AARON CURRY: PAINTINGS

Michael Werner Gallery, London, is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Curry. This is the artist's first exhibition devoted to paintings, representing a new direction in his work.

A modern day mash-up of classical and kitsch has long been the conceptual hallmark of Aaron Curry's diverse practice. Drawing on late-20th century modernism, science fiction, comic book illustration and California street style, Curry's complex, intensely colored sculptures slyly upended received notions of abstraction, figuration and the role of sculpture as form-in-space. His conflation of sculpted form with printed and painted surfaces confused formal distinctions of two- and three-dimensional opticality, mass and volume. Curry's new, large-scale paintings on canvas, shown here for the first time, are a departure from the artist's sculptural practice and represent an entirely new direction in his work. Strikingly illusionistic renderings of grotesque figures and heads, painted in savagely intense hues, call upon a rich array of visual associations high and low: Yves Tanguy and Robert Williams, Japanese 'ghost heads', Roberto Matta and the checked-out illustrations of Juxtapoz, Juan Gris and Garbage Pail Kids. Curry's new paintings further complicate the visual and metaphoric potential of the artist's pop-infused abstraction, blurring the line between contemporary psychedelia and classic surrealism.

Aaron Curry was born in San Antonio, Texas, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He has exhibited his works throughout the US and in Europe, including solo exhibitions at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover; Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo; and Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX. The artist's sculptures featured prominently in Alexander Calder: Form, Balance, Joy, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, which traveled to the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport; and Statuesque, organized by the Public Art Fund at City Hall Park, New York, which also traveled to the Nasher Sculpture Center. In 2010 Curry was awarded the Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin. Last year Curry presented his most ambitious project to date, Melt to Earth, a site-specific installation of monumental sculptures created for Lincoln Center's Josie Robertson Plaza in New York City. Opening in June 2014, the CAPC Contemporary Art Museum in Bordeaux will present a major survey of the artist's work.