May 1, 2017
A tender embrace of art history might not be the first quality that springs to mind when it comes to the artist John Currin, whose controversial, carefully executed paintings are more frequently singled out for the way they exaggerate and warp standards of beauty to unsettling new proportions—a practice which has landed him both criticism and praise. But it’s Currin’s technical mastery of centuries of Western painting in combination with his intentional distortions, that makes his work so magnetic.Rather than trying to reject the past, Currin chooses to celebrate its forms and tropes even while he’s inflating modern standards of beauty almost to the bursting point. He paints women as idealized virginal graces, sex objects, stylish old dowagers, and exaggerated parodies; they touch themselves, they measure each other’s ballooning breasts, they drape their porcelain-white bodies in furs and jewels. But despite the explicit content of many of Currin’s works, he does not think that the pornographic is what makes them transgressive. As modern viewers, we are hardly shocked by the erotic in art, yet Currin’s paintings still make us uneasy. What is it about these smiling feminine prototypes that raises the hairs on the back of the neck? According to Currin, the secret is simple: “bad drawing.”
READ MORE...
