John Currin

There’s the passing moment, and then there’s eternity. Two different kinds of time in one painting.
—John Currin

Gagosian is pleased to present Memorial, an exhibition of new paintings by John Currin. This is his first solo exhibition at the gallery in New York since 2010.

Sophisticated in technique and perverse in subject matter, Currin’s portraits conflate high and low culture in a teasing blend of satire and homage. His figures—predominantly female and often wildly exaggerated—have diverse sources, from pornographic pinups to old master paintings. In their extreme mannerism, they combine the beautiful and the grotesque, the sacred and the profane.

A series of startling new paintings begun in 2020 finds Currin bringing his musings on intimacy, eroticism, and feminine and masculine identities into a fresh context that expands his repertoire of art historical references while returning to the explicitly sexual imagery of his earlier work. In these so-called “memorials,” statuary figures are rendered in alabaster tones; warm flesh is replaced with cold trompe l’oeil stone in a confrontation between the sordid and the stately that diverts the traditional medium of public art to unexpected ends. Currin uses grisaille, a monochrome technique identified with Jan van Eyck and other artists, to evoke the texture of marble. He has spoken of the method as imparting to figures a funerary aspect, suggesting a meditation on death—or the demise of eroticism—and a look back at his own earlier work.