Strange people with absurd figures, in strange poses and situations… And yet they look hyperrealistic. Is this even possible? Yes, if the author of the paintings is John Currin. His ambitious paintings seduce and repel, surprise and puzzle. His technique is comparable to that of the greatest masters of European painting of the 15th-17th centuries. At the same time, the plots are often absurd and border on undisguised kitsch, grotesque and pornography. It is not for nothing that John Currin is compared to Lucas Cranach the Elder, whose works, despite their genius, sometimes make one doubt the author’s mental sanity.

John Currin was born in 1962 in Boulder (USA, Colorado). He was the third of four children in the family of a music teacher and a physics professor. As a teenager, he studied painting privately with Lev Mezhberg, a Russian artist of Jewish descent. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and entered Yale to study art. In 1989, he organized his first major exhibition, where he showed a series of portraits of young girls copied from photographs. These works showed the beginnings of the artist’s signature style.

The artist gained real recognition in the 1990s. His overtly sexual paintings caused a lot of controversy among critics, who called Curran a sexist and a misogynist. But the viewer was delighted. The portrait artist himself commented on his work as follows: “My art is a satirical commentary on the perception of women in modern culture.” The artist’s reputation grew, and by 2003, the price of each of his works was six figures. Curran’s muse and main model was his wife, artist and sculptor Rachel Feinstein, whom he met in 1994. According to the artist, it was thanks to her face and body that he earned his millions.