Julie Bozzi
Eye Candy
Talley Dunn Gallery
February 17 – April 6, 2024
Celebrating Bozzi’s exquisite paintings in a variety of intimate formats, the exhibition reveals the artist’s fascination with studying sweets, candies, and breads from around the world. Always painting from her delectable source material, Bozzi’s shares with us her insatiable fascination with collecting, categorizing, documenting, and painting sweets and food. Traveling throughout Mexico and Japan, Bozzi shares with the viewer her meticulously rendered paintings of each culture’s treasured breads and candies. From the suggestive forms of Mexico’s pan dulce to the seasonal references of Japan’s wagashi, Bozzi studies the centuries-old traditions within these cultures, revealing her encyclopedic knowledge of her subjects. Intriguing, tiny handheld holiday booklets reveal jewel-like paintings of American candies associated with cultural holidays.
Individual: 3 3/4h x 3 3/4w inches
Overall: 3 3/4h x 33w inches
Individual: 3 3/4h x 3 3/4w inches
Overall: 3 3/4h x 22w inches
Julie Bozzi earned both her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees from the University of California, Davis, and also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1975. Her work explores the culture of convenience prevalent in the United States by examining suburban roadsides. Turning our attention to what is often overlooked, Bozzi crafts meticulous paintings of banal suburban settings. At a scale rarely exceeding four by ten inches, Bozzi’s horizontal landscapes are painted on the side of the road in the tradition of plein air painting. Bozzi completes each work over the course of several days, creating a sense of condensed time and presence in an ever-distracted world. Her work frequently features scenes from California and from Texas.
Bozzi has participated in numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the El Paso Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Select group exhibitions include The Meadows Museum, Dallas, TX, The Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The New Museum, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Many notable institutions have collected Bozzi’s work, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the Dallas Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Bozzi’s accolades include the Award in Painting from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in 1981, an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2005, and the Dozier Travel Grant from the Dallas Museum of Art in 2017.