Portraits

John Currin: Paintings is the catalogue for Currin’s 2016 exhibition at the Museo Stefano Bardini in Florence, which the city’s museum service billed as the New York painter’s first significant show in an Italian public space.

The exhibition ran from 13 June to 2 October 2016. Sergio Risaliti edited the book for Forma Edizioni, an 84-page paperback with flaps and 24 images, with essays by Antonella Nesi and Risaliti and an interview between Currin and Angus Cook. Forma’s page lists the works it expected on view: family portraits of Currin’s wife Rachel and their three children, allegorical portraits including Flora, The Penitent and The Lobster, female portraits such as Bent Lady, Anna and Big Hands, and the nude Nude in a Convex Mirror. They hung among the museum’s own holdings, which Forma describes as running from Donatello’s Virgins and small bronzes to carved frames, seventeenth-century paintings and medieval wood statues.

Currin studied at Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University. Gagosian’s biography records an earlier pairing of the same kind, his paintings shown beside those of the Dutch Golden Age painter Cornelis van Haarlem at the Frans Hals Museum in 2011–12.