Girl in Bed
Inspired by Old Master and Mannerist portraits, popular and pornographic imagery alike, John Currin intentionally distorts classical painterly techniques to portray contemporary social and sexual taboos. Girl in Bed exemplifies the artist’s ability to hold the grotesque and comical in ambiguous tension. Covered with a frilly-bordered sheet from the neck down, a caricaturesque young blonde woman appears confined to her blue-framed single bed. Suggesting immobility rather than sexual invitation, Girl in Bed subverts the conventional connotations of the reclining female figure throughout the history of painting, though its subject remains passive. The young woman’s oversized doe-eyed gaze, rouged lips—indeterminately pursed in a grimace or smirk—and perfectly coiffed hair perched atop a spot-lit pillow underscore the scene’s implausibility. Currin said of the work: "I wanted to make a totally passive subject… I wanted to get away from that duality of the repressed woman and the repressed abstract painting behind her, and make the isolation of the figure more benign. So she's been isolated by being put in bed. She's awake—she's not sleeping, she's not sick, she's just a completely passive isolated watcher or spectator… She just looks at things. It's an allegory of what you're doing when you look at the painting. She can't sleep because you're looking at the painting."[1] As an allegory of looking, Currin’s subject is simultaneously an object. An acerbic insincerity and cryptic affect pervade the image.
[1] John Currin interviewed by Rochelle Steiner, John Currin. Exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2003, p. 78.
[1] John Currin interviewed by Rochelle Steiner, John Currin. Exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2003, p. 78.
Artwork Details
- Title: Girl in Bed
- Artist: John Currin (American, born Boulder, Colorado, 1962)
- Date: 1993
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 38 × 48 in. (96.5 × 121.9 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Gift of Teiger Foundation, in honor of David Teiger, 2022
- Object Number: 2022.95.1
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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