John Currin

Gagosian Gallery, New York
Private Collection, New York

This work is in excellent condition overall. The surface is bright and fresh. The canvas is unlined. Only under raking light and very close inspection is a very soft buckling at the upper right corner evident. Framed.
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John Currin’s true genius lies in his reverence for the figure and his ability to direct contemporary viewers to the luscious spectacle and grand tradition of painting through various reconsiderations of the female gender. Untitled (Study for the Conservatory) is an impressive study from John Currin’s oeuvre, serving as a strong example of his career-long enthrallment with the form of the female body. Painted in Currin’s trademark bravura technique, two young women are portrayed with painterly virtuosity, providing a meditation on art historical precedents ranging from the Northern Renaissance to twentieth-century portraiture.

The present work is a study for Currin’s 2010 work The Conservatory, which serves as a blueprint and opportunity for the artist to hone his vision before embarking on the larger work, which is rendered with sharper technical detail and subtle changes to the composition. The depiction of the two women remains similar, unaware of the onlooker, and detached from reality. Currin slightly alters the composition of the larger work to include a more sophisticated setting. The drapery is more defined in its depiction, and he abandons a table holding a bottle of wine in the study in favor of beautifully rendered stringed instruments in The Conservatory.

The female as subject in the history of painting has consistently been refined and reimagined. Currin explored innovative ways of depicting women in the context of his own time, relying on accepted forms only to challenge them. His successful subversion of the ideal female nude as a historical paradigm allows him to articulate a painting that both enchants and repels, masterfully intertwining the beautiful and the grotesque in equal parts that leaves the viewer unsettled. Currin exposes portraiture's long history of scopophilia and fetishism, particularly in depictions of women by presenting obstacles to pure, unfettered enjoyment and consumption: “Currin’s technique involves a continuous swerve between attraction and repulsion, pleasure and guilt, joy and shame.” (Norman Bryson, “Maudit: John Currin and Morphology,” in Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, John Currin, 2006, p. 30) 

The disconcerting quality of his work derives from the very conjunction of his traditional mode of working with perpetually off-key oddities. This essence suggests a presence of Mannerist influence as Currin portrays an exaggerated elongation of human forms, creating a composition of tension and instability rather than one of balance and clarity.  The women who fill the frame bear all the marks of Currin’s technical gravitas while simultaneously encapsulating the fundamental uncanniness of his unique aesthetic of an exhilarating collision of painterly influences. This explicit tension between art history and mass culture, which Currin piercingly articulates through a deliberately selected vernacular, inverts the very concept of academic portraiture upon itself, allowing a powerful meditation on this central pillar of art history.