Julie Curtiss does this factor with portray through which she speaks of the modern political local weather with no trace of an apparent visible to understand onto for context. She is sneaky in that approach, and among the finest painters of the final decade to emerge within the wake of a resurgence of Chicago Imagist admiration however via her personal satirical imaginative and prescient. Her cover story with us in Fall 2021, which I’ve talked about quite a few instances, was the place my admiration for her potential to be each political and social in a single picture actually got here to fruition. I prefer to assume she has a vantage level over the procedings of life in a approach few different painters have. “I’m taken with methods constructing themselves and falling aside, within the cycle of chaos and order, and within the second when one thing is pushed to its breaking level,” Curtiss says of her new present, Suburban Lawns, on view now at Gagosian in Paris, and maybe that is essentially the most specific I’ve heard her on the topic. We reside in instances the place destruction of norms is now the norm, the place chaos is being introduced as some manicured way forward for ones liking, methods collapsing on goal to make approach for some omnipresent utopia of a future.
Being a brand new mother or father and the surreal second through which we see ourselves in 2025 appears to be on the heart of the work, and one thing properly kempt however barely not of this world has been on the heart of Curtiss’ output since we first began writing about her. Her works recommend we won’t run away from the Lynchian universe all of us share. There may be ambiguity sure, however a way that we are able to escape to the suburbs for a neater extra steady life is nothing however a farce, and Curtiss is properly conscious. —Evan Pricco
