For his seventh exhibition with Sadie Coles HQ, John Currin is showing three new paintings at the Bury Street gallery in St James’s.
Alluring and perverse, Currin’s latest muses express his dual preoccupations with the graphic virtuosity and romantic idealism of classical figuration and vanitas scenes, layered with subversive stereotypes surrounding the body and eroticism that pervade the present day. The canvases depict a group of three female nudes, Gala, and two individual nudes, Silver Hippy and Gold Hippy.
Barely adorned in swathes of luscious cloth, his figures’ languorous postures, sensuously attenuated limbs and swollen abdomens, recall the idealised portrayals of the Renaissance Masters. Currin’s meticulous realism and subtle distortions, however, conversely displace the allusion of romantic naïveté and deference with the guise of abject modesty. The figures oscillate between paradoxical registers of youth and age, beauty and decay, object and subject, the sensual and the grotesque; simultaneously disrupting and fusing the binary visual conventions of femininity to satirical effect.
| Duration | 12 October 2022 - 26 November 2022 |
| Times | Tues - Fri 11am - 6pm |
| Cost | free |
| Venue | Sadie Coles HQ (Bury Street) |
| Address | 8 Bury Street, London, SW1Y 6AB |
| Contact | 442074938611 / info@sadiecoles.com / www.sadiecoles.com/ |