Aaron Curry: Raw Dog
September 11, 2025 – November 1, 2025
Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2156 W. Fulton St, Chicago, IL 60612
from site: an exhibition of new sculptures, paintings, and collages. This is the gallery's first exhibition with Curry, and the artist's first solo show in Chicago. Aaron Curry (b. 1972) has charted a unique space for his work between the most sub-underground mania of the American pulp grotesque (think comix culture and the surreal side of sleazy commercialism) and the most refined formal elements of European high modernism (think Arp, Miro, Picasso). In Raw Dog, Curry introduces a new component to his wood sculptures, which is to leave them largely unpainted, allowing the natural grain of the material, its whorls and knots and eyes, to carry that sense of flow. Occasional flashes of hot pink, turquoise, and grape purple complement the tanscapes on several boxes and flatworks, while two human-scale sculptures are resolutely wooden, with cut away holes and curvilinear forms dancing with the wood's own patterns, the whole work suggesting a figure, cock's comb perched atop.