropological oddities, and cartoon detritus that feel both nostalgic and alien. Rendered with airbrush and acrylic, these artworks compress her encyclopedic visual archive into unnerving vignettes, where humour and horror coexist. This signature style exemplifies her refusal to adhere to traditional painting hierarchies, instead embracing visual excess and the grotesque to mirror the chaos of contemporary culture.
Referencing and Rewriting
Juliano-Villani’s process is rooted in deep research and relentless image collecting. Her studio contains a vast library of source materials—magazines, manuals, anime, and discarded commercial ephemera—which she repurposes into arresting scenes. Works like Buddy (2016) depict offbeat characters caught in claustrophobic or nonsensical situations, mirroring the disjointed logic of dreams or digital scrolling. Her approach borrows from the tradition of Surrealism, but the effect is distinctly post-internet: fast, fractured, and emotionally raw. She paints with calculated precision, yet the final compositions feel unstable, as if threatening to implode under their own referential weight. Her works challenge viewers to decode layered symbols without ever offering resolution.
O’Flaherty’s and Expanded Practice
In 2021, Juliano-Villani co-founded O’Flaherty’s, a Manhattan gallery known for its theatrical, often confrontational programming. The space operates more like an artwork than a white cube, embracing chaos, contradiction, and personality. Her exhibitions there—such as Let’s Kill Nicole (2022)—blur the boundaries between painting, performance, and environment. Installed with deliberately overwhelming scenography, these projects reflect her irreverent, anti-institutional ethos. Through O’Flaherty’s, Juliano-Villani has redefined the gallery as a medium, turning it into a site for absurdity, critique, and community. This curatorial work reinforces her artistic interest in systems of control, institutional behaviour, and the slippery power dynamics that shape both art and life.
Exhibitions
Jamian Juliano-Villani has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.
Solo Exhibitions
- Try Explaining How You Feel, Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavander (2021)
- Steak Wars, Pond Society Foundation, Shanghai (2021)
- The World’s Greatest Planet on Earth, Studio Voltaire (2016)
- Detroit Affinities, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit (2015)
Group Exhibitions
- Milk of Dreams, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2022)
- My Reflection of You, The Perimeter, London (2022)
- Trouble in Paradise, Collection Rattan Chadha, Kunsthal Rotterdam (2019)
- Infinite Blue, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (2018)
- Something Living, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2017)
- A Shape That Stands Up, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016)
Jamian Juliano-Villani’s Instagram can be found here.
Critical Reception
Jamian Juliano-Villani’s work has been featured in leading art magazines including Artforum, Interview Magazine, and Vulture.
Jamian Juliano-Villani FAQs
What kind of artist is Jamian Juliano-Villani?
Jamian Juliano-Villani is a contemporary American artist known for her energetic, referential paintings that fuse mass culture with surreal imagery and personal psychology. Drawing from a vast archive of commercial and cultural visual material, her artworks confront the viewer with absurd, layered narratives that blur the boundaries between humour and horror, figuration and abstraction. Juliano-Villani’s practice is both deeply painterly and resolutely post-internet, examining the aesthetics of overstimulation and disorientation in modern life through a unique, unapologetically maximalist lens.
What materials does Jamian Juliano-Villani use?
Jamian Juliano-Villani’s paintings are primarily created with acrylic and airbrush on canvas, though her process begins long before she touches a brush. She sources thousands of images—ranging from anime stills to instructional graphics—compiling a physical and digital archive that informs each composition. These materials are combined, distorted, and recontextualised using Photoshop before being meticulously painted by hand. The resulting works are both technically refined and visually chaotic, underscoring her interest in labour-intensive painting as a response to disposable digital media and contemporary image overload.
What is O’Flaherty’s and how is Jamian involved?
O’Flaherty’s is an artist-run gallery co-founded by Jamian Juliano-Villani in 2021, alongside Matthew Brown and Billy Grant. Situated in Manhattan’s East Village, the space defies traditional gallery conventions with chaotic installations, unpredictable programming, and an anti-commercial ethos. Juliano-Villani uses O’Flaherty’s not only as a curatorial platform but as an extension of her artistic voice—one that values risk, absurdity, and critical humour. The gallery operates like an ongoing conceptual artwork, allowing her to explore performance, collaboration, and institutional critique in tandem with her painting practice.
Ocula | 2025
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