J
ulien Nguyen is a contemporary painter whose meticulously rendered tableaus merge Renaissance composition, science‑fiction aesthetics and portraits of friends to create visually complex worlds shaped by both art‑historical scholarship and digital‑age fragmentation. His rapid rise, marked by the Whitney Biennial and major institutional exhibitions, has established him as one of the most inventive figurative painters working today.
Julien Nguyen Biography
Julien Nguyen’s deftly rendered paintings combining elements of art history, science fiction, and contemporary subjects in precisely rendered tableaus have cemented his reputation as one of the most inventive painters working today. His practice is at once deeply academic, informed by the philosophies and aesthetic precedents of art history, and immediately colloquial, populated with friends, lovers, and fellow artists who pose for him in his Los Angeles studio. Harmoniously blending iconography as disparate as Renaissance altarpieces and video-game imagery, Nguyen builds alluring pictorial worlds that evoke the nonhierarchical and often fragmented pictorial language of the modern digital age through sumptuous color and delicate form. Nguyen received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012 and completed postgraduate studies at Frankfurt’s Städelschule, where he was awarded his Meisterschule in 2015. His work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Swiss Institute in New York and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.
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