Sunday, September 03, 2006

Five paintings by John Currin


The Bra Shop, 1997, oil on canvas, 48 x 38 in.

Dogwood, 1997

La vieille barrière, 1999, huile sur toile, 193 x 102 cm

The Wizard, circa 1994

There are some wildly different ideas about exactly what Currin is up to—New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman sees him as "a latter-day Jeff Koons" trafficking in postmodern irony while Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker finds him a blissfully sincere artist tapping into the timeless values of "mystery, sublimity, transcendence." But everyone is unanimous about one thing: John Currin can paint. (source)

[..] A few years later he presented an instantly notorious group of paintings of women with basketball-sized breasts and faces done in craggy impasto acting out various soft-porn scenarios. Crass jokes rendered in oil on canvas, they are ostentatiously "bad paintings" done in the defiantly ironic mode of high-concept kitsch. Though the reviews were tepid, Currin got a big thumbs-up from Juggs magazine, which applauded him for "paying attention to the worthy theme of big tits." (source)

Buy this book at Amazon.com Buy this book at Amazon.com Buy this book at Amazon.com

No comments: