John Currin
9 September – 2 November 2003
www.serpentinegallery.org
LONDON: SADIE COLES HQ
John Currin
6 September – 4 October 2003
www.sadiecoles.com
‘The people I paint don’t exist. The only thing that is real is the painting. The image is only happening right now and this is the only version of it. It’s an eternal moment.’
John Currin has been accused of a lot over
the last 12 years – most commonly of misogyny and of being derivative,
relying too much on art historical references. Yet nothing about Currin’s
work is simple, as his first British retrospective shows. The exhibition
highlights his mastery and significance as a figurative painter, and also
how controversial and intriguing many of the ideas expressed in his work
are.
It is clear that from the outset Currin is fascinated with painting women.
He portrays them unpredictably, choosing to depict the ill or the old, yet
always injecting a level of glamour and beauty that often belies their
circumstances. This infatuation with overt femininity also occurs in the
notoriously contentious paintings of the big-breasted women, but here it
becomes grotesque and extreme, with the rough oil paint on their faces
turning them into caricatures.
Currin’s decision to paint from a montage of source material, usually
photographs in books, imbues all his works with a sense of the surreal,
which continues as his style changes, becoming more refined and elegant. His
nudes of the late 1990s (Honeymoon Nude, The Pink Tree and The Old Fence)
are heavily influenced by Cranach, yet feature the Cosmo-girl faces of
contemporary fashion. Around this time, Currin also began to paint
homosexual couples, but his use of stock photographs of heterosexual couples
as the source material creates domestic scenes that are airbrushed to an
almost sinister perfection.
It is only in his recent works that Currin has begun painting from life, particularly using his wife, the artist Rachel Feinstein, as a model. She appears in many of the later works at the Serpentine as well as the new paintings on show at Sadie Coles HQ. These works demonstrate a continuation of Currin’s previous style – the grotesque is still evident in Bent Lady (2003) and the art-historical in Amanda (2003), which nods heavily to Mantegna’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1490). However, one particular painting, Thanksgiving (2003), seems to bring together all the themes of Currin’s work. It is a narrative painting, depicting a trio of women preparing a Thanksgiving lunch. The immaculate, loving detail of the turkey reveals Currin’s superb skill with still-life painting, yet an air of unreality remains as the three women, all of whom bare some resemblance to Feinstein, are captured in a posed, fictitious moment.
Eliza Williams