Prize

Curtis Kulig, Prize
Published by Pacific, 2018
Texts by Karen Wong and Max Blagg

Hardcover
112 pages, 9 × 9 inches
Edition of 300
$50

Prize is a new hardcover publication by Curtis Kulig, featuring forty mixed-media works on paper that explore the nuanced and poetic movement of professional boxing. The publication, and corresponding exhibition at Agnès b. Galerie Boutique, draws from Kulig’s relationship with his Uncle Davy, an amateur boxer and free spirit, who has had a profound effect on the artist’s life.

Like dancers, boxers exist in the physical moment—the body is their medium and every gesture is an articulation of strategy. The end result is exhaustion, but Kulig’s boxers are frozen in the moment, giving the viewer a chance to linger over their angled, twisting figures mid-fight. The prize for the two fighters at the end of a boxing match is either agony or euphoria, defeat or triumph. The opening and closing pages of the publication play with this notion, bookending Kulig’s drawings—as well as texts by the New Museum’s Karen Wong and poet Max Blagg—with archival footage from two fights featuring Uncle Davy in 1982.