ART CITIES:N.York-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
In his solo exhibition “Memorial” a series of new paintings begun in 2020 finds John Currin bringing his musings on intimacy, eroticism, and feminine and masculine identities into a fresh context that expands his repertoire of art historical references while returning to the explicitly sexual imagery of his earlier work. In these so-called “memorials,” statuary figures are rendered in alabaster tones; warm flesh is replaced with cold trompe l’oeil stone in a confrontation between the sordid and the stately that diverts the traditional medium of public art to unexpected ends. Currin uses grisaille, a monochrome technique identified with Jan van Eyck and other artists, to evoke the texture of marble. He has spoken of the method as imparting to figures a funerary aspect, suggesting a meditation on death or the demise of eroticism, and a look back at his own earlier work. “Pinup” (2021) depicts a solitary female nude draped in rags and with her arms raised provocatively behind her head. Her gaunt contours, however, undermine the curvaceous archetype suggested by the painting’s title; and rather than being tantalizingly available, she is contained within a boxlike niche. “Sunflower” (2021) also isolates its female subject within the contained space of an alcove, with only the large red flower that she holds beginning to escape its painted confines. In “Mantis” (2020), one woman perches atop another in an awkward pyramidal pose borrowed from an erotic comic book that also suggests the angular form of the titular insect. The work depicticts a knee and a foot that project beyond the frame, and like many of these new works, engages with Northern European Mannerism, a movement known for its juxtaposition of dramatic, stylized poses with architectonic solidity. Currin brings dynamic, historicized figures into contact with a distinctly modern view of sexuality and the human body. He further complicates his graphic subject matter by giving many of the central figures the facial features of his wife, the artist Rachel Feinstein, a perpetual muse throughout his career. Through this visual invocation of his most enduring subject and model, Currin’s paintings prompt a complex entanglement of personal, societal, and historical narratives.
John 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. Despite being tinged with irony, Currin’s deep affection and affinity for his subjects are evident, his eloquent brushstrokes conveying satire and sincerity in equal measure.
Photo: Left: John Currin, Caryatid, 2021, Oil on canvas, 50 × 34 inches (127 × 86.4 cm), © John Currin, Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Right: John Currin, Pinup, 2021, Oil on canvas, 54 × 36 inches (137.2 × 91.4 cm), © John Currin, Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 14/9-30/10/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com
