Jamian Juliano-Villani's Spaghettios at Gagosian

Sometimes Jamian Juliano-Villani might take two hours to produce a painting. Others take six months. Nonetheless, like her popularity, the New York-based artist's works have been gradually expanding in both size and content.

On view in New York is It (16 March–20 April 2024), Juliano-Villani's debut solo exhibition with Gagosian, featuring paintings depicting images plucked from American popular culture.

At the heart of the show is Spaghettios (2023), a large-scale oil painting featuring a can of the American brand of ready-to-eat pasta in tomato sauce. Clean in form and stark in colour, the work offers a snapshot of everyday life rendered in rapturous hyperrealism.

When asked by the artist Jordan Wolfson, 'When you think about a painting, what do you think about?' Juliano-Villani responded: '...when I look at other people's work, I want someone to force me into a direction.'

'It's like being in a room with someone you don't want to be in the room with. When I make paintings, I want to dictate someone's reality for a moment, and then they can forget about it if they want.'

This propensity for curation no doubt feeds into Juliano-Villani's role at O'Flaherty's, the gallery she opened in 2021 in New York's Lower East Side with two longtime friends, Billy Grant and Ruby Zarsky. Named after a long-running joke by her parents, who call her Jamian O'Flaherty on account of her diminishing Italianness, O'Flaherty's has shown the likes of Anthea Hamilton, Kim Dingle, and the late Ashley Bickerton.

Juliano-Villani has spoken about the lessons she learned from the legendary Barbadian-born artist—notably passion, freedom, and the importance of being present.

Juliano-Villani's works are held in major U.S. institutional collections including Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Main image: Jamian Juliano-Villani, Spaghettios (2023). Oil on canvas. 185.4 x 212.1 cm. © Jamian Juliano-Villani. Courtesy Gagosian. Photo: Rob McKeever.