Julie Curtiss

Julie Curtiss is a French artist based in Brooklyn whose neo-surrealist paintings dissect femininity, beauty standards and the uneasy edge between nature and culture.

Her tightly framed compositions isolate elaborate hairstyles, manicured hands and cropped or severed body parts, turning familiar signs of glamour into something eerie and psychologically charged.

Curtiss often stages surreal domestic and culinary scenes – at once seductive and grotesque – to evoke excess, consumption and social ritual. She trained at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (BA/MFA, 2006), and her visual language draws in part on Japanese graphic imagery and Noh masks, informed by time spent in Japan in the mid-2000s.

Through fetishised detail and stark cropping, Curtiss stages an unsettling theatre of the female psyche: poised, uncanny, and insistently self-aware.