Julie Curtiss is returning to New York with a solo exhibition that takes the city itself as its subject. Unreal opens on 10 November at Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street, and runs to 19 December. It is the French-born, Brooklyn-based painter's first solo presentation with Gagosian in New York, and her first solo show in the city in five years, since Somnambules at Anton Kern Gallery in the autumn of 2022.

The new paintings are set in what Curtiss describes as a metropolitan fever dream. Tightly cropped scenes move through intimate apartment interiors, laundromats, bodegas and a fortune teller's window, examining life in New York through questions of identity, gender and ageing, with a pervasive feeling of unreality. In Grand Street (2026), neon light falls on a Chinatown storefront where a Peking duck hangs in the window beside tanks of clams, crab and fish. Makeover (2026) shows two women on the street in fur coats, sunglasses and post-operative compression face masks, while Dirty Laundry stages an exchange between a man and a woman.

Curtiss has described the show as a small vignette of life in New York, and of what it is to feel older in the city. Rather than a straightforward celebration, the paintings lean into the chaos, control and excess that define the place, the city the architect Le Corbusier once called a fairy catastrophe. Her stylised figures often appear with their faces obscured, and isolated body parts are cropped into compositions that build a sly, human observation of urban life.

The exhibition follows Curtiss's last solo show, Maid in Feathers, which opened at White Cube in Seoul in November 2025 and dealt with early motherhood in gothic-feeling black-and-white paintings of breast pumps, bassinets and bath times. Born in Paris in 1982 and based in Brooklyn, Curtiss is jointly represented by White Cube and Anton Kern Gallery.