Published on the occassion of Home: Works by Julie Roberts 1993-2003 at Sean Kelley Gallery, New York, NY.
The themes that interest the painter Julie Roberts--dream and reality, Eros and Thanatos, sleep and death, the historical and the temporal--give her work a depth and associative richness that place her within a tradition going back to classical antiquity. More immediate is an affinity with the work of Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, as well as with the Surrealist movement--Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Hans Bellmer particularly come to mind--an affinity identifiable in a shared love of ambiguity and a darker side always tempered by a belief in the positive power of Eros. In Home, the first major monograph on Julie Roberts, the artist's work is highlighted in over 60 beautifully reproduced full-color images, and is accompanied by two insightful essays.