John Currin

A trip to Currin-land is like a science-fiction movie, in which familiar things - Old Master works by Bruegel and Courbet, the Rococo idylls of Boucher and Fragonard, girly photos from 1960s men's magazines and cheerful ads for wholesome American products - are transformed into figurative paintings that border on the freakish.

In John Currin's universe, everything looks both commonplace and fantastic, like Norman Rockwell paintings as seen through a fun-house mirror. Robert Rosenblum reviews Currin's output since 1990 in this monograph.

Seventy-five provocatively titled colour plates exemplify the artist's trademark collison of classical technique and 20th-century kitsch.