by Mercuri Lam
“Art in View” is a biweekly column by Mercuri Lam, exploring contemporary artists and art in conversation with personal connections and wider contexts.
I first encountered Henry Curchod’s work through his exhibitions at SPURS gallery in Beijing, where he showcased his work in the group show In Between in 2023, and later at Gallery Vacancy in Shanghai for his solo show Waterplay in 2024. The paintings made their way onto various Chinese social media platforms, and I admired them plenty, but never did any deeper research.
This summer, I worked at the gallery that represented Curchod in the US, and became much more familiar with his artworks– their combination of traditional painting methods with layers of charcoal, gouache, and oil sticks on surfaces like rugs and sculptures. However, what interested me wasn’t just the paintings themselves, but the journey he undertook to get him to his present style As Curchod puts it, “when I took my practice onto the rug, I lost my sense of perspective and scale and…identity …and I…became …the freest I’ve ever been…for the first time in my life, [the works are] really, they really who I am, or they’re carrying my personality for better.” I was curious, then, how this freedom came to be.
Henry was born in 1992 in Palo Alto, CA, and grew up in a Kurdish and Anglo-American household. He moved to Australia, where he earned his BFA from the University of New South Wales in 2014 and now lives in London. In his first exhibition, Bitter Winds, his paintings were largely abstract but displayed his budding sense of color, heavily influenced by Art Nouveau, Expressionism, and Surrealism. The titular piece, “But I Love These Bitter Winds,” features a man holding up what seems to be a giant dandelion while it gets blown away by flurries of wind.
Curchod references his Persian upbringing in other paintings, with motifs of arched doors, pomegranates, jewelry, and mythology (an eye in the sky of one painting, a giant squid stranded on shore with traditional Persian fez hats, and mermaids). But it’s through this show that we also begin to see, as the press release mentions, “’algebraic’ [approach to color].” Curchod works off “a sequence of decisions, assessed at each stage as an equation of the known and the yet-unknown. Such strong attention to building the interior logic of each work results in a series of works which, whilst entirely autonomous, are immediately legible as a whole.”
Despite never having visited his motherland, Curchod uses portrayals of Persian art, culture, and places as the foundation for his work. In show after show, his ability to create a sense of immersion only strengthened his exploration of cultural cross-pollination. Nature, too, becomes a source of reckoning in these works through the depictions of, culminating in Waterplay, Curchod’s show at Gallery Vacancy. Within these pieces, water’s various natures emerge, with images of mythical creatures such as sirens, humanoid oysters, sinking ships, drowning sailors, and more. Above all else, however, you’ll notice the scale of the paintings: the centerpiece of the show, Mercy, stands at over two meters, and other paintings measure almost equal in size or larger. Mercy, depicting a scene of sailors caught in a great wave, hanging on for dear life amidst the wreckage of collapsed buildings, brings forth this sense of a Lovecraftian deluge, with no one able to escape.
While Persian symbols take a backseat in Waterplay, they are still featured through details like Islamic geometric patterns on the sides of ships. Waterplay also introduces bananas as a motif for capitalism, which are now commonly seen throughout Curchod’s paintings. Curchod’s sense of detail and texture is also stronger in this show compared to Bitter Winds, because the signature layered streaked textures of his work come readily into focus. He heavily layers oil pastels to add a sense of glow and color and a rough texture, which, all the while, complement the subject matter. These touches create a greater sense of depth as opposed to the monomedial works in Curchod’s first show.
Curchod’s latest show, Rome is No Longer in Rome, took place this summer in Los Angeles at CLEARING. In this show, Curchod’s work came full circle. Drawing its title from Poetics of Relation by Édouard Glissant, the exhibition showcases his emerging, idiosyncratic style: by layering multiple textures and mediums on top of one another—not just through dry-on-dry layering, but also variations of wet-on-wet, dry-on-wet, and more —the images themselves, whether a baby suckling on a cow or the aftermath of police brutality, combine to create colorful, immersive scenes.
What stood out in particular about this show were the rugs featured in the space. I was lucky enough to transcribe an interview with Henry himself in preparation for the show, where he described more about his artistic journey and the choice to use rugs in his art. The rugs, I learned, were old Iranian rugs from Curchod’s family in Iran and subsequently repainted and dyed with acrylic, gouache, and natural dyes, combining his artistic visions directly with his culture on the canvas. The results are staggeringly large pieces that are not only beautiful to look at, but are also interactive, as viewers can step onto the surfaces and tactilely engage with the rug and its textures.
Curchod’s work has departed from merely observing the abstract ideas of his heritage and now fully embodies his culture in practice, using the rugs from his family as his canvas. Through taking history and making it his own, he becomes an active participant in his cultural narrative. In a way, he’s tackled what it means to find his own identity as an artist—combining his background with his artistic perspective to create his own meaning.
