Aaron Curry, Raw Dog, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

Aaron Curry Seduces and Splinters in Raw Dog

By Grey Dey

Aaron Curry's current show at Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, Raw Dog, is classic Curry in many senses. You are greeted by a DIY Home Depot pragmatism in the plywood assemblages and sculptures, big-kid street-art style in the acrylic gouache paintings, boys-club flex with the gigantic tag-like signatures, puerile puns in some of the titles, and a retro-cool vintage aesthetic that runs through much of Curry's work. The unapologetic bravado and sarcasm of Paul McCarthy and Martin Kippenberger came to mind through flippant, vulgar titles like Fluster Clux and Curry's plastering of his name, or a huge capital "A", marking his territory onto the works, like a rap-star rivalry.

But there is an audience out there for McCarthy and Kippenberger, and those devotees are also probably eager for the next art-gallery version of a Bukowski. Curry seems to position himself squarely within that Western modern-art history canon characterized by predominantly male contributors. Yet, Curry unifies his gestures to minimalism, pop, retro-futurism, graffiti, and street art, with a slick thread of his trademark mid-century-modern aesthetic.

But I wasn't put off in the same way with Curry's work as I have been with the earlier, more self-congratulatory artists I've mentioned. Rather, I was intrigued—pulled in by the unapologetic beauty and even, at times, elegance. Are these meant to operate as edifying objects in various settings purely for pleasure? Do we read too much into art for art's sake, or does Curry's work offer more than that simplistic explanation?

As I spent time with the collection, I began to sense a queering of Curry's place in these conversations. Was I projecting? Perhaps. But once I re-examined the exhibition through a queer lens, I was struck by the underlying camp that prevents the works from taking themselves too seriously. There was so much humor just beneath the surface that my furrowed brow gave way to a wide, if suspicious, smile.

One distinct element in this body of work is Curry's choice to leave entire pieces, as with the floor-standing sculptures, untouched by the flat, luscious applications of saturated color he has indulged in throughout his career. Some works tease with very selective uses of pigment. The show quietly resounds with the naked exposure of the everyday plywood—the home-improvement material from which most pieces are constructed.

At first, I thought the work might have been rushed. Abstraction Box (with Blue Guts) even retained a front panel with a wabi-sabi-like chewed point. But then I began to see the function of the naked wood. Nude Figure simultaneously exposes both the budget materials of the sculpture and the embarrassment of unexpectedly being caught nude. All the while, the title returns us to the awareness that this is a nude figure, a subject so desired, so exposed. I began to ask myself, what else is Curry revealing with these works?

(L) Nude Figure, 2025, wood, 66 x 23 x 27 inches (alternate view).

(R) Abstraction Box (with blue guts), 2025, acrylic gouache on wood, 16 x 12 1/2 x 7 inches. wood, 16 x 12 1/2 x 7 inches.

The floor sculptures have a surreal, kid's birthday present feel—like 3-D interlocking birchwood puzzles that can be reassembled to discover new formations of wonder, or a cardboard pop-out toy prize inside or on a cereal box. The abstraction boxes recall home and classroom aquariums and terrariums where young imaginations ran wild.

When we finally take in the collaged cereal boxes hanging separately in the office, the regression to childhood magic is complete. What subliminal or Freudian double messages do they betray? What are these works resisting? Is it adulthood, or the corruption of creativity for profit? How much play and awe do we allow into our grown-up schedules of deadlines, compromises, and bottom lines?

Raw Dog is about surface planes and layers: layers of constructed form, mixed media, associations, and self. The assemblage of the flat planes of the materials in the sculptural pieces brings physical space back into sensual experience. The visible space, both within the sculptures and in situ, and the audible atmosphere of the gallery space, underline the three-dimensionality of reality itself. The paintings and collages challenge that reality by abstracting space onto two-dimensional surfaces, allowing our inner space to participate in its illusions. All of these spaces are mediated by the appearances of the artworks.

Nude Figure, 2025, wood, 60 x 22 x 17 inches.

(alternate view).

The campy queering is perhaps not as overt as the immersive, Pee-wee's Playhouse-like collaboration Cornfabulation with Richard Hawkins at David Kordansky Gallery in 2011, yet the 1971 General Mills cereal box collages in this current exhibition recall the sugar-high storytelling of childhood. Just as quickly, though, Neil Young's 1968 buzz-kill lyric interrupts—"You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain."

The paintings in the main gallery—filled with eye-gasmic, psychedelic video-game matrices—are both seductive and menacing in their infinite webs of entrapment. Their black-velvet-painting lusciousness owes to the gouache medium. The scale of Primordial Slop reinforces that sense of endlessness, like a microscopic zoom-in on the smaller Primordial Cluster Flux.

