MUFF MOUTH, 2013
Ink, silkscreen, spray paint on wood with painted aluminium base, 268 x 86,4 x 189,2 cm.
Courtesy of the gallery.

Currently on view at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, France is “NEWDZ AND NEW GODZ”, a solo exhibition of new works by Aaron Curry. Organized around a graphic motif of skin and hair photographed at close range, the exhibition sets up a constellation of references, from the history of collage and the nude to the cadaver-craftwork of bodysnatcher Ed Gein and the amusements of childhood masquerade. Curry’s sculptures are composed from irregular wooden segments, slotted together and silkscreened with magnified views of his skin. Arranged like a hall of classical statuary, they invert the Pygmalion myth, flattening rather than animating the flesh printed on them, and confronting the promise of vitality couched in human skin with its morbid condition when reduced to merely surface. Recalling Picasso’s monstrous seaside bathers, they transform the nude—that token of fulfillment and contained desire—into a seemingly provisional and precarious assembly of fragments, alternately hidden in profile view and aggressively frontal.

“NEWDZ AND NEW GODZ”, Installation view. Courtesy of the gallery.

Surfaces elsewhere in the gallery, however, have taken on the fleshy proximity that Curry has squeezed out of his sculptures. Like a stripped-down version of Gottfried Semper’s architectural Bekleidungstheorie, the rooms here are cladded in silkscreened panels of beards and skin. Alongside sculptures fabricated in rigid industrial materials that belie their spontaneous contours, the panels invoke an artistic history of mechanical reproduction

“NEWDZ AND NEW GODZ” is on view through November 9th, 2013.

For more information on “NEWDZ AND NEW GODZ” visit Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, France.