Julia Rommel

Julia Rommel (born 1980) is an American abstract painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Education.
Julia Rommel was educated at the University of Richmond and subsequently she received her MFA from The American University in Washington DC.
Work.
Julia Rommel is an American painter with a background in art history who was creatively influenced during the 1980s. Some of her early paintings were monochrome black, and others were other kinds of monochrome. Her paintings are made by a process of construction and deconstruction that results in an abstract work that has a sense of the history of its own making and also has a subtle references to landscape. Through experiment with paint and surface, the artist deconstructs the formal foundations of painting.
Rommel uses the conventional materials of painting – linen pulled taut over stretcher bars and oil paint applied by brush – but she uses them unconventionally, pushing her paintings towards the sculptural. Rommel works on several paintings at once. “Whenever I approach what looks like an existing modernist painting, I know I have to change something,” says Rommel in an interview with Art in America, “I try to mess up the painting to prevent a fixed reading that reflects an established tradition.” Rommel challenges the essentials of art making as well as the art market, exposing her audience to various stages of painting.
Rommel’s work acts between painting and relief, insisting on the objectiveness of the work. In her paintings, Rommel is less interested in signature brush strokes than in what she describes as using tools “to keep my signature away.”
Rommel’s oil paintings range in size and color from cool to warm palettes of blues, greys, whites, reds and pinks, and bright citrus hues. Rommel’s seemingly accessible surfaces belie their complexity which are made with a laborious effort of cutting, sanding, wiping, expunging, and overlaying, as the build-up and break down of the composition both reveals and hides a history of choices and decisions. Rommel creates stressed surfaces with bends, folds, cracks, frayed edges, and staple holes. Rommel’s canvases often have skin-like quality which emphasizes the tactility of the paintings. Traces caused by her process add marks onto the canvas akin to wrinkles on a skin, while the imperfectly textured paint adds an outer coat. Through repeatedly re-stretching linen from one stretcher to another in different sizes, and layering paint onto the linen at intermediary stages, she cumulatively builds up a textured surface.
Rommel is and has always been a colorist and the colors come from her experiences. Her paintings act equally as research into color. Her works have come to be as defined by movement as they are by color. While they are not attempts at color harmonies, the artist is interested in the conflict between colors and of using tones to eliminate one another.
The edges become important, especially the ones that end up scarred and visible. A relief is formed from the accretion of creases, staple holes and edges frayed by repeated stretching. All of her paintings concern their edges, as they are stretched and re-stretched numerous times over the course of their making in a physical wrangle of layering and effacing. While most painters endeavor to disguise and hide stretcher bars and their functional role as supports, Rommel revels in their structural utility.
The painting titles are pulled mostly from within moments of clarity and openness. The titles of Rommel’s painting allude to personal perspectives and this differentiates her work from Minimalism’s suppression of subjectivity. But, Rommel strips external narratives off her paintings, delving into the physicality of the canvas. Rommel is concerned primarily with painting’s internal dynamics. The paintings have their own personality rather than acting as a conduit for hers. While being made, her paintings seem to have a mind of their own. Despite her original plans to make dark works, they may become bright paintings; the personality of the paintings, 'the fun and happiness, has sneakily persisted.' Rommel warmly welcomes imperfections onto her canvas, giving her work a humanness that is so often absent from fine art.
Process emblematizes Rommel’s work. To make a painting, Rommel wraps stretcher boards with excessive canvas, which she fixes to the back; as she goes, she turns her attention to the extra, releasing it and rebinding it on new differently sized boards, color-correcting or leaving the stains of stray brushstrokes. Initially putting a layer of gesso and paint onto her canvas that she stretched on a wooden frame, she later removes the canvas from its support to re-stretch it back in an alternative position. Sometimes she gessoes and sometimes she doesn’t, and sometimes she may sand the surface. This process sounds messy, but the effect is extremely deliberate. The paintings are all very laborious. They are slow, slow paintings. Paint is layered in stages, building up texture and a natural language of mark-making. Repeating the process multiple times, the artist examines the basics of oil painting. Rommel’s unique process substitutes for traditional painting onto a canvas. This process reveals the passage of time and traces the history of Rommel’s decision-making, visibly evidenced in the various applications of monochrome colors.
Rommel’s paintings are the result of a back and forth battle with the canvas. The beginnings of a painting are reworked, covered, and revised through various stages until the moment when she finds contentment. Linen is stretched and re-stretched from one set of stretcher bars to another of a different size. Like maps indexing Rommel’s activity, fragments of her paintings are obliterated as she moves through a succession of painterly steps, ultimately resulting in a sculptural surface. There is a sense of desperation or frustration in their making and paint application. Each of her strokes are a decisive moment where she court abandon which manages to infuse the art with humor. The artist writes about the struggle to find ways of making marks that look natural and at home on the canvas.
Collections.
Rommel’s work is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.