02 April 2008 – 10 May 2008
Sadie Coles HQ is presenting a major new series of paintings by American painter John Currin whose subjects range from the domestic to the overtly erotic. These exceptionally refined and gloriously engaging paintings continue the intense debate within Currin’s work that combines art historical technique with contemporary reference. While some of Currin’s new paintings are of flowers and exquisite china, most are depictions of hardcore eroticism taken from European pornography. Pornography is functional and almost by definition an unembellished celluloid or digital idiom. Indeed, one of the primary uses of photography is porn, and a painting would struggle to claim to be as immediate or undeniably in the moment as a photograph. Currin’s use of pornographic subject matter is both a challenge to these conventions and an acknowledgement of the spectral presence of photography for the contemporary painter.
Currin renders the pornographic in luscious oil paint, evoking the technique of historical painters as various as the magisterial Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Gustave Courbet, Christian Schad or Otto Dix. Currin’s appropriation of daring images and their transformation through the medium of paint knowingly mimics the four-hundred-year-old practice of erotic paintings commissioned for private viewing by wealthy patrons. His imagery does away with the elevation of the subject through mythical role play and these girls and boys are what they are, 20th century porn stars, but they are promoted purely through their rendering in oil paint. And when the pictures are not explicit they are laced with innuendo. One picture in the exhibition, Pushkin Girl, depicts a plump young woman looking up from her book in order to gaze at the viewer, the expression on her face suggesting that something indecent may be going on outside the crop of the image. Another painting, a still life of delft china, is seen in this context as fetishistic and as dogged in its mastery as Currin’s rendering of the sex act.
From early on in his career Currin was known for his distinctive depictions of women of various ages and sizes – dour menopausal women, pretty young girls, buxom maidens – and men of dubious sexual ability, and he has been alternately spoken of in terms of mannerism, caricature, and conservatism. But throughout Currin’s compositions is a morphology of academic realism entwined with lively contemporary caricature, with the work allowed to triumph by the pure splendour and the staggering ability of his painting.
John Currin was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1962 and obtained a B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University (1984) followed by a M.F.A. from Yale University (1986). He lives and works in New York. In 2003, a travelling exhibition of drawings was organised by the Des Moines Art Center and in the same year MoCA Chicago initiated a mid-career survey of his painting which travelled to the Serpentine Gallery, London and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work has also been included as part of What is Painting?- Contemporary Art from the Collection, MoMA- Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007; Painting Now! - Back to Figuration, Kunsthal Rotterdam, 2007; In the Darkest Hour there may be light: works from Damien Hirst’s Murderme Collection, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006. A major monograph on John Currin was published by Rizzoli in 2006.
06 September – 04 October 2003
‘I like the idea that Picasso looked at women all the time, but had a strange, antagonistic, questionable relationship to them. It’s a strange act of adoration, but it’s also very violent. My favorites are the pictures of Dora Maar, where she’s crying, a weeping woman, and her eyes are like spoons with soup falling out of them. She’s crying all the time, she’s upset, and he’s an asshole and has no sympathy. His coldness is fascinating and it’s the real subject of the painting. I don’t have the same temperament, but I like the idea of painting someone who is crying, of observing them like that. Have you ever experienced a moment when you can’t believe how cold-hearted you are? It’s an emotional moment. I’ve realized that it’s analogous to painting - to paint you have to be very observant and cold about it. This act of portraying is, in a way, paradoxical. I have to have a feeling to paint, but as a painter I cannot have the feeling so much that I can’t objectify the image.’
John Currin in Rochelle Steiner ‘Interview with John Currin’, John Currin (New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc., 2003)
For his third exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Currin presents a concise new group of eight new works, introducing still-life subject matter alongside his more familiar figurative imagery. A reclining nude recalls his black background nudes of the late 90s, paintings which married the influences of Cranach and Botticelli, but here playing on the foreshortening of Mantegna to celebrate a new ideal of beauty. The middle-aged woman in Bent Lady, gaily contorted in front of a luscious rose bush, has shaken off her dour peers who were the subjects of a rather darker, peculiarly asexual group of earlier imaginings of divorcee fund-raisers. In the biggest and most elaborate composition in the exhibition, three women of different ages, all based on the artist’s wife, are seen preparing Thanksgiving Lunch. Beautifully realised, the vignette affectionately mocks the domestic rituals of the middle classes, a scene elevated by the myriad of art historical references (and, what is quite possibly, the most lovingly painted turkey in the history of art).Examining John Currins’ paintings of women - from the pneumatic babes to the middle-aged, the sick girls lying in their beds to the classical nudes - we are able to identify them all. Or rather we are able to categorise - for they do not exist as individuals. They are composites, imaginary beings, assembled via the pages of Cosmo and Playboy, from stock photos, from life models and through the canon of great European painting. Robert Rosenblum recently observed in an essay that `Currin’s fusion of venerable past and vulgar present comes out as a perfect hybrid that lives in both worlds’. In both worlds of representation that is - as Currin himself observes, `The people I paint don’t exist. The only thing that is real is the painting. It’s not like a photograph where there’s another reality that existed at a certain moment in time in the past. The image is only happening right now and this is the only version of it. To me, that’s fascinating. It’s an eternal moment.’
The show coincides with a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; it is his first individual show in public institutions both sides of the Atlantic. Currin has shown extensively throughout Europe and the United States, and was included in two of last year’s key exhibitions Dear Painter at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and in Drawing Now: Eight Propositions at MoMA in New York.