Julien Nguyen

Julien Nguyen was born in 1990 in Washington, D.C., and lives and works in Los Angeles. He earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012, then completed postgraduate study at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste, known as the Stadelschule, in Frankfurt, where he was awarded his Meisterschule in 2015.

His early solo exhibitions took place in quick succession at Kunstverein Munchen in Munich in 2014 and at Neue Alte Brucke in Frankfurt in 2015, followed by a solo show at Freedman Fitzpatrick in Los Angeles, "Super-predators," in 2016. His profile rose substantially with his inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York. In 2018 he had a solo exhibition, "Ex Forti Dulcedo," at Modern Art in London, and the following year the Swiss Institute in New York presented "Evil in the Defense of the Good," described by the institution as his first institutional solo exhibition in the United States.

Nguyen is now represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, which has staged a New York solo exhibition of twenty new paintings in 2025 and a Los Angeles solo exhibition, "Vessels," running from May to July 2026. His paintings, often in oil on panel or copper, are known for combining old-master technique with subjects drawn from military hardware, video games, and internet culture.

Nguyen's work has drawn attention in Artforum and Mousse Magazine, among others, largely for the way it layers old-master painting technique onto contemporary and speculative subject matter, from Renaissance devotional imagery to bombers and video-game iconography. His trajectory through Kunstverein Munchen, the Whitney Biennial, Modern Art London, and the Swiss Institute in the space of a few years is itself a form of critical validation, tracing a path from European kunstverein circuits to major American institutional recognition. No verbatim critical assessment could be confirmed for this profile with the sourcing available, so none is quoted here.

Nguyen's auction market is thin but has produced one striking result. His painting "Semper Solus" (2007) sold at Sotheby's London on 14 October 2022, as part of the house's The Now Evening Auction, for a hammer price of GBP 453,600 (about USD 503,723), after drawing 14 bids. That result stands as his all-time auction record, a sign of active competitive bidding rather than a broad, established price level.

Other recorded results sit well below that figure: "Point Break" sold for USD 63,500 at Phillips, and an untitled 2024 work sold for USD 132,000 at Sotheby's New York, though the exact sale date for that result is not publicly documented. Public auction appearances for the artist remain limited in number, so any single result should be read against a small sample rather than as a stable trend line.

Nguyen's market is young and thin. His auction record came after a competitive multi-bid sale, a useful signal of demand but not yet evidence of a broad, repeatable price level, since his other public sales have closed well below that peak. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through Matthew Marks Gallery matter more than usual. His exhibition history, including the 2017 Whitney Biennial, is a strong institutional signal, though public sources do not document that any museum currently holds his work in a permanent collection, a distinction collectors should keep in mind when weighing exhibition history against acquisition history.