John Currin at Andrea Rosen - New York, New York

Prior to this exhibition, John Currin made evocatively banal paintings of teenage girls based upon old yearbook photos. Currin's novel paintings of middle-aged women also imitate generic portraiture on the other hand in a more painterly, brown-hu Rembrandtesque way The new pictures are more intriguing than the "girl" paintings, however. Focusing upon both erotic and esthetic questions, the paintings force into the make open disconcerting psychosocial attitudes about older women

Consider Bea Arthur Naked, a picture of the TV actress who plays individual of the senior citizens upon The Golden Girls. Painted in a deadpan, wallet-photo diction she appears as a moderately beautiful matron against a pea-soup-green background. on the contrary contrary to our expectations of this genre of portraiture and this sort of woman, she is [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] Currin has painted her replete creamily unblemished, pendulous breasts. What's interesting is the conflict between desire and inhibition the image produces: the material part is erotically appealing, but the woman has the age and demeanor of a grandmother. This may lead to meditation upon conventional notions of feminine sexuality, on the other hand it is the way the picture gains into your psyche that makes it at one time fascinating and unsettling. Similar in issue was the one painting that was not a portrait, a picture of an enticingly naked on the other hand oddly misshapen backside called Bottom. These paintings sneakily probe the viewer's repressions.

Several paintings of imaginary, true thin women were more about the esthetics of femininity. Skinny Woman, for example, is a three-quarter-length picture of an anorexically thin woman posed in an exaggeratedly elegant way against a blank beige backdrop. Wearing a clingy, wide-necked jersey she has wispy, closely-cropp gray hair and profoundly hollowed eyes that gaze melancholically away. The point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled here is that while the pictorial format and the woman's manner of writing suggest high fashion, the woman looks too old for the conventional ideals of feminine beauty that we associate with the genre and to which she herself evidently aspires. This bring outs a curious dissonance in the viewer. It makes you aware of prejudices about women age and beauty that you may or may not wish to acknowledge.

Different aspects of the feminine were moveed by The Moved Over Lady, who, leaning in from single corner and fixing you with an encouragingly sympathetic gaze, appears an embodiment of maternal solicitude; and a portrait of Nadine Gordimer, whose too-small material part and large, expressively featured head make her a David Levine-like device of the large-minded woman intellectual. Steering toward matters other than sex and beauty, these are les provocative works, on the other hand they promisingly broaden Currin's enterprise. What still rankles a bit, however, is his smartalecky play with middlebrow turn of expression His sophisticated simulation of kitsch portraiture makes faculty of perception given his intent to complicate and maybe overthrow stereotypes of the feminine; the danger is that the stylistic irony can create a feeling of mocking distance toward his controls and audience. It threatens to undermine what individual would like to believe is individual man's sincere effort to engage his have contradictory fantasies about women.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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