John Currin Paintings
With never dull settings and sarcastic undertones, and a choice of subjects that recall with their formal definition the graphics of glossy or pornographic magazines, the American artist has been able to redefine the contemporary portraiture.
Currin has been known and appreciated for elegant portraits and even lascivious scenes interpreted with a wry, shameless realism.
Starting from June, 13 and until October, 2 2016, John Currin, one of the most popular artists of our time, will be the protagonist of a great exhibition at Stefano Bardini Museum in Florence. This is the first exhibition of Currin in an Italian institutional space. Sophisticated painter because of technique and visual culture, Currin has been known and appreciated for elegant portraits and even lascivious scenes interpreted with a wry, shameless realism. In his paintings, often small format paintings, Currin conceals a strong knowledge of art history and a very sophisticated taste for figurative composition. With never dull settings and sarcastic undertones, and a choice of subjects that recall with their formal definition the graphics of glossy or pornographic magazines, the American artist has been able to redefine the contemporary portraiture.
In his artworks the interpretation of feminine eros, and the American bourgeois psychology are almost surreal or grotesque, extremely disturbing. But his figurative satire is never shouted or blatant, never a caricature or in bad taste. His figures, dressed or playing as romantic novel extras or as cool-headed mannequins in a fashionable center, by the zealous spirit even in the case of solitary or group sexual practices, reveal signs and expressions of an unequivocal psycho-physical alteration. The disproportionate or prospectively deformed anatomy, the facial expression alter the Renaissance ideal representation of the body or of the female face.