Friday, November 25, 2016

John Currin exhibit
































Well, there's a display of some of the works of an artist named John Currin. It's in London so you don't need to feel bound to go, though I admit I would like to. Currin seems a bit weird. Weird is good. I can do weird ... especially if someone else is doing the doing.
Filled with visual jokes, art historical pastiche and unlovable people, Currin’s paintings are hard to take seriously – in fact, hard to take at all, and certainly not at surface value, although surface is all they are. As absurd and decadent as their high prices, and the art world in which they circulate, Currin’s canvases stop you in your tracks....
Things happen to the people in Currin’s paintings and things happen in the paint. He paints people and scenes that are really hard to take. Misanthropic, misogynistic, cruel, absurd, silly – all these criticisms could be – and have been – thrown at him....
This group of new paintings is more than a laugh, a recoil and a grimace – though it is all these things. Once you get over the initial knowing wince, there is an awful lot to unravel. I don’t think I could live with a Currin; I certainly wouldn’t want to live inside one. But perhaps I already do.

1 comment:

  1. Watched a nice clip yesterday about the Holocaust. What still baffles me is how Donald J. Trump being never a military Presbyterian relates to Israel when he takes office.

    Nude women. Shower rooms. Sadistic murders. Angela Merkel is running another term in the country where fascism found infamy. I was quite glad that Brexit saw May taking over. The irony as always is that being English speaking, if Kalinigrad ever invades Poland or Poland and Ukraine ever invades Belarus, it is easier repeating World War 2 with the English speaking on the same side than having Japan as an ally of US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore and Malaysia.

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