John Currin & Lucian Freud

This afternoon I walked up Madison Avenue in the warmth and the rain to see an exhibition of new work by John Currin at the Gagosian Gallery. I don't normally visit galleries on weekdays, and the crowd was a noticeably more business-like lot than the self-consciously artsy types who roam around Chelsea on Saturdays, determined to make a day of it.

The exhibition of unframed canvases is in one large room, and no sooner had I turned from a portrait of the artist's instantly recognizable wife than I saw her - Rachel Feinstein - gazing at another painting. That seemed like an odd coincidence until I saw John Currin himself, talking to a gallery employee. It’s not unusual to see an artist at his or her opening, of course, but it’s something else entirely to see them examining their own paintings on an ordinary day, especially if the paintings include portraits of family members, not to mention assorted orgies.

Those orgies – oddly unsexy configurations in which disproportionately tiny hands grasp at engorged genitals – have already attracted the lion’s share of attention. But the portraits of Currin’s wife and son are more memorable – sweetly luminous and sensitive, they fit well in the mannered style that he has so deftly adopted.

Still to come: Lucian Freud at Acquavella Galleries