Julie Curtiss (b. 1982, Paris, France)
Julie Curtiss works across painting, sculpture, and gouache with a surreal, razor-sharp visual vocabulary that blends the uncanny and the mundane. Her compositions dwell on themes of femininity, body parts, hair,, food, and domestic objects, often cropped and fragmented to destabilize the viewer’s gaze. With faceless figures, coiling tendrils of hair, exaggerated nails, and everyday objects turned weird, her worlds feel dreamlike, erotic, uncanny — a place where nature, desire, psychology, and identity collapse into one another.
Curtiss studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, earning her BA and MFA between 2001 and 2006. During her studies she participated in exchange programs at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden (2004) and at the Art Institute of Chicago (2005–2006).
Her residencies and awards include the Youkobo Art Space Returnee Residency (Tokyo, 2019); Fellowship in the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (Brooklyn, 2018); a Saltonstall Arts Colony Residency (2017); a Van Lier Fellowship via NYFA (2012); and earlier support from the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy Young Artists Award (2004) and an Erasmus Grant for study in Dresden (2003).
Curtiss has mounted solo exhibitions with galleries and institutions such as White Cube, Anton Kern, VSF / Various Small Fires, and Gagosian. Her work has appeared in influential group shows across New York, London, Paris, Seoul, and elsewhere.
She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.