Julie Curtiss

Julie Curtiss was born in 1982 in Paris, France, to a French mother and a Vietnamese father. She studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she completed a BA and MFA in 2006, and during those years took part in two exchange programs, one at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste in Dresden in 2004, and one at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with sources placing this exchange variously between 2004 and 2006, the latter associated with a Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy Young Artists Award.

After graduating, Curtiss lived for a period in Tokyo, where she shifted her practice toward drawing, before briefly returning to France and then settling in Brooklyn, New York, around 2010. She lives and works there today with her husband, the artist Clinton King. Her paintings, works on paper, and sculptures return repeatedly to hair, grooming rituals, hands, and stylized female archetypes, mixing humor and unease, the everyday and the grotesque.

Critical framing of Curtiss's work, from White Cube, Ocula, and Artnet, centers on her surrealist reworking of female archetypes: recurring motifs of hair, nails, hands, and fragmented figures rendered with a controlled, graphic precision that plays humor against unease and the everyday against the grotesque. Writers have linked her to the Chicago Imagists and to earlier women surrealists. No verbatim critic quotation or specific media-coverage list could be confirmed from the available sources, so none is published here.

Curtiss's auction market accelerated quickly following her early gallery exhibitions in the late 2010s. Early works that sold privately for a few hundred to about 1,350 US dollars in 2016 were reselling at auction for tens of thousands of dollars by 2019, with reports of a work hammering at 85,000 US dollars (106,250 with fees) at Phillips. Her all-time auction high to date is Three Widows, which sold for 466,200 US dollars at Phillips in New York on 23 June 2021. As of mid-2026, no later public sale has been documented surpassing that result.

Curtiss has no catalogue raisonne, which is typical for an artist still in the early stages of a career, and authentication currently runs through her representing galleries rather than a published scholarly catalogue. Her auction history is short, meaning results can still move sharply on a single strong or weak sale, and the rapid price appreciation seen between 2016 and 2021 should be read against that thin trading base rather than as a guaranteed trend. Her growing footprint in museum collections, including LACMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Walker Art Center, is a meaningful sign of institutional interest for a painter still building a full market track record.