Works like MEMORYMAX, METASTABLE, and SPACEJUNK are built as pressure chambers. Rather than offering a stable scene to decode, each painting functions as a field of ruptures and temporary coherences, where meaning forms, collapses, and reforms in real time. In the chrome-plated steel “Mutations,” this language becomes physical - hard, reflective, and organism-like - pushing the same logic of deformation into space and returning the viewer’s presence as part of the work’s circuitry.
Lombardi treats each work as a “reality stake”: a wager that painting and form can register the overload of contemporary experience without smoothing it into certainty. Through oscillations of seduction and abrasion, control and spill, his practice insists on intensity as information - tracking what happens when sensation, faith, and system-thinking collide, and when the human body must negotiate the aftermath.
Born in 1996 in Philadelphia, Lombardi received his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 2024. His work has been exhibited in solo and group contexts internationally, including The Global Carnival, Carl Kostyál, London (upcoming, 2026); Beautiful Little Rapture, The Something Machine, Bellport, NY (2024); Unstable Grounds, Kearsey & Gold, London (2025); Nowhere to Be, L.U.P.O. Lorenzelli Projects, Milan (2025); Untitled Miami, L.U.P.O. Lorenzelli Projects, Miami (2025); Through closed eyes, darkly, Belenius, Stockholm (2025); Roamer Project II, Colección Aldebarán, Madrid (2025); Mirage of Water, Norito Gallery, London (2025); Royal College of Art MA Painting Degree Exhibition, London (2024); Summer Fling III, L.U.P.O. Lorenzelli Projects, Milan (2024); Transitional Traces, M P Birla Millennium Art Gallery, London (2024); Club Silencio, Bermondsey Project Space, London (2024); and Palimpsestic Impressions, Arusha Gallery, London (2023).
In early 2026 Lombardi will present a solo exhibition with Carl Kostyál at the gallery’s Savile Row space in Mayfair, London, before undertaking a research-based project at the Vannucci Artist Residency in Città della Pieve, Umbria, supported by the Deighton Family Foundation.
“Julian Lombardi is an American artist living and working in London. Lombardi’s position on biomorphic abstraction points to the genre’s capacity for redemption, agency and psychosocial awareness. Lombardi leans into his sub- and unconscious to create distinct protean forms that commingle with the uncanny land- and dreamscapes. Lombard’s inquest into surrealism allows for sensuous color and rapturous painterliness to reveal our nuanced relationships to the complicated present.
While Lombardi’s practice draws from his deep understanding to painting’s histories, his signature vocabulary offers abstraction in the present tense where beholders are offered an opportunity to think through the complexities of contemporary life.”
- Jeffrey Uslip
Curator, United States Pavilion, 2026 La Biennale di Venezia
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