Julie Curtiss paintings make ordinary scenes look slightly wrong. Her figurative paintings show laundry rooms, street corners and fortune tellers’ windows, then tilt them just enough to stop the viewer. The Paris-born, New York-based painter says that tilt is deliberate.
“The ordinary is where the extraordinary takes place,” Curtiss says. “Within routine or boredom, I’m always looking for that moment when a glitch occurs.”
She uses a French phrase to describe how her mind works. Sauter du coq à l’âne means, literally, to jump from the rooster to the donkey. It describes going off on a tangent, and Curtiss says that is close to how she thinks.
Julie Curtiss paintings are highly stylised, and that stylisation gives them a dreamlike quality. Two friends catch up over a cigarette, their heads wrapped in bandages that suggest recent facelifts. In another work, dirty laundry in a washing machine drum turns faintly erotic through a tight crop and a suggestive placement of a foot. A close view of a tarot reading adds a dry, knowing humour.
If Curtiss’s surreal take on everyday life appeals to you, Cristina Ardelean’s surreal AI shadow poetry explores a similar dreamlike unease through very different means.
Humour as a route to bigger questions
Curtiss treats humour as a way into philosophy. “There’s a reason comedians can be great philosophers, or why the king’s fool is sometimes the only person allowed to tell the truth,” she says. Humour, in her view, often grows from exposing the paradoxes within a situation.
She is less interested in picking one side of a contradiction than in watching the two trade places. “To me, it’s not that everything and its opposite are equally true,” she says, “but rather that every truth contains a little bit of its opposite.”
Most of the characters in Julie Curtiss paintings have no visible faces, and that absence draws viewers in. Curtiss describes a long struggle over how to paint them. She considered realistic faces, cartoonish features with round eyes and linear mouths, and caricature. “I never felt comfortable taking the illustrative approach all the way,” she says. “I felt it would diminish what I was trying to say.”
The result is a group of figures who feel specific yet remain anonymous. “They need to feel oddly intimate and distant at once,” Curtiss says. Viewers can see themselves in the bodies on the canvas, which seems to be part of the point.
Julie Curtiss paintings at Gagosian New York
Gagosian New York presents a new exhibition, Julie Curtiss, ‘Unreal,’ which opens on 10 November at 541 West 24th Street. The show runs to 19 December. It is the gallery’s first presentation of Curtiss’s work in New York.
The exhibition’s surreal paintings examine life in New York City through apartment interiors, laundromats, bodegas and a fortune teller’s window. The gallery says the works address identity, gender and aging, all under a steady sense of unreality. “Nothing feels real right now,” Curtiss says. “It’s not even surreal, just the feeling that nothing can be trusted.”
In Julie Curtiss paintings like Makeover (2026), two women stand on a street, wearing fur coats, sunglasses and postoperative compression face masks. Both are painted from behind. Their age and class are hinted at, but their identities stay hidden. Curtiss gives close attention to the patterns and textures of their hair, coats and accessories, which echo the grooming and self-care rituals through which the women display their means.
Ordinary domestic interiors take on a similar quiet strangeness in Elena Serafimova’s photographic ode to Soviet dachas, a companion piece for anyone drawn to Curtiss’s private, slightly off-kilter rooms.
Curtiss hopes the work changes how people move through their own streets. She wants a visitor to leave the gallery, step outside and notice something that bends slightly, then think of her. She has already seen that happen. People send her photographs of everyday scenes with a note: that’s a Julie Curtiss painting.
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Frequently asked questions
Where and when can I see Julie Curtiss’s ‘Unreal’ exhibition?
The ‘Unreal’ exhibition is at Gagosian New York, 541 West 24th Street. It opens on 10 November and runs until 19 December, and it is the gallery’s first presentation of Curtiss’s work in New York.
Why don’t the characters in Julie Curtiss’s paintings have visible faces?
Most of her characters have no visible faces, and Curtiss said she never felt comfortable painting them in an illustrative way because it would diminish what she was trying to say. The figures are meant to feel specific yet anonymous, oddly intimate and distant at once, and viewers can see themselves in them.
What does the French phrase ‘sauter du coq à l’âne’ mean?
Literally it means to jump from the rooster to the donkey, and it describes going off on a tangent. Curtiss says this is close to how her mind works.
What does Julie Curtiss want viewers to do after seeing her work?
She hopes visitors will leave the gallery, step outside, and notice something that bends slightly in their everyday surroundings, then think of her. People have already sent her photographs of ordinary scenes with the note that it’s a Julie Curtiss painting.
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