The cartoonishness of George Jetson-style mid-century modernism in the Abstraction Boxes and sculptures helps temper the double messaging throughout. We move beyond the self-importance of earlier Western modernists like Arp or Brancusi. Curry's tongue-in-cheek petulance even recalls a bootleg T-shirt I once saw, complete with the White Rabbit, that read: "Trips are for Kids."

Gambling Man, 2025, collage, 11 3/8 x 8 ½” 

Of course, there is more than the Snuffleupagus of childhood at play in Curry's work. We feel the erotic undertones of where adults turn to find fantasy and escape from life's drudgeries. Even titles such as Nude Figure allude to our thinly concealed interests. Yet the title also redirects attention to the absence of pigment that once suggested otherworldly beings in Curry's earlier works. Like pulling the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz, these sculptures remain ordinary plywood, just as artists are ordinary people.

Negative Positive Negative, 2025, acrylic gouache on wood, 19 x 20 x

2 1/2 inches, (unframed), (alternative view), signed and dated verso.

The wabi-sabi imperfections—the chewed plywood point, the irregular tears of the cereal-box collages, and the ostentatious oversized signatures—are the most human glimpses here, revealing the artist's hand and fragile ego. Behind all the perfectionism of blue-chip gallery art, digital design, industrial fabrication, and AI-assisted processes, there remains a human being generating ideas. For now.

The title itself, Raw Dog, is a double entendre. Once slang for unprotected sex, it now also means to approach something unprepared. Both definitions suit Curry's risks and innuendos.

Does Raw Dog also nod to the unpreparedness with which we've embraced AI and computerized processes, both as producers and consumers? The cryptic alphabets and coding motifs in the gouache paintings, their overlapping webs, suggest the tangled feeding frenzy of capitalist digital expansion and conquest. The distorted abstractions, flattened into one-dimensional planes, reflect the popular series Severance, and how many of us feel like clueless subordinate participants, standing on the outside, forced into this new aggressive environment.

Techno-jargon and digital mandates are relentlessly imposed: buy into this reality or be left behind. Even the contrast between exposed plywood and synthetic hues in Raw Dog hints at a man-versus-machine narrative for our age. Are we doomed to separation? Are we beyond the encroachment of synthetic, robotic, dehumanized futures, and now at the point of no return?

(L) Primordial Cluster Flux, 2025, acrylic gouache on canvas in

(R) Primordial Slop, 2025, acrylic gouache on canvas, artist's frame, 16 1/4 x 13 x 1 1/2 inches. 66 x 60 x 2 inches, signed recto.

This is Curry's first show in Chicago. Raw Dog also runs concurrently in Corbett vs. Dempsey's Vault Gallery with Human, Non Human, another Curry collaboration with Richard Hawkins. This time, Hawkins provides the soundtrack. The video, a rapid-fire sequence of stills, created with genAI, suggests the obliteration of any intrinsic value to original creations under our insatiable demand for new content, regardless of how that content is achieved. I enjoyed the soundtrack most: its comedic, cutesy future-tech ambiguity amplifies the chaos while adding little "storytelling." I was disappointed when I learned that the images were generated by AI, for all the obvious reasons, but the short video remains charged and entertaining like much of Curry's work.

Amidst all that there is to consider here, one must add that even the soothing nostalgia of mid-century modernism can be both problematic and pleasing, leaving us to wonder, can we still long, guilt-free, for that deceptively "simpler time?" -an empire-driven era of white-supremacist consumer capitalism? So many were intentionally excluded from that white-picket-fence promise of suburban Utopia and property-owning happiness.

What, then, is the American Dream today? We may not be able to escape back to childhood, but we continue to chase the sugar-high of distraction, through Lisa Frank-painted landfill, video-game hellscapes, and apocalyptic movies where atrocities happen in distant galaxies. Yet those same atrocities unfold here and now. Still, we continue to consume these regurgitated metanarratives to the point of even resigning ourselves to their inevitability.

Perhaps I read too much into Raw Dog, but I think it's all there, and much more. The sheer luxury of its pulchritude and Curry's ability to complicate our perceptions through double messaging is thoroughly engaging. Remaining open-ended, the work is suggestive but still ambiguous enough to forfeit rhetoric for inquiry. I like the interpretation, found on the David Kordansky Gallery artist page, that describes Curry's work as "productively fraught." Curry may raise some eyebrows and even cross some lines, but he manages to keep his provocations within the frameworks of speculation and discourse.

Raw Dog, new works by Aaron Curry, runs through November 1, 2025, at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago.