John Currin

There’s a kind of a distortion that happens with adoration.
—John Currin

Gagosian is pleased to present new portraits by John Currin. This is his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong and his first exhibition in Asia.

Conflating inspirative sources of high and low culture, from old masters to soft-porn pinups, Currin channels his prodigious painterly skills into idealized yet perverse images that both charm and challenge.

As a graduate student at Yale University in the 1980s, Currin recognized a “forced masculinity” in the Abstract Expressionist mode of painting that he had been practicing; consequently, he began exploring themes of innocence, humor, and eroticism, creating highly mannerist images of horses and girls with feathered hair, large-headed caricatures, and portraits of individuals and couples made in a painterly language entirely his own. Currin’s detailed renderings of human flesh in sensuous, glowing brushwork has frequently prompted comparison to the Dutch masters, including the celebrated Golden Age painter Cornelis van Haarlem, alongside whose paintings Currin’s were exhibited at the Frans Hals Museum in the Netherlands in 2011.