John Currin Biography

John Currin is an American painter based in New York City. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner.

His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and contemporary fashion models. He often distorts or exaggerates the erotic forms of the female body, and has stressed that his characters are reflections of himself rather than inspired by real people. His technical skills, Calvin Tomkins has written, which include elements of Old Master paint application and high-Manneristcomposition, have been put to use on some of the most seductive and rivetingly weird figure paintings of our era.

John Currin Age

John was born in 1962 in Boulder, Colorado the United States Of America. He is 57 years old as of now.

John Currin Education

In Connecticut, as a teenager, he studied painting privately with a renowned and traditionally trained Russian artist from Odesa, Ukraine, Lev Meshberg. He went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he obtained a BFA in 1984 and received an MFA from Yale University in 1986.

John Currin Family

Currin was born in Boulder, Colorado, and grew up in Connecticut, the son of a physics professor from Connecticut and a piano teacher from Oklahoma.

John Currin Married|Wife

Currin met artist Rachel Feinstein at a gallery in which she was living in a self-made gingerbread house as a performance piece. However, Feinstein specializes in sculptural work. They were engaged two weeks later at Currin’s show in Paris and married three years later on Valentine’s Day. They have two sons and a daughter. She has been described as his muse, which he says is kinda corny.

However, he has stated When I met Rachel I felt that I could connect with some principles that moved my art along, that I had some freedom from the petty things in my own personality.” Feinstein has appeared in many of Currin’s paintings, both as a recognizable face and as a body model.

In 2002 Feinstein and Currin published a 24-page book of their works at the Hydra Workshop in Hydra, Greece which they titled The Honeymooners, John Currin, and Rachel Feinstein. It includes an interview conducted by Sadie Coles. In 2011 the New York Times described them as “the ruling power couple in today’s art world.

John Currin Paintings|Feminism

Currin’s depictions of the female figure enchant and repel, often in equal measure. Labeled as a mannerist, caricaturist, radical conservative, or satirist, Currin continues to confound expectations and evade categorization. While his meticulous and virtuosic technique is indebted to the history of classical painting, the images themselves engage startlingly contemporary ideas about the representation of the human figure.

With inspirations as diverse as old master portraits, pinups, and mid-twentieth-century B movies, Currin continues to paint ideational yet challengingly perverse images of female subjects, from lusty nymphs to more ethereal feminine prototypes. With his uncanny ability to locate the point at which the beautiful and the grotesque are held in perfect balance, he continues to produce subversive portraits of idiosyncratic women in conventional settings. The latest additions to his cast include the demure Constance Towers and the extravagant Mademoiselle, presented here alongside scenes of bourgeois erotic abandon, such as The Women of Franklin Street.

John Currin Net Worth

John Currin has made a lot of wealth from his painting and art career as he has emerged to be one of the wealthiest painters in the world. He has an estimated net worth of $1.43 Billion USA dollars.

John Currin Books

• John Currin
• Works on Paper
• Beauty
• John Currin Selects
• The Dogwood Thieves

John Currin Art|Famous Works|Complete Works

One of her famous artworks is Honeymoon Nude, Nude on a table and Stamford after Brunch. At White Columns in New York City in 1989, he exhibited a series of portraits of young girls derived from the photographs in a high school yearbook and initiated his efforts to distill art from traditionally clichéd subjects. In the 1990s, when politically-themed artworks were favored, Currin brazenly used bold depictions of busty young women, mustachioed men, and asexual divorcés, setting him apart from the rest. He used magazines like Cosmopolitan along with old issues of Playboy for inspiration for his paintings.

In 1992 Currin moved to the Andrea Rosen Gallery, focusing, less sympathetically, on well-to-do middle-aged women. Nonetheless, by the late 1990s, Currin’s ability to paint subjects of kitsch with technical facility met with critical and financial success, and by 2003 his paintings were selling for prices in the high six figures” after he moved to the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. More recently, he has undertaken a series of figure paintings dealing with unabashedly pornographic themes, saying One motive of mine is to see if I could make this clearly debased and unbeautiful thing become beautiful in a painting.

John Currin Dallas Contemporary|My life as a Man

Currin’s studio is on the top floor of a loftlike building in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, just a few blocks from the Gramercy Park townhouse he shares with his wife, artist Rachel Feinstein, and their two sons and daughter. The studio is a cavernous space that could easily house a three-bedroom apartment, but Currin—imposingly tall, affable, and prone to boyish bouts of physical comedy at 56—keep it open and airy. There’s a big wall of windows and a skylight overhead. When I visit, it’s raining and the light reflecting off the gray painted floor feels straight-up Vermeer.

