Aaron Curry, Michael Werner Gallery

Through a sensational exhibition of paintings by sculptor Aaron Curry, Michael Werner Gallery shed a new light on the artist's practice

The back-story..

2012 was a boom year for high-end contemporary art sales. Unsurprisingly, many overseas powerhouse galleries launched spaces in London – such as Pace, David Zwirner, Skarstedt and Michael Werner. The latter is no new comer to the art world, having launched his first gallery in Berlin in 1963 and later in New York. Today Michael Werner boasts a select but prominent stable of artists as Peter Doig, Per Kirkeby and Sigmar Polke.

The artist…

Not to be missed is the exhibition of LA-based artist Aaron Curry. Known predominantly for his sculptural practice, Curry’s works have attracted a lot of interest, with commissions ranging from the Lincoln Center, New York, to the Dior Homme store in LA, as well as a much-anticipated survey in CAPC Bordeaux this year. Curry’s show at Michael Werner, however, is devoted entirely to painting and represents a new direction – making this show all the more compelling. 

The exhibition…

Ablaze with colour, Curry’s monumental canvases depict illusionistic renderings of eerie heads and figures. Like his sculptural works, Curry has amalgamated a dizzying array of visual references: from surrealism, abstraction, pop-culture, and contemporary psychedelia. Here, low and high art are amalgamated seamlessly, imbuing the paintings with a spirit that is at once futuristic and redolent of fossilised archaeological forms. 

Curry’s sculptures conflate 3D sculptural form with 2D printed and painted surfaces, and his paintings also take on this blurring of dimensions. Untitled, 2014 is a good example of this. A decrepit head-like form is bedecked with biomorphic forms at its cleaved cranium, resembling the artist’s sculptures. Add to this the brazen colours of a lime green nucleus in the middle and a shocking pink background, and the canvas pulsates with a wild vitality. Brutal yet strangely beguiling, there is a savage beauty about Curry’s paintings – one that will certainly linger in your mind.