John Currin: The Complete Works: New Paintings

John Currin: New Paintings is the Gagosian Gallery’s survey of the New York painter’s work from 1988 to 2006, a slipcased Rizzoli monograph that reproduces roughly four hundred paintings and drawings.

Rizzoli lists the book as compiled by Gagosian and published on 5 December 2006. Norman Bryson and Alison M. Gingeras contribute essays, with short pieces by Dave Eggers, and Kara Vander Weg and Rose Dergan are named as editors. Booksellers describe the plates as running in chronological groups, with notebook sketches and source material alongside the finished pictures, and with the artist’s own comments beside some of the paintings. A bookseller’s listing says many of the works had not been reproduced before.

Currin painted abstractions in the manner of Willem de Kooning as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, then took an MFA at Yale University. Gagosian traces his turn from there to stylized horses, girls with feathered hair, large-headed caricatures and portraits of individuals and couples. In the early 2000s he made paintings that set explicit sex scenes inside decorative still-life interiors. Gagosian gives his sources as Old Master portraiture, pornography and B movies.