Artist: Julie Curtiss

I’m interested in systems building themselves and falling apart, in the cycle of chaos and order, and in the moment when something is pushed to its breaking point.
- Julie Curtiss

Gagosian presents an exhibition of new paintings by Julie Curtiss. It is the artist’s first solo exhibition with Gagosian, and in Paris.

In her acrylic and oil compositions, Curtiss distills the familiar into enigmatic scenes, transforming seemingly banal moments through exaggerated forms, saturated color, and rich textures. Her figures, faceless or seen in fragments, are frozen in dreamlike pauses, amplifying a sense of unease. Drawing inspiration from Jungian psychoanalysis, Curtiss synthesizes her surreal visions into images that explore the clash between anima and animus, nature and nurture. She juxtaposes signifiers of domesticity with allusions to the shadow selves and animalistic drives that pulse beneath her subjects’ skins.

In the Flow (2025) depicts a dark-haired woman clad in a purple-and-black Lycra jumpsuit and augmented reality glasses riding an exercise bike, surrounded by an environment that suggests confinement. The scene unfolds as if viewed through a glass tank filled with tropical fish, vegetation, and rocks. The out-of-frame edges create the illusion that the woman herself is underwater, merely another creature on display. A coexistence of multiple levels of containment is implied as perspectives shift and differ between the viewer, the unknown figure, and the tangential reality to which she has exclusive access.

Compositions such as Last Stop (2025) extend this sense of uncertainty. A pregnant woman in a yellow dress stands at a bus stop, palm trees bending in the wind toward where she waits. Her posture and environment imply a pause, while the light moves between diffuse illumination and shadow, heightening the scene’s subtle ambiguity. Curtiss’s depiction of light, in particular, enhances the cinematic quality of her compositions, evoking the quiet, loaded pauses of a film scene held in suspense.

Curtiss draws on the conventions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European painting while seamlessly integrating influences from the Chicago Imagists, ukiyo-e, comics, and popular illustration. The sharp glow of a diner’s pendant lights in Fish Camp (2024) bathes a woman sitting at one of the tables, her dejected posture made more poignant by the stark arrangement of three red tumblers before her. The stillness of the composition recalls Johannes Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep (c. 1656–57), with Curtiss’s faceless subject becoming a figure caught between spaces, between incidents. In Delivery (2025), which shows a mail carrier handing a package to an unseen recipient while two black grasshoppers loiter on flowers in the foreground, the interplay of interior and exterior spaces, the suspension of time, and meticulous refinement further define the artist’s approach, offering a window into a self-contained world that is both recognizable and mysterious. Associating humor with darkness and the mundane with the uncanny, Curtiss employs a visual language of vivid colors and forms that are at once seductive and grotesque, using it to explore the puzzle of identity and extending an invitation to reflect on the idea of an unfixed, ever-changing self.