John Currin

Along with an insightful new essay, this beautiful book features over forty-five striking color reproductions of John Currin’s most recent paintings, spanning from 2011 to 2015. At once highly seductive and deeply perplexing, John Currin’s paintings draw inspiration from such disparate areas as Old Master portraits, pinups, pornography, and B-movies. Consistent throughout his oeuvre, however, is his search for the point at which the beautiful and the grotesque hold each other in perfect balance, and this new book from Gagosian Gallery demonstrates just that. In his most recent work, Currin layers each canvas with multiple scenes, creating paintings within paintings. He paints idealized yet challengingly perverse images of women, from lusty nymphs and dour matrons to more ethereal feminine prototypes. While his eroticized subjects often exist at odds with the popular dialogue and politics of contemporary art, they entice viewers, and are reproduced here in stunning detail.

James Lawrence is a critic and historian of postwar and contemporary art. He is a frequent contributor to The Burlington Magazine.