About this Event
On the ocassion of Henry Curchod's exhibition LOTTO at Kiang Malingue New York (November 11, 2026 - January 9, 2027), with a conversation between the artist and Maia Asshaq.
Preview the book:
About the exhibition:
(About the Book)
Papers, Henry Curchod’s book of drawings and works on paper, could be seen as the artist’s personal index of what a contemporary mythology of symbols and materials might look like. Gathering 162 works rich in expressiveness and variation, typology and narrative, the book is first and foremost an assemblage of themes, subjects, and styles that inform the artist’s constantly evolving way of thinking. As such, Papers mirrors Curchod's overall painting practice, which exists in the fluid area between abstraction and figuration, as well as between his Eastern and Western upbringing: rather than constructing thematic tropes, the works in the book thrive in polarities, always refusing a dominant identity.
“Making a painting is to translate the humility of a drawing onto a canvas,” says Curchod via John Douglas Millar’s commissioned essay accompanying Papers. And indeed, both drawing and painting are not practices about something specific so much as records of the constant becomings of matters and ideas. Curchod is telling us that the work should be allowed a certain opacity, and that a demand for full legibility is, in this sense, a kind of violence.
Originating from this mindset, the book echoes mythical pasts by relating them to the material present and the artist’s constant struggle with matter. Curchod's motifs—art historical, personal, mythical, absurdist—serve as holding points against our contemporary feeling of utter disintegration, while the human remains the work’s main subject.
Again, from Douglas Millar’s essay: “What I really want to talk about though is how present they [i.e. the drawings] feel, and how attuned they are to this present, this absurd, deadened, sometimes violently beautiful present that we share as bodies and consciousnesses in this space and time.”
Ultimately, Papers is a book that feels like a profoundly generous response to the ruin of our everyday, an ode to the imagination as an engine of survival.
(About the Speakers)
Henry Curchod is an artist based in London whose practice moves between figuration and abstraction, and through an interplay of depth and surface, representation and substrate, in drawing and painting. Personal memory and the complexity of the self, everyday objects and encounters, and art and artifacts inform Curchod works, of oil stick on linen, canvas, and stainless steel, as well as fabric dye on Iranian wool rugs connected to the artist’s Kurdish heritage. His compositions, characterized by unanchored forms, shifting perspectives, and raw, gestural markings, appear to emerge from fragments of time, narrative, dream, and history, allowing for multiple meanings to coalesce without a fixed resolution.
Recent solo exhibitions include Kiang Malingue, New York; The Intermission, Athens, Greece; Clearing, Los Angeles and New York; Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai; Shoot the Lobster, New York; and Mamoth, London. His work is held in collections including the Buxton International Collection, Melbourne; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; M Woods Museum, Beijing; Sifang Museum, Nanjing; START Museum, Shanghai; Dangxia Foundation, Beijing; Tiantai Museum of Art, Qingdao; and X Museum, Beijing.
Maia Asshaq is a writer, editor, and curator working in artist publications and public programs. She is the founder of the Detroit Art Book Fair, DittoDitto Books, and Flint Magazine and was, most recently, the director of Printed Matter’s LA and NY Art Book Fairs. Among many things, she is interested in all of the ways language and art impact one another.
Event venue & nearby stays
Kiang Malingue (New York), 50 Eldridge Street, New York, United States
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