Viewing Julie Curtiss: Monads and Dyads, White Cube

In recent years critics and collectors have feted Julie Curtiss, and commercial success has followed. Her quirky, saturated paintings of obscured or fragmented figures now sell for half a million dollars and can be found in private and public collections around the world.

Her first solo exhibition in London, featuring new paintings, works on paper and sculptures, draws you magnetically into the macabre, neo-surrealist vision that has made her name.

Curtiss has long been inspired by the notion of duality: ‘In my images, I enjoy the complementarity of humour and darkness, the uncanny and the mundane, grotesque shapes and vivid colours’. Not surprisingly, symmetries, binary oppositions and unexpected juxtapositions abound here.

States of Mind (2021), for example, depicts two middle-aged women wearing virtual reality headsets, while the carcasses in Coldroom 1 (2020) are polished and glossy, the environment clean and sterile. At once bizarre and dreamlike, Curtiss’s cinematic images get under your skin. No wonder she’s the art world’s new must-have darling.