“…When I was trying to change myself into a figurative painter, I was more drawn to the rococo and the other damned souls of art history.” – John Currin

Co-presented with The Broad’s Un-Private Collection art talk series and the Getty Museum’s Getty Perspectives series, artist John Currin and President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust James Cuno discuss how classical painting shaped Currin's modern interpretation of the form. Their conversation considers Currin's works in the Broad collections and classical paintings from the Getty collection.

Currin emerged in the 1990s as one of the freshest voices in American art and was among a wave of contemporary artists who established a renewed interest in portraiture. Drawing from sources as diverse as Northern Renaissance painting and pinup magazines, he is known for his distortions of the human figure and his critiques of societal ideals of beauty. Currin is also known for his contemporary renditions of old master poses and formats that often conflate opposing sensibilities—vaulted taste with vulgarity, sentimentality with irony, and conventional beauty with banality.

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View works by John Currin in the collections