Julie Speed, painter, Marfa
Moderated by Guillaume Kientz, curator of European art
Living and working in Texas since 1978, Julie Speed is an artist of inexhaustible imagination and impeccable technique. Far from the tradition of minimalist and conceptual art that dominates in Marfa, where she settled in 2006, she has used her unchained creativity to develop a whole figurative universe from many different sources, including Asian art, prints, and Renaissance painting. Her colorful, crowded, and meticulously painted compositions imply narratives that aim to engage viewers and stimulate their own imaginative capacities. Looking at a painting by Speed is like starting a journey in a world where, at first sight, things look familiar and innocent, but they don’t really make sense until one agrees to play the game, to lose oneself in a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland experience and start to make room for another kind of logic and rationality, for a complex world with more than one meaning, where opposites don’t necessarily contradict, but where every detail is enjoyable.
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