John Currin

American · b. 1962

John Currin (b. 1962, Boulder, Colorado) is an American painter known for technically refined figurative works that combine references to Old Master painting, Renaissance and Mannerist portraiture, popular culture, fashion imagery, pinups, and pornography. His paintings frequently depict women, couples, domestic scenes, and erotic subjects, using anatomical exaggeration, stylized expressions, and highly controlled surfaces. Currin draws on the language of historical European painting while engaging with contemporary ideas about beauty, sexuality, taste, gender, and social convention. Humour, discomfort, elegance, and grotesque distortion often coexist within the same image. Since emerging in the New York art scene in the early 1990s, he has become one of the most prominent figures in contemporary figurative painting.