John Currin in The New Yorker

There is a profile of painter John Currin in this week’s issue of The New Yorker and it’s well worth picking it up. If you’re in London, he has a forthcoming show there, I believe at the Serpentine Gallery, I had seen a large mid-career retrospective of his work at the Whitney in 2003 in NY and found it to be quite good. He has a kind of very classical style that he mixes with paintings of disproportionate bodies, a sarcastic and twisted sense of humor, and slightly surrealistic takes on Norman Rockwell along with references to painters as diverse as Vermeer, Lucien Freud and Goya. As Tomkins writes in the article, “More than any artist I know, John Currin exemplifies the productive struggle between self-confidence and self-doubt.” From the New Yorker: “Currin’s work ranges from riffs on high-school-yearbook head shots–reminiscent I think of Richter’s Nurse Paintings used most recently by Sonic Youth for the cover art to their album Sonic Nurse–to scenes inspired by Internet pornography, to portraits of family members, including his wife, Rachel, and his son Francis.

The New Yorker has a portfolio of some of Currin’s recent work online here.