John Currin

About this episode

It’s Season 28!!! New Talk Art podcast hosted by Robert Diament. Robert meets painter John Currin, recorded at his solo show Opening Credits at Sadie Coles. Currin is widely recognised for his figurative oil paintings in which themes of sexual personae and historical painterly genres appear in surreal and at times, disconcerting guises. Oscillating between a graphic sexuality and playful symbolism, Currin captures the tones and textures of everyday life with an acute sensitivity and a meticulous attention to detail. John Currin’s show at Sadie Coles’ Savile Row gallery focuses on a new series of paintings that set pairs or triplets of women with exaggerated physiques in ornamental, Arcadian landscapes. In the sequence of twelve mid-size paintings, performative models, reinterpreted from the pages of 1970s clothing catalogues, are poised in a confident display that provides Currin with the means to explore classical painting. In his rendering of the tension of fabric stretched tight across breasts, the light on feathered leaves and gnarled trunks, the radiant softness of flesh and hair, and the self-conscious assembly of limbs, these tableaus allow Currin to make masterful pai