John Currin

Private Collection
Sadie Coles HQ, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner in May 1999

New York, White Columns, White Room: John Currin, December 1989 - January 1990
London, Thomas Dane Gallery, Very Abstract and Hyper Figurative, March - April 2007

This work is in very good condition overall. The canvas is unlined. There is evidence of minor wear and handling to the corners and turning edges. Under close inspection, there is minimal and stable hairline craquelure along the bottom left edge. Under raking light there is evidence of a very minor stretcher impression along the upper edge and a soft depression in the upper right corner. Under Ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
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"I first imagined these high-school-girl paintings when I was in my studio in Hoboken. I was so lost, and I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I wasn't living where I wanted to live, and nothing was going right. I remember writing down character studies for the girls in a notebook. I would think of colors, decide what time of day it was, and make a list of the character's attributes. At this time, I read the novel The Horse's Mouth [Joyce Cary, 1944], which had long, beautiful descriptions of the character making figurative paintings, painting feet, and I decided that I wanted to think about those kinds of things when I was painting. My paintings became about giving up on my abstract-painting persona and adopting a repressed vision of myself--very angry, but essentially nice. My expressionism is not violent, it's repression rather than rage. That's what I was trying to capture with these silent girls. Their style also seems non-Western--more like twentieth-century Chinese Communist paintings." John Currin, in Kara Vander Weg, Ed., John Currin, New York 2006, p. 56