Jean Jullien

From Nantes to London

Jean Jullien was born in 1983 in western France and grew up between Cholet and Nantes, with family roots in Lesconil, a small fishing village on the Breton coast. He has said that rock pools and the imagery of aquatic fauna and flora filled his imagination from an early age, and that he grew accustomed to documenting the seaside first in sketchbooks and then in paintings. That early habit of drawing whatever sits directly in front of him has never really left the work. In his twenties he moved to London, where he studied at Central Saint Martins and then at the Royal College of Art, a training in graphic design rather than in painting that still shapes the way he builds an image.

A graphic language of brushstroke and block colour

Jullien is known for irreverent observations of everyday life caught in an idiosyncratic illustrative style built from heavy black brushstrokes and bold blocks of flat colour. The vocabulary is deliberately economical. A figure is a silhouette, a face is three marks, a beach is a band of colour, and the humour arrives in the gap between how little is drawn and how much is recognised. His output moves freely across painting, illustration, photography, video, costume, installation, books, posters and clothing, and he has treated all of it as one practice rather than as a fine art career with commercial work attached to the side.

The drawing that carried his name well beyond the design world was a peace symbol whose inner lines form the Eiffel Tower, made in the hours after the November attacks in Paris and posted online without a signature. It travelled around the world through social media and news coverage, was projected and printed far beyond anything the artist controlled, and was taken up by the French embassy in Berlin for a lighting installation on its facade. His editorial drawings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic and Telerama.

Museums, galleries and public installations

Jullien has shown in Paris, London, Brussels, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore. In 2020 he installed a group of large sculptural graphic figures in the Jardin des Plantes in Nantes, the city where he grew up. In 2022 a retrospective at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul was accompanied by his first retrospective monograph, published by Phaidon. In 2023 he exhibited with his brother Nicolas at Nanzuka Underground in Tokyo.

That same year the MIMA in Brussels gave him his first European institutional solo museum exhibition, Studiolo, in which intimate paintings were set inside an immersive environment of handwritten commentary painted straight onto the museum walls; it ran through the winter and closed in 2024. Also in 2023 the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne opened RIFIFI: Jean Jullien for Kids as part of its Triennial, an underwater world filling the gallery's dedicated children's space and the first time he had exhibited in Australia. In 2024 he opened LOLO at Hashimoto Contemporary in New York, a body of paintings and site specific wall drawings weighing the crowded city against the imagined calm of the countryside.

The work at auction

Two quite different kinds of object carry his name into the saleroom. The first is the unique painting, usually gouache and acrylic on canvas or on linen, sometimes at considerable scale, signed at the lower right and signed again with a date on the reverse. The second is the print or poster edition, produced in numbered runs and very often tied to an exhibition or a collaboration. The two sit in entirely different registers, and a buyer should be clear which one is on offer before reading anything into a price.

For any work that comes up, the details that matter are the medium and the support, the dimensions, whether the sheet is signed by hand and numbered, and the condition of the paper or the canvas. Because so much of his printed output is issued alongside a museum or gallery show, documentation from the publisher or the representing gallery is usually the most informative thing a consignor can supply.