Painter Julie Curtiss, the Art World’s Newly Anointed Market Darling, Will Be Represented by White Cube

Julie Curtiss, a young art star
whose market profile has exploded in the last two years, has signed
on with White Cube, the gallery announced
today. 

The London-based gallery will
represent the painter in Europe and Asia, while New York gallerist
Anton Kern, who has represented Curtiss since the fall of 2018,
will continue to show her work in the U.S. 

Curtiss’s witty take on the
graphic surrealism of the Chicago Imagists turned her into one of
the art world’s most buzzed about artists seemingly overnight. That
trajectory is best encapsulated by the two-year, 10,000-percent
increase in the price for her work from 2018 to 2019, peaking last
November, when three of the artist’s paintings sold for a combined
$1.1 million in less
than 24 hours at Phillips New York.

“I’m very lucky and I’m aware of
it, because there was nothing before, and I know how that
is,” Curtiss told Artnet
last year, speaking to
her rapid rise to fame. “But I’m also a bit worried. I don’t want
to be a flash in the pan. I want to have a sustainable career. I
don’t want this to be this big inflation—and then a
collapse.”

Born and raised in Paris,
Curtiss studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts
and then at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden before
attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There she
came into contact with the work of the school’s famous Imagist
alumni, including Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, and Christina Ramberg
(whose work hers is most often compared to).

She moved to New York in the
early 2010s and, after a brief stint working for Jeff Koons, spent
several years painting in the Brooklyn studio of artist Brian
Donnelly (a.k.a. KAWS). 

Curtiss briefly showed with
Various Small Fires in Los Angeles before moving to Kern, and has
only mounted four major solo gallery shows to date. White Cube has
not yet announced when its first solo presentation of the artist
will take place. 

When it happens, it won’t be her
first turn with the gallery. Curtiss’s work was included in the
popular 2017 exhibition “Dreamers Awake” at
White Cube Bermondsey—the most prominent show on her resume at the
time. 

“[That] exhibition explored the
enduring influence of Surrealism through the female gaze, which was
perfectly encapsulated in her distinctive, uncanny works,” Susan
May, White Cube’s global artistic director, told Artnet in a
statement. “Since then we continued to follow the development of
her practice, and with our colleagues at Anton Kern Gallery in New
York, now look forward to helping provide the breathing space for
her ideas to flourish.”

The next question will be which gallery snaps up representation
of Curtiss in her native Paris.

The post Painter Julie Curtiss, the Art World’s Newly
Anointed Market Darling, Will Be Represented by White Cube
appeared first on artnet News.