Sick Spirit John Currin's paintings – skinny-legged, wide-hipped women, their breasts protruding from Renaissance-style robes – are 'disgusting and amoral', writes Rosanna McLaughlin. 'And that is why they are so good.' Currin has been producing his horny and humiliating portraits since the early 1990s. And over that time, they've often landed him in trouble. But their subject, McLaughlin argues, 'is not really the women at all, but the artist's decrepit libido'.
It's that 'willingness to look his libido in the eye' that sets the painter apart. In an artworld 'too encumbered by the burdens of representational politics to risk expressing anything morally unsanitary', or a production-line of paintings that function as little more than a 'luxury moodboard', Currin's grotesque, unflattering pictures 'are oddly life-affirming'. | 
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