John Currin

Already world-renowned, John Currin's retrospective has traveled from The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, to The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and The Serpentine Gallery in London. John Currin burst onto the art world in the early 1990s when figurative painting was on the margins of the contemporary art scene. An astute observer of human nature, Currin creates painterly portraits that oscillate from the flatly realistic to the thickly cartoonish. He is best known for his portraits (real and fictitious) of strangely blank-faced women with dark expressionless eyes. Both commonplace and fantastic, his paintings cull subjects from a range of sources, from fifteenth-century Italian art to girlie magazines of the sixties and have earned the artist comparisons with the likes of Breugel and Norman Rockwell.