Julie Curtiss: Monads and Dyads

White Cube presents ‘Monads and Dyads’, Julie Curtiss’ first exhibition in London, featuring new paintings, works on paper and sculptures. Curtiss’ paintings are carefully composed, framed and cropped with a cinematographic instinct for arresting image and a keen eye for the absurdities of everyday life.  With their saturated colour, crisp detail, and scenarios which are at once banal and bizarre, they have a dreamlike quality.

Curtiss’ visual language draws on a history of figuration that includes 18th- and 19th-century French painting, as well as the Chicago Imagists and the ‘pop’ imagery of comic books, manga and illustration. Through the use of unexpected juxtapositions of subject with object, of the seen and the implied, and exaggerated cartoon-like forms, her paintings are infused with a direct and deadpan humour, revealing the uncanny within the familiar and the grotesque and surreal undertones of human characteristics and behaviour. Known for her surrealist re-workings of archetypes of femininity, in this new body of work the artist expands from the intimate and subjective to broader themes of the individual and society.