It’s World Food Day today—a day originally set up 1945 in honour of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Now it is celebrated in over 150 countries. Julie Curtiss’s steaming hairy turkey calls to mind the excesses of food and consumption in parts of the world, as well as food’s potential for sociability, sharing and bringing people together. The French artist is known for her surreal paintings that convey high drama through fetishistic ropes of hair, aggressively manicured fingernails and impossibly extreme cuisine. Curtiss described her work as dealing with “ideas of the wild and the tame; nature and culture in the female psyche” when we interviewed her in issue 35.
