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EVENT DESCRIPTION
White Cube is pleased to present Julie Curtiss’ first exhibition in Greater China, opening in September. The presentation will feature painting, sculpture and works on paper, as well as Curtiss’ first film work, a Surrealist narrative incorporating sculptural props made by the artist. The new works feature birds, insects and lush, tropical plants influenced by Curtiss’ new studio location in Florida. Sparking parallels with art-historical depictions of Eden and Paradise, the motifs serve as fertile ground for the artist’s slyly humorous take on temptation, gender and sexuality. A new edition, made by traditional Japanese woodblock printing, has been created on the occasion of this show.
ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER
Born and raised in Paris, Curtiss 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. Her subject matter centres on the female body, through deconstructed and fragmented details like heads or legs, or the symbols of stereotyped ‘femininity’ such as long nails, flowing hair or high heels. In a similar manner to Post-Impressionist painters, Curtiss mines her subjects from contemporary, everyday life, representing its curious, small details in cropped and ambiguous compositions that are erotically charged, and cinematic and dreamlike in feel, interweaving the general and specific in ways that are at once fantastical, precise and unsettling. Through the use of unexpected juxtapositions, of subject with object, of the seen and the implied, and an exaggerated portrayal of cartoon-like forms, her paintings are infused with a direct and deadpan humour, revealing the uncanny within the banal and the grotesque and surreal undertones of human characteristics and behaviour.Details
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