Artist to Watch: Julie Curtiss Explores Powerful Themes of Motherhood with Hyperreal Style

“There’s a strange, new connection to the animal world in the work lately,” reflects French painter Julie Curtiss, as she considers the monochrome canvases filled with avian figures on the walls of her Brooklyn studio. “My characters usually have an anonymous feeling to them, but here I show the faces of the birds, almost imbuing them with human emotion.” One large portrait inspired by Postimpressionist artist Henri Rousseau merges a pelican and African shoebill. In a surrealist diptych nearby, a bassinet stroller melds with a gigantic bird beak.

In the spring, her Gagosian Paris exhibit, “Suburban Lawns,” her first solo exhibition with the gallery, tapped into another side of motherhood. Having a baby and living as a new mom in the Tampa Bay, Florida, suburbs, amid the manicured lawns and super fit women, unmoored her. Those paintings have “a lot of color and kitsch and mother themes in Florida, more baroque pop,” she says.

Currently, Curtiss is placing the final touches on new paintings, sculpture, and gouache-on-paper works that will be presented in her first solo exhibition in Korea at White Cube, Seoul, which opens in November. While her work in the past has gravitated toward saturated hues, she’s now experimenting with gray scale. “I was having some postpartum depression or just exhaustion,” says Curtiss, who, after giving birth, channeled those emotions into the upcoming show. “That’s when I started these very intuitive works on paper focusing on tonal shifts.”

The recipient of an MFA from the prestigious Beaux-Arts de Paris, Curtiss developed a unique, overtly stylized language of long, painted fingernails, high heels, cigarettes, and women’s hair as luscious motifs. “The hair on a woman’s body is bestial, but the
hair on her head is somehow sublime and beautifying,” she says. “I like the conversation between attraction and repulsion.”

Her masterful technique utilizes different mediums such as acrylic, vinyl, and oil to produce a graphic, hyperreal style. “There’s a lot of caressing of the surface of the canvas until I get the texture right,” she says, adding that the extra effort helps create an autonomous, sensory feeling when the works are viewed. Taken together, both bodies of work—in Paris and Seoul—reflect the artist’s deepest stirrings and artistic breadth.

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Fall Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.