ART CITIES:Geneva-John Currin
Since the 1990s, John Currin has reigned as one of the art world’s greatest provocateurs residing on the double-edged sword of desire and disgust. His work, which mingles an early training in classical painting with a decidedly American palate for the absurdity found in kitsch, presents figurative portraits, often nude, that reflect the perversity within our culture’s obsession with beauty and perfection.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive
An exhibition of paintings and works on paper by John Currin, made between 1989 and 2014 is on presentation at Gagosian Gallery in Geneva. Several paintings in this exhibition from different junctures in Currin’s trajectory reveal evolutions in technique and subject matter. “Miss Fenwick” (1996) depicts a mature blond woman in a simple blue dress, her smoothly painted body contrasting with the thick brushstrokes used for her face, which imparts a sense of desiccation and decay. With this simple contrast in texture, Currin suggests the dark undercurrents of social conventions, interrupting the contours of femininity with the charged idea of age. In “Young Woman on a Lounger” (2014), the woman’s long red hair frames her porcelain-skinned face as she gazes softly out at the viewer. Chosen from over a hundred sketchbooks and notepads, the drawings (studies for prints and paintings, as well as still lifes, portraits, and loose watercolors, gouache, charcoal, ink, and pencil) show the evolution of Currin’s conceptual approach to the depiction of the human figure, concurrent with the development of his singular artistic process. Currin was born in Colorado to a physics professor father and piano teacher mother. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Northern California, first settling in Palo Alto, and later, Santa Cruz. They finally moved to Connecticut when he was ten. Currin went on to study at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he obtained a BFA in 1984. Immediately afterward, he pursued an MFA at Yale, where he became close friends with Lisa Yuskavage and Sean Landers. He completed his MFA in 1986, then moved to New York City. The year 1989 marked his first major exhibition with a series of portraits of young girls derived from photographs in high school yearbooks. By this point he had developed a distinct, kitschy style of figurative painting that focused on bold depictions of women and men, drawing inspiration from sources like Playboy and Cosmopolitan. By 1992, Currin was selling his work at Andrea Rosen Gallery, and had established himself as a critical and financial success. The frank sexuality of Currin’s work attracted its fair share of controversy throughout the 1990s, with a number of critics dismissing it as sexist and misogynistic. Currin’s popularity continues to bloom along with, and perhaps despite, his commitment to pushing society’s buttons. His recent works merge the influence of 16th-century Northern European paintings with pop culture pinups and Internet porn, interrogating the boundaries between the beautiful and the grotesque.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 19 place de Longemalle, Geneva, Duration: 30/1-22/4/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com
