Julie Curtiss, © The artist
Julie Curtiss (b. 1982, Paris, France) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose surreal and uncanny works explore the intersection of nature, culture and femininity. Using painting, sculpture and gouache, Curtiss reimagines female archetypes through a highly stylized visual language influenced by French figurative painting, the Chicago Imagists and pop imagery like manga and comic books. Her works often feature fragmented and faceless female forms, exaggerated symbols of femininity and recurring motifs like hair, nails and food, creating compositions that are both humorous and unsettling.
Curtiss’s art employs vibrant, flattened colors, cropped perspectives and surrealist techniques to challenge stereotypes of femininity and notions of beauty. She juxtaposes the mundane and grotesque, imbuing everyday objects with surreal and erotic undertones. Hair, for example, transforms into twisting tendrils, both seductive and sinister, while food items become strange and unsettling, such as a pie covered in hair or sushi made from a severed finger.
Curtiss studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and completed exchanges in Dresden and Chicago. Her works are held in prominent collections, including LACMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Walker Art Center. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at White Cube Hong Kong, Anton Kern Gallery in New York and White Cube Mason’s Yard in London. Drawing inspiration from contemporary life and historical art, Curtiss crafts compositions that explore themes of voyeurism, fetishism and female empowerment while unsettling traditional representations of the female form.