In fact, the whole place is empty of art because Gagosian’s Madison Avenue outpost has recently opened an exhibition of Currin’s semipornographic nudes and other figurative oils, his second outing with the gallery.īorn in Boulder, Colorado, in 1962, Currin grew up in Connecticut, studied at Carnegie Mellon University, and received an MFA from Yale in 1986. Near a desk with an iMac on it lurks a female mannequin sporting a dark blazer on a window ledge behind a long work cabinet crowded with brushes and paints, two blond wigs with different hairstyles hang on stands near an ornate settee with gilt edges, two thick easels, both empty, await the artist. A large peaked skylight with sophisticated mechanical shades - “outrageously expensive,” the artist admits - illuminates the primary work area. If, cleaning up and dressed down, Currin presents a far more casual persona than the visitor might expect, the setting, at least, is appropriately grand.Īiry, elegant, and enviably proportioned, the studio is located in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, a short walk from the town house Currin and Feinstein are renovating. He wears thick rectangular glasses, jeans, and an old blue T-shirt rather than one of the tailored three-piece suits he’s often photographed in when out with his wife, the artist Rachel Feinstein. It’s Saturday afternoon, and John Currin, arguably the most acclaimed American painter of his generation, is mopping his studio floor. Read the first half of the article below, then follow the jump to the ARTINFO site to learn more about Currin’s artistic process. Luckily, writer Daniel Kunitz was able to paint a lovely, erm, picture of what it’s like to be Currin - from his everyday anxieties to his video game habits to the music he listens to when he’s feeling creative. But aside from some odd-looking mannequins and a table piled with paint tubes, Currin’s working space didn’t look much like a working space at all. Perhaps it’s the fact that, as the article mentions, he’d just moved in and redone the floors, or perhaps he tidied things up for the cameras. When we spotted an article posted on ARTINFO - which originally ran in Art+Auction magazine - promising a look into this very realm, we were surprised to see something that didn’t particularly fit either mold. John Currin’s New York studio, as we’d imagined it, could have gone either way: Classical and lush, befitting a painter who got famous in the ’90s portraying himself as a new Old Master while his contemporaries were overdosing on conceptualism, or strange and wild, bursting with the eclectic ephemera Currin references in his portraits, from vintage porn mags to movie clips to historical tomes.
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