Julie Curtiss
Julie Curtiss is a French artist based in Brooklyn. In 2004, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago thanks to a Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy Award. After her graduation from l’Ecole des Beaux-arts of Paris in 2006, she lived in Tokyo. Influenced by the local art scene and Japanese graphic imagery, she started a new body of works focusing on drawing. After a brief come back in France, she finally settled in Brooklyn in 2010 and was recipient of a Van Lier Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2012. Curtiss shows her works in various venues and galleries of the New York City area.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT (From Maake)
“I enjoy associating humor with darkness, the uncanny and the mundane, grotesque shapes to vivid colors. I work from mental notes or imagination. With ideas of narration, I will utilize recurring elements from one painting to another, or leave some of the action outside the frame, thus creating a form of suspense.
My artworks are psychological. By omitting parts of an image or suggesting abnormal situations, I would like to contrast a feeling of familiarity with surrealism.
I am interested in the various aspects that female identity can take, especially through the opposite notions of Nature and Culture. I like to represent smoking teacups and cigarettes, objects that call to mind a domestic, tamed image of women. On the other side, organic, ambiguous body parts allude to the archetype of a woman fused with nature and her animalistic drive.
With faceless portraits of women, gnarled fingers and toes, and voluptuous bodies composed of hair, I would like to present the viewer with an enigmatic puzzle, an invitation to reflect on the idea of an unfixed, ever-changing self.”
The Test, 2016
Gouache on paper
12 x 16 inches
Appetizer, 2017
Gouache on paper
12 X 9 inches
Tea for two, 2016
Acrylagouache on paper glued on panel, 20 x 24 inches
Chinatown, 2018
Acrylic, vinyl, and oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches