John Currin: Mastering the Big, Dumb Idea

I wrote about John Currin’s brilliant exhibition, Memorial, for the Fall 2022 BLAU. Here’s a taste:

It’s not easy these days to make art that is, in every aspect, a sudden, enormous leap of imagination, so terribly beautiful that it sticks in a viewer’s skull, and not for a day or a month but, in my sorry case, nearly a year. Harder still to hang it in on a single wall, as though deserving of worship, in a psychically loaded Manhattan Gagosian room that was until recently a Mary Boone. In its entirety, the group, only just now finished and unlikely to be seen together again, is the most gutting art yet to emerge from pandemic life. 

There’s another 2500 words and 20 pages of images in the issue.