HTSI: Painter Sam McKinniss’ debut monograph gives celebrity culture a new gloss

The American figurative painter Sam McKinniss takes images from popular culture and reinterprets them in lush, hyper-saturated oil paintings imbued with a queer sensibility. He’s painted Lil Nas X in his pink cowboy suit, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and a self-portrait in the style of a J Crew advert. But, as his debut monograph from Rizzoli demonstrates, he is much more than a painter of pop culture, and is equally drawn to subjects from the natural world: cows, flowers, which he paints in the style of 19th-century French painter Henri Fantin-Latour, and swans. In an interview with the writer and curator Jarrett Earnest, McKinniss sums up his uneasy relationship with his work: “I want painting to terrify me a little bit and turn me on while becoming an image of something extremely refined.”