Word: currin
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...Currin isn't the first artist to work at the intersection of art and trash. The kitsch shenanigans of Jeff Koons have been a major inspiration for him, and so has the later work of Francis Picabia--those painstaking oils from the 1940s that Picabia copied from naughty photographs. But in the mid-'90s Currin began to introduce old master borrowings into his work, at first conflating them with soft, pillowy porn, then working them into more conventionally scaled nudes and lately scattering them into satires of life among the well dressed and well fed. His art-history references come...
Keep in mind that the John Currin retrospective, now at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, is not actually called "Welcome to the Boom Boom Room." It's just hard not to think of it that way, and not only because so many of Currin's paintings are of women with breasts so large you want to yodel from one to the next. (It's a safe bet that he's the only painter of note ever to rate a review in Juggs magazine. A rave, of course.) But there's another kind of boom boom...
...Currin can make an easy target, a balloon just waiting for a pin. In interviews he doesn't hesitate to name himself as the best artist in Manhattan or to theorize in his lofty, jejune way. (One of his latest conclusions is that American painters have never manifested "the will to make a masterpiece"--which would have come as news to Jackson Pollock, to say nothing of the thundering landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church.) But whatever his merits as a thinker, as an entrepreneur Currin is doing fine. With his wife Rachel Feinstein, a sculptor whose high forehead and pert...
Over time Currin has gone through a succession of styles, from the deliberately slapdash to an ever more fine-grained illusionism, the kind that reports to the eye in detail about the clammy surface of a raw turkey or the plush of a fur jacket. But at every turn, his chief subject has been women, sometimes silky and creamy, sometimes wrinkled and brittle, sometimes with stupendous, impossible breasts...
Figurative artists have always quoted from the past, but Currin, like a good postmodernist, puts his quotes in big quotation marks. Walk through any of the later galleries in the Whitney show, and what you experience is a sustained conceptual flutter, a continual flickering between high and low, Mannerism and kitsch, Parmigianino and sleazerino. It's a strategy that makes his work radical and familiar at the same time, like an especially snappy new running shoe, which in any market is never a bad idea...