The walls are hung with works in progress, fictional portraits of ladies wearing classical draperies, with hot-roller tresses and eerie, mirthful expressions. One, bearing a passing resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence—whom Currin painted for the cover of this magazine in 2017—has an eye that appears to be slipping down her cheek and a partially bald pate. Not for long: “The best hair in paintings is the stuff you make up,” advises Currin, but just in case, there are mannequin heads bedecked with wigs—luscious curls, bouncy bobs—lining a wall of shelves like fembots waiting to be sent into battle.

There’s also a flügelhorn, some glass vases, a lute, and a fake parrot, accoutrements for Currin’s shtick: mashing up the tropes and painting techniques of his beloved Old Masters with images of (mostly) women adapted from vintage Sears catalogs, fashion magazines, stock photos, and other, more outré sources. Take, for example, his most notorious works, which depict Mannerist-style babes—and the occasional guy—screwing one another in positions cribbed from 1970s hard-core Danish porn (he likes that the actors are plain but the rooms are lavishly rococo).

It’s not really meant to titillate, Currin insists; erotica has a prurience half-life of about a decade, and Courbet aside, painted porn is like “a Ferrari made out of bread: It has no function,” he says. But the artist has a story he occasionally dines out on, about the misadventures of a couple that tried to use one of these unsexy sexy canvases as a spanking paddle. “I think there were drugs involved,” he muses. The real tragedy, Currin observes with some dismay, was the way a conservator “completely ruined the painting” in an attempt to repair the cracks.

We sit at a table in the center of the space to talk, not about the work on the walls, but about the paintings that have already been shipped to Texas for Currin’s first museum show in 15 years, which opened last weekend at Dallas Contemporary. My Life as a Man, a title taken from a Philip Roth novel, assembles the lesser-known side of the painter’s oeuvre, what curator Alison Gingeras calls his “canon of sad guys.” Currin is undoubtedly among contemporary art’s most committed, outspoken, and polarizing oglers of the opposite sex (on the canvas, that is), but he does occasionally turn his brush to his own kind—reluctantly. “When I paint women, it’s much easier to let myself drift into a little bit of Courbet, or Botticelli, or Goya, all the people I love,” he explains. “With men it’s like, the only way I have is the way I do it.”

John Currin Exhibition

John had retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and is represented in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Tate Gallery. Currin’s Whitney retrospective of 2004 showcased the development of his career through over 40 of his displayed paintings.

John Currin Bea Arthur Painting

Currin’s painting, Bea Arthur Naked, sold at Christie’s on May 15, 2013, for US$1,900,000.

John Currin Materials

Currin has cited Danish pornography pulled off the Internet as source material for his work. Specific images published by Color Climax Corporation have been identified as sources for Currin’s more pornographic paintings, including compositions and small details.

John Currin Thanksgiving Portrait

Thanksgiving 2003 is a large portrait format oil painting by American artist John Currin. It depicts in fine detail three young women of similar appearance (thin with pale skin and blonde hair) within an ornate setting decorated with marble columns, a chandelier, and a silver-framed mirror.

The woman on the left of the composition, holding the silver lid of a saucepan in one hand, feeds a spoon to a woman in a black dress next to her, who is arching her neck and opening her mouth in a manner reminiscent of a young bird or fish. The third woman, who is wearing a brown smock, sits on the right of the painting with her head bowed and grape in her hand.

On the table in front of the women is an enormous uncooked turkey, along with a bunch of grapes, an onion, a white plate and a vase of flowers (which contains both decaying and vibrant roses). Although the title Thanksgivingrefers to the American holiday when a turkey is traditionally served, the highly mannered style of this work – as well as the somewhat anachronistic clothing and décor depicted – seems to recall the tradition of northern European Renaissance painting.

Currin has claimed that Thanksgiving, completed in New York where he has lived and worked since the late 1980s, was ‘a failed painting that sat around in my studio’ until he decided to return to it when his wife, the artist Rachel Feinstein, became pregnant. Currin explained,

“The funny thing is that the painting took me exactly nine months to finish, and the painting turned into an allegory of Rachel’s pregnancy. Certain kinds of paintings were on my mind at the time – Dutch genre paintings, Velázquez’s bodegones – but as soon as I began, it became more about Rachel, and she posed for the figures a lot.”

John Currin Interview

In a 2011 interview, Currin described his relationship to his work as, “…a completely ambisexual atmosphere. I think you’re right if there’s a reverse logic to my work It’s that the pictures of men are about men and the pictures of women are about me. As of 2015, he is represented by the Gagosian Gallery, in both New York and Paris, displaying his scrutiny and emulation of 16th-century Northern European paintings.

His inspirations come from Old Master portraits and pin-ups, nymphs, and ethereal feminine prototypes, as well as his muse and wife, Feinstein. His paintings hold a conversation between the grotesque and the beautiful, and range inspiration from classical artists such as Fragonard and Bouchard to Rockwell and Crumb.