There are certain paintings that just stop in your tracks, cause you to pause, make you ponder and wonder and you feel immersed in a moment. That is what good art does. That happened to me when I saw the glorious work of Julie Curtiss for her new solo show, Somnambules, translated as "sleepwalkers," and the painting Times Square (seen above). Curtiss has always been able to balance so much in a work; modern anxiety, surrealism, comedy, loneliness and urban life. Her cover with us last Fall was like an omnipresent figure looking over a shattered world, quiet and looming, watching over a city that had been transformed and in a state of uncertainty. Times Square is what that figure might have been looking over, a scene of the city as faceless residents wander past a vision of paradise in their own moody daily life. It's powerful.
Her new show at Anton Kern Gallery is, once again, a slight nod to surrealism and the fuzziness of sleep-deprivation. As the gallery notes, "This exhibition is a particularly personal one for the artist. Plagued by insomnia and grappling with processing the toll the past few years have taken, Curtiss often felt like a sleepwalker herself while creating this body of work–day and night, light and darkness running into each other in a blurry timeless vacuum." What we have learned in these past few years is that time and daily life have become transfigured, where hours blend differently as life re-emerges and attempts to be normal. Each of us has had our moments of confusion and uncertainty, and these works blur our reality of what we think we see and what is familiar.
Even with such talent and the ability to have a visual language that is both hers and depicting the universal, Curtiss is fully coming into her own as one of the special talents in contemporary art. It's as if the world caught up to her art. "I remember when I started this body of work, I was really interested in finding my own voice and exploring different aspects of my psyche in relation to society.," Curtiss told us last year, and she is refining her voice in every show. —Evan Pricco
