John Currin valuation
Paints women from yearbooks, magazines and the Old Masters with a virtuoso's skill and a satirist's eye.
John Currin was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1962 and grew up in Connecticut, where as a teenager he took private painting lessons.
What a work by John Currin is worth
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Bio
John Currin was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1962 and grew up in Connecticut, where as a teenager he took private painting lessons. He studied at Carnegie Mellon University and took his MFA at Yale in 1986. At White Columns in New York in 1989 he showed portraits of girls taken from a high-school yearbook, and in 1992, at Andrea Rosen Gallery, paintings of middle-aged women, and critics in the early 1990s grouped him with the slacker artists. Through the decade his technique grew into an Old Master manner, drawing on sixteenth-century Northern European painting, Fragonard, pin-ups and magazines, applied to subjects that are erotic, kitsch and often uncomfortable. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Serpentine Gallery in London organised a survey of his work in 2003, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art that winter, and his paintings are in the collections of Tate and the Hirshhorn Museum. He is married to the sculptor Rachel Feinstein, who often appears in his paintings.
Paintings, many of them small or medium-sized, are the heart of the work, with drawings alongside. Period matters: the yearbook and middle-aged-women paintings of the early 1990s and the Old Master paintings that followed are distinct bodies of work, and the sitter or source, often Rachel Feinstein, helps date a picture. The records of his dealers, above all Gagosian since the early 2000s, settle most questions of provenance, and the drawings, which are easier to imitate than the paintings, need the same care.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
