John Currin

John Currin paints figurative scenes of unsettling vitality, often sexually explicit, that probe the gap between desire and disgust in contemporary culture. Born in Boulder in 1962 and trained at Carnegie Mellon and Yale, he emerged in the late 1980s with portraits drawn from yearbooks and magazines—Cosmopolitan, Playboy—transformed through exaggeration and distortion into something both repellent and compelling. His technical mastery, grounded in Old Master painting and Northern Renaissance portraiture, allows him to render kitsch and degradation with the formality of high art.