John Currin

The sources for Currin’s masterfully crafted paintings may be found in Northern Renaissance and early Mannerist painting and the pages of popular fashion magazines. Currin synthesizes historical and contemporary styles, creating evocative images that examine the tradition of painting and the role of the female nude in art…

JC: The subject of a painting is always the author, the artist. You can only make an illusion that it’s about something other than that. I think that’s what the function of representation is: to give a painting the illusion of a subject. In the end, that’s why I started seeing no reason for me to paint abstractly. Some people would say, "Abstraction is as much a representation as anything else." But I wanted it to be more simple-minded. Why can’t I just be forthright about saying that I’m the author, that I’m the one who determined it?…

Works in the TATE collection

John Currin’s strangely disquieting paintings are depictions of contemporary people, rendered in a style characterized by distortion and elongation that is evocative of the painters of northern Renaissance, early Mannerism, and 20th-century modernism, including Grünewald, Parmigianino, and Picasso…