Julie Curtiss is finally painting her metropolitan fever dream. “It’s a New York painting story,” said Curtiss, during a recent conversation at her East Williamsburg studio. On the studio walls were her most recent paintings: scenes of faceless women doing yoga in small apartments, the neon lights of storefronts, a laundromat.
“I decided the show would be a little vignette of life in New York, and of what it is to feel like you’re getting older in the city,” she said.
The artist has earned acclaim over the past decade for her distinctive style synthesizing Pop and Surrealist sensibilities with the bold patterning and controlled sensuality of Chicago Imagists like Christina Ramberg. She is a painter of glistening coils of long hair, of rippled shellfish, and of fur-covered food in the lineage of Meret Oppenheim.
Born and raised in Paris, she is the only child of a French librarian mother and a Vietnamese technical photographer father. But New York has been her home for the past 16 years, and the backdrop of a career from early jobs as a studio assistant for KAWS and Jeff Koons to her 2017 breakout at Spring/Break Art Show, followed by exhibitions at prominent galleries including Anton Kern Gallery and White Cube. She married and became a mother in the city. Today she lives just a short walk from her studio.
Now, for the first time in five years, she’s opening a New York solo show—and in grand form. “Unreal,” which opens November 10th, will mark Curtiss’s first New York solo show with Gagosian. It is her first New York solo exhibition since “Somnambules” at Anton Kern Gallery in the fall of 2022.
But the exhibition is not an uncomplicated love letter to New York. Instead, Curtiss leans into the chaos, control, and excess that define a city acclaimed architect Le Corbusier once described as a “fairy catastrophe.”
“We get here in our twenties and thirties, full of energy and ambition,” she said. “Then, as time goes on, the city wears you out. You make all those attempts at renewal, and it becomes about maintenance, about just trying to keep up with that crazy pace.”
Curtiss’s last solo exhibition, “Maid in Feathers,” which opened at White Cube in Seoul in November 2025, dealt with the transformation and complex realities of early motherhood rendered in gothic-feeling black-and-white paintings of breast pumps, bassinets, and bath times. Here, she found herself grappling with a more vague sense of identity.
“That show [“Maid in Feathers”] practically painted itself. It was very cohesive: the same palette throughout, all about motherhood, very dreamy and surrealist,” she said. “This show was different. It was the New York show, where everybody was going to be and see it. I felt I had to do something great and I went in a lot of different directions.”
Ultimately, Curtiss arrived at a language that she describes as “magical realist” as opposed to the Surrealist visions that appeared in earlier works. While the comically macabre images of monstrous, manicured claws and heads on platters of her earlier works are absent, a winking sense of strangeness still abounds.
“It’s everyday life, and where it meets unreality,” she said. “It’s also about thinking about our relationship to images right now—you can’t trust images representing the world. These paintings are very mundane scenes, but they all have something a little off about them, something slightly funny or an unexpected juxtaposition.”
In the painting Grand Street (2026), neon lights illuminate a Chinatown storefront in which a Peking duck hangs in the windows next to tanks of clams, crab, and fish. But these animals are not oblivious to their circumstances. Instead they stare out at the viewers with hyperaware urgency. “Everything [in the show] is imbued with so much projection,” she said. “The animals carry so much human projection. They become stand-ins for human emotion, or for humanity.”
The paintings often take inspiration from scenes in Curtiss’s everyday life—her local bodega, a window strung with Christmas lights on her block, and a nearby psychic’s parlor. “My life is very local,” said Curtiss. “My life is studio, home, park, studio, home, park.” But in these familiar stomping grounds, a sense of urgency and intensity exist.
“It’s this ‘only in New York’ energy, with crazy stuff happening all the time. There’s the constant contrast of the high and the low, socially and economically,” said Curtiss. “With all that friction, there’s always something coming out of it. It’s also exhausting, but it’s alive.”
Her female figures, faces always obscured, become a stand-in for this tension between urban luxury and decay. A hole appears in the stocking of an elegantly clad woman, for instance. In the painting Makeover (2026), two women in fur coats and oversized sunglasses, their hair perfectly coiffed and nails manicured, face away from the viewer. One smokes a cigarette. Their faces are swathed in the white bandages that immediately signal recent plastic surgery. They are elegant and mangled at once.
“For a while, in my social media feed, I was getting mostly skin-care tricks to take care of your skin and limit the damage of life. The façade. It’s funny, because a few of these paintings are about that never-ending, high-maintenance work,” said Curtiss.
Curtiss’s women—practicing yoga, getting nipped and tucked, and playing the perfect housewife—try to wrest control from the unpredictability of aging and life in a city with its own out-of-date infrastructure.
But Curtiss is also finding new freedom within this push and pull of chaos and control. Her process for these works has been much more intuitive than in the past, with the artist sometimes discovering her subject matter as she works through it in some cases. Her works have become more nuanced, too. Whereas Curtiss often used to leave her backgrounds empty, here she plunges viewers into complex spaces. Her airtight control of pattern has given way to movement—plumes of smoke, sheens and reflections of washing machines and windows.
“Maybe it’s just natural development, but things become a little more complex—themes are a little deeper, and my frame is getting a little wider, too,” she said. “I used to be really focused on a single object, and it was a bit like boom, boom, boom. Now I’m playing more with composition. Everything is more sophisticated.”
Those shifts are, perhaps, the result of living and working in a city that is constantly asking its people to grow and adapt. Curtiss, for one, is energized by the thought of sharing this work in the city and, in typical New York fashion, getting some honest opinions back. “New York people are very driven; you can’t live in New York if you’re not really driven,” she said. “These people engage with the work and give you thorough feedback. New York people are pretty serious when it comes to art.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/URzb7QY
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