Aaron Curry
Ohnedaruth
2009
steel
252 x 108 x 122 cm
© Aaron Curry
private collection
Image courtesy: VeneKlasen/Werner, Berlin
Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
aaron curry | bad dimension
5 March to 24 May 2010
The American artist Aaron Curry (*1972) studied in Los Angeles with Mike Kelley and Richard Hawkins. Early in his career he developed his own artistic language, which is unmistakable despite its evident connections to the cubist and surrealist movements of classical modernism.
Curry’s preferred media are drawing, painting, silkscreen and sculpture. His sculptures are made from materials such as steel or wood and are covered with acrylic or spray paint. They vaguely recall works by Henry Moore or Pablo Picasso, and these artists’ specific interest in the human figure. Other pieces bring to mind American artists such as Alexander Calder or John McCracken, both of whom were milestone figures in the further development of the genre of sculpture.
While parts of the avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century made use of the representational methods of cultures then seen as primitive in order to gain new impulses for their visual worlds, Curry’s work draws on contemporary media cultures: his inspiration comes from 3D computer games, fantasy films or related genres like science fiction. He is also deeply involved with the visual phenomena of American folklore, handicrafts and former countercultural techniques such as graffiti. Currry’s work performs an inversion: he combines the dominant aesthetics of our popular cultural present with the formal vocabularies that were basic to the art history of the 20th century. In their collage of differing cultural and temporal styles, Curry’s sculptures have the effect of mysterious totemic figures, like shadows of modernism, the relicts of curious cult. This is also apparent in Curry’s recent sculptures, which refer to Alexander Calder’s »Le hellebardier« (1972) in front of the Sprengel Museum in Hanover.
Works like Ohnedaruth (2009) give the impression of enormous weight, but a closer look reveals that they consist of individual interlocking parts. Their delicate construction is in contrast to the grotesque monstrosity that occurs on the level of the image. In technical execution and visual effect Curry’s works combine the two poles between which the artistic perception of sculpture takes place: an abstract withdrawnness and a spatial aspect that allows figurative interpretation. The sculptures feature a particular form of multiple perspective — a new image appears from every new standpoint. Depending on the angle of vision the works oscillate between two-dimensional image and three-dimensional figure, between abstract surface and organic body. This causes the boundary between picture and sculpture to blur and the viewers to move through the space.
As with XOXO Skeleton (2009), the surfaces are covered with grid structures that in computer programs like Poser serve as a technical aid to the creation of an artificial three-dimensionality. In films like »Star Trek«, on the other hand, they represent the science-fiction vision of an arbitrary virtual reality. Aaron Curry paints and prints his works with variations of these grids, and his pieces become an encounter between the signs of digitally created illusions of space and artistic elements of the genuinely handmade.
In the spatial collage of works in the kestnergesellschaft, the drawings, collages and sculptures enter into a dialogue. Particular colors, forms and patterns are repeated here from work to work, changing as they go. This dynamic can be aptly described by the metaphor of flow: the drop-shaped growths on Eye C U (2009), for example, remind one of the film technique of morphing, which allows a seamless connection from one image to another: surfaces and figures can be enlarged, made smaller or distorted at will on the computer screen. The title of the exhibition, consequentially, is Bad Dimension. The distinctions between two- and three-dimensionality are blurred, as are the visual signs of past and present, and the boundaries between finished artwork, sketch and antiquated, over-used form become fluid: there are frequent gestural traces such as pencil strokes or spatterings of spray paint that could imply either the possibility of further treatment or a state of ageing or obsolescence.
One of Curry’s frequently used motifs is the mask. Its original function is disguise, the carnivalesque or ritual overlay of an underlying »actual« reality. Curry’s masks, however, are often overlaid by other masks, as in Untitled (2009). The original, apparently »authentic« is veiled by layers of superimposition that in the end construct a pure surface of visuality.
On many levels Curry’s work manifests the »in between«, which also reflects our uncertainty in dealing with the flood of images that confronts us every day. Aaron Curry belongs to a new generation of artists for whom the melding of virtual and real environments has become normal. In his work the elusiveness and lightness of digital images encounters the solidness and weight of the real.