Julie Curtiss is a painter and sculptor who exposes and reworks female archetypes through a sense of the uncanny. She first exhibited at White Cube in 2017 as part of ‘Dreamers Awake’, a major group exhibition that explored the enduring influence of Surrealism through the work of women artists.
Employing a highly stylized visual language, Curtiss draws on the history of figurative painting in her work; from the Chicago Imagists and 18th and 19th century French painters, to the ‘pop’ imagery of comic books, manga and illustration. Her subject matter centres on the female body, through deconstructed and fragmented details like heads or legs, or through symbols of stereotyped ‘femininity’.
In a similar manner to Post-Impressionist painters, Curtiss mines her subjects from contemporary, everyday life. She depicts curious, small details in cropped and ambiguous compositions that are erotically charged, cinematic and dreamlike, weaving the general and specific in ways that are at once fantastical, precise and unsettling.
Julie Curtiss is jointly represented by White Cube and Anton Kern Gallery.
About The Artist
Julie Curtiss was born in 1982 in Paris, France and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Wildlife’, Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2019); ‘Altered States’, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2018) and ‘Soft Shells’, 106 Green, Brooklyn, New York (2017). Group exhibitions include La Patinoire Royale—Galerie Valérie Bach, Brussels (2020); Perrotin, Seoul (2019); Clearing, New York (2019) and White Cube Bermondsey, London (2017).
