Who

One of the biggest names in contemporary art, Currin is loved and hated for his primary subject matter: women with extremely large—and usually exposed—breasts. He's married to Rachel Feinstein.

Backstory

The son of a physics professor (his father) and a piano teacher (his mother), Currin moved with his family from California to Connecticut when he was 10, went to college at Carnegie Mellon, and attended graduate school at Yale's School of Art. A year after receiving his MFA, Currin moved into a loft in Hoboken with Yale classmate Lisa Yuskavage and kept himself afloat by taking on contracting and housepainting jobs. After relocating to a studio on Houston Street with another Yale classmate, Sean Landers, Currin attracted an initial dollop of attention in 1989 with his first solo show, a riff on the high-school yearbook featuring portraits of teenage girls. But it was his 1992 show at the Andrea Rosen Gallery (it was no coincidence he showed there—Rosen was his ex-girlfriend) consisting of portraits of middle-aged, weathered-looking women—the high-school girls of his earlier paintings grown up and decidedly worse for the wear—that catapulted him to art-world fame and even elicited a call from the Village Voice's Kim Levin for all good feminists to boycott the show.

During the '90s and early '00, Currin sought out new subject matter with which to push people's buttons; his motifs during this period included Playboy-inspired girls with ballooning breasts, gay couples making homemade pasta, and ur-housewives sipping on martinis and chomping cigars. Critics have vilified him for work that's sexist and exploitative; Currin defends himself by saying that exploitation is exactly what he's commenting on with his art. Take your pick.

Of note

The last few years have been good to Currin. In 2003, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago put together a mid-career retrospective of his work, and the exhibition later traveled to the Whitney in New York and the Serpentine Gallery in London. The buzzy exhibition increased demand for his work, and Currin surprised many insiders by ditching longtime dealer Andrea Rosen—who's widely credited with guiding him to stardom—for Larry Gagosian's Madison Avenue gallery; Gagosian, naturally, promised Currin he'd be able to get him higher prices (and that indeed proved to be the case).

Yet something of a creative drought followed his 2003 retrospective. For a year, he barely painted. In 2005, he returned with his most sexually suggestive series yet, penetration-heavy and often epically large paintings directly derived from internet porn. The racy material doesn't turn off buyers, of course. Currin's collectors include Charles Saatchi, Tobias Meyer, software entrepreneur Peter Norton, Adam Lindemann, and hedge funders Steve Cohen and Adam Sender. Novelist Dave Eggers is a fan, too: He contributed an essay to Currin's 2006 Rizzoli book featuring images of more than 400 of his pieces.

Keeping score

Bring a fat wallet if you plan to attend a Currin auction. In 2004, his painting Homemade Pasta sold at Christie's for $847,500, and prices keep going up: In 2007, his Living Room was on sale for $1.8 million at a major European art show.

Personal

Currin lives in SoHo with his wife, sculptor Rachel Feinstein, and their sons Francis and Hollis. (A mutual friend set the pair up, telling them that Feinstein looked like the women Currin paints—and she does.) Feinstein appears in a number of Currin's works.

No joke

Currin is one of the few fine artists to have received a review in Juggs, a porn magazine that focuses on all things mammary.