John Currin

John Currin’s distorted portraits range from the satirical to the grotesque, riffing on art history and pornography alike. The artist combines elements of staged Renaissance compositions with contemporary aesthetic influences such as pinup posters, X-rated images, and B movies. His enigmatic caricatures simultaneously embrace beauty, abjection, and cultural traditions high and low. Currin studied at Carnegie Mellon before receiving his MFA from Yale. He has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Brussels, and Tokyo, among other cities. Currin’s work has sold for up to eight figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.