Summary
A painter based in New York, Currin was first known for his 1989-90 series of pseudo-portraits of young women (head and shoulders) painted in a deadpan manner. Taken from photographs in high school yearbooks, they were characterised by their bland prettiness and seemingly untroubled sweetness. Their blank gaze and the overall emptiness of the image reproduces a terrifying moment of stillness compared by the artist to the deadly cold stare of Damien, protagonist of the film The Omen (1976, director Richard Donner). Subsequent paintings depict caricatured men and women whose over-large eyes, ruddy cheeks and sentimental expressions suggest the world of the cartoon. Women with balloon-like breasts and slender bearded men act out the traditional fantasies of the white American male as expressed in the kitsch culture of pornography, advertising and magazine photographs. The excessive sickliness of these images contrasts with the emptiness of the personalities portrayed, producing a psychologically unsettling effect… (read more)
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