JOHN CURRIN | Study for Bent Woman

Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by David Teiger in 2003

Kara Vander Weg and Rose Dergan, Eds., John Currin, New York 2006, p. 312, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is cooler with more contrast in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Created as a study for one of John Currin’s most celebrated paintings, Bent Lady (Private Collection, UK), the present work epitomises the artist’s extraordinary technical proficiency and classical draftsmanship. Recalling the expressive distortions of the human form employed by High Mannerist artists such as Bronzino and Jacopo da Pontormo, and in turn the French Neo-Classicists of the Nineteenth Century, such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Currin positions himself within an artistic lineage that sublimates its subjects to artistic ideals. His work is unsettling, despite the extraordinary virtuosity and beauty of its execution. In the case of Bent Lady, the ‘bend’ after which the work is named manifests as a violent rupture of form as the woman’s trunk pivots alarmingly and impossibly, snapping her upper half back into the canvas. In the present work however, Currin abbreviates his subject, focussing solely on the head and impossibly slender neck. The movement of the body is implied as his subject’s hair is flung out to the side, however the violence of the final composition is avoided. Indeed, there is something almost tender to the drawing, with the highly rendered contrasts where the light catches her cheeks, chin and forehead implying a moment of joyful abandon. This vacillation between the beautiful and the repellent typifies Currin’s practice. As Norman Bryson observed, “Currin’s technique involves a continuous swerve between attraction and repulsion, pleasure and guilt, joy and shame. The surface in his work is radically heterogeneous: some areas, even some strokes, move closer toward ideality; other areas, often adjacent, move away… The codes of ideality and the grotesque are jammed together; they become interchangeable and undecideable” (Norman Bryson, “Maudit: John Currin and Morphology”, in: Kara Vander Weg and Rose Dergan, Eds., John Currin, New York 2006, p. 30). Epitomising this juxtaposition and superbly demonstrating Currin’s virtuosic stylistic decadence, Study for Bent Woman is an exquisite example of the artist’s drawing, a pivotal part of the artist’s practice that he once described as “a flirtation with the real” (John Currin in: Brett Littman, “Drawing is a First Date”, Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2017, online).