Aaron Curry: Boxxes

A book built on deliberate loss: for Boxxes, the Los Angeles artist Aaron Curry created 160 unique works of art and then destroyed them, photographing each beforehand so that the book stands as both their only record and a new singular work assembled from their remains.

Published by Koenig Books in 2015 and edited by Karen Marta with the designer Brian Roettinger, the 144-page paperback grew out of UCCA's 'The Los Angeles Project' in Beijing. Curry's painted and collaged box constructions — checkerboards, torn figures, gestural blacks — pass through the camera into sequence, the page becoming the only place the work now exists.

Curry (b. 1972) is known for sculpture that pushes biomorphic modernism into cartoon and collage registers Boxxes extends the conceptual lineage of John Baldessari's cremated paintings and Ed Ruscha's bookworks, where destruction and documentation trade places.