John Currin Artwork by John Currin.
Evocative, varied, sometimes vulgar and often styled in a deliberately retrograde manner, John Currin's depictions of women nearly always induce a sense of the familiar, of having been seen before--framed on the wall of a doctor's office, spread-eagled in father's nudie magazine, glimpsed in a drawing by Rubin, posing as a prop in some old advertisement, lying supine in a painting at the Metropolitan. Whether working in watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pencil, or pen and ink, his sometimes lurid images of women, with their elongated necks, oversized bosoms and otherwise slightly distorted bodies, update the exaggerations of Italian mannerism with a breezy brushstroke or, alternately, a contemplative smudge of charcoal.
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