Born in Paris and now working between Brooklyn and Florida, Julie Curtiss is a visual trickster of the surrealist lineage. urtiss studied at l’Ėcole des Beaux-Arts before moving first to Japan and then to New York, where she now lives and works. Employing a highly stylised visual language, she draws on a history of figurative painting including 18th- and 19th-century French painting, as well as the Chicago Imagists and the ‘pop’ imagery of comic books, manga and illustration.

There is no face to greet you here. Her women—fragmented, faceless, coiled in symbols—refuse the satisfaction of direct encounter. A woman is hair. Hair is a curtain. A nipple is a cone. A clawed hand gestures somewhere between seduction and threat. Curtiss doesn’t paint portraits—she paints archetypes possessed by Jungian spirits and cosmetic advertisements. And she makes it personal. Or rather, she makes it intimate. Like peeking through a peephole only to realize someone—or something—is staring back.

The Uncanny in High Definition

Curtiss’ style is all edge: crisp outlines, saturated colors, hard shadows. You’d be forgiven for mistaking her palette for Pop Art—until you notice the quiet violence it conceals. The brushwork is clean, almost airless, reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints and 18th-century French painting—except the subject matter is anything but classical. Think sushi made of fingers, teapots dripping with menace, or pies topped not with cream but tight ridges of hair. You laugh, then wince. You’re never quite sure if you’re supposed to.

Her compositions are cropped, claustrophobic. Like a voyeur’s snapshot or a still from a dream you only half-remember. A detail suggests a story—but the rest of the narrative is deliberately withheld. The viewer becomes complicit, a Peeping Tom in a Lynchian landscape of domestic surrealism. And just when you think you’ve got the joke, she slaps you with a slice of Freudian pie.

Bitter Apples and Other Fables

Her 2023 exhibition Bitter Apples at White Cube Hong Kong was a fever dream spun into reality. The titular short film, in which Curtiss herself wanders through Tokyo as if lost in a dream stitched from Buñuel and Gondry, echoes Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. Sculptures from the gallery reappear as props, and inanimate objects take on erotic agency. A bra becomes a bird’s nest. A fish flirts through gauze. You begin to suspect the plants are watching you.

Femininity as Weapon, Fetish, Myth

Julie Curtiss’ work is not a critique of femininity—it’s a reanimation of its deepest cultural myths. Her visual lexicon—hair, nails, lips, flesh—is a taxonomy of the symbolic female, deconstructed and adorned. In The Non-existent Knight, she offers us a suit of armor in a business suit: masculinity emptied of essence, performance without substance. Opposite him, Lady Nautilus coils into herself, a tender, tentacled enigma. Together, they stage a battle of archetypes where nobody wins and nobody bleeds—because Curtiss has already drained the wound and served it cold.

There’s a distinctly surreal tenderness in how she mates animal and woman. Lovebirds curl into ears, ducks pose for portraits, clams and mussels get suggestively steamy. But this isn’t kitsch—it’s psychoanalysis in drag. Curtiss makes the unconscious visible, then paints it with matte acrylics and grotesque precision.

Neither Judgment Nor Redemption

Unlike Bosch’s garden, there is no moralizing in Curtiss’ Eden. Her visions of sex and temptation are too strange to be sinful, too humorous to be tragic. There are no punishments here, only permutations—hair as fruit, fruit as flesh, flesh as landscape.

She is not interested in resolving gender. She’s here to stir the pot, coil the hair, and let the apple rot. There is mischief in her feminism, and defiance in her stylization. And when she offers you a slice of something absurd—maybe sushi, maybe sin—you take a bite. Because like all good surrealists, Curtiss reminds us: the world is weird. But what’s weirder is how much we crave it.

Julie Curtis`s vision

Curtiss has commented that her subject matter emerges from ‘[…] the surrealist elements of modern life, in which our corporeal appetites are titillated with the extravagant, abnormal and bizarre.’ Frequently reusing the same, insistent motifs from one painting to another, objects such as cigarettes, teapots or long boots appear familiar and strange and soft, as if covered with down. Food is a consistent theme, both seductive and repulsive in equal measure. A slice of pie is covered with tight ridges of hair, or a piece of sushi is formed from a neatly severed finger.

Julie Curtiss is the surrealist the 21st century didn’t know it needed: precise, perverse, and quietly hilarious. Her work disarms you with color, then leaves you tangled in meaning. She’s not painting what femininity is. She’s painting what it feels like to live inside its contradictions—every luscious, grotesque, uncanny inch of it.