Julia Yerger

Starring Fizz implies a kind of flashy protagonist, while intimating a flurry of shooting stars doused in carbonated soda. Texture blankets meaning in Julia Yerger’s practice, akin to when a note from a fiddle sweetens a lyric about home. Cliff (2026) illustrates a cluster circumscribed within an opaque plain. The central form compresses the image, allowing the eye to bounce around its woven interior: an exquisite corpse packed with channels of diaristic scribbles and erasures. It funnels up like a smokestack at the top edge of the canvas where the pressure diffuses into scrapes of warm translucencies resembling shimmering fog. Cliff is not a cliff literally, but texturally–the chisel of a face-shaped rock, gritty air, and flattened grass.

The speed at which an image is formulated is integral to the way it is read. Painting can conflate opposing timescales, and Yerger allows her subjects to materialize through a contradictory process of control and chance. Unwavering linework contrasts flurries of gestural brushtrokes. The smallest tweaks become essential, such as the curve of one line or the grain of the canvas that is covered up in the process. In Flood on purpose (2026), a figure stands in an indeterminate horizon with a glaring coral sun stretching out against a sea. Rather, it begins to do so before losing itself to a deluge of aquamarine and turquoise. The image had permission from the artist to engage with its own undoing. Symbolism gets reduced to color, shape, and tactility–and the sign is emptied out. The corollary is closer to feeling than language.

Julia Yerger (b. 1993, Rockville, Maryland) lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Chamberlin, Zurich (2026); Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2024); King's Leap, New York (2024); and Clearing, Brussels (2023). Group exhibitions include Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2026); Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2026); Societe, Berlin (2025); Matthew Brown, New York (2025); Shore Gallery, Vienna (2025); Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles (2024); Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2023); and Paul Soto, Los Angeles (2023). Yerger received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2015.