John Currin
This comprehensive monograph illustrates John Currin’s work between 1988 and 2006, with approximately four hundred paintings and drawings, many of them previously unpublished, arranged into chronological groupings accompanied by reproductions of notebook sketches and source materials. Using classical techniques to portray highly charged and often taboo subjects, Currin takes inspiration from old master portraits, pornography, and B movies to produce challengingly perverse images of men and (especially) women that balance the sacred and the profane.
In addition to Currin’s own commentary on many of the works, the book features original essays by art historian Norman Bryson and curator Alison M. Gingeras, and a short story by novelist Dave Eggers. Bryson’s “Maudit: John Currin and Morphology” explores how Currin’s painterly representations of figures and faces combine idealized beauty with outlandish caricature, and situates his aesthetic strategy in the context of such contemporaries as Lisa Yuskavage and Kara Walker. Gingeras’s essay, “John Currin: Pictor Vulgaris,” discusses the artist’s outwardly misogynistic depictions of female subjects as a deliberately provocative refusal of decorum that is all the more effective for its juxtaposition with elements of conventional style. Finally, the protagonist of Eggers’s story “Tracy and Her Loyalty” compares herself favorably to her friends in a manner that resonates with the imagined internal struggles of Currin’s own cast of characters.
Publisher: Gagosian
Publication date: 2006
Contributors: Norman Bryson, John Currin, Dave Eggers, Alison M. Gingeras
Designer: Richard Pandiscio and Bill Loccisano, Pandiscio Co.
Printer: Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, Germany
Distributor: Rizzoli International Publications, New York
Format: Cloth hardcover in slipcase
Dimensions: 10 1/2 × 13 1/2 inches (26.7 × 34.3 cm)
Pages: 384
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-8478-2865-4
