Ken Currie

Ken Currie's monumental works of this period examine the interaction between the city of Glasgow itself (undergoing a surface makeover in preparation for the European City of Culture award in 1990) and its citizens, depicted not as portrait studies but as a series of recurring motifs.  In the form of large-scale figurative painting, Currie explores themes of physicality, brutality and oppression, and this important work follows on from the (post) industrial Glasgow Triptych of 1986. The left panel, Night Shift, presents the 'wandering man' totem (Currie's own notes as follows "torpedo shrapnel in skull/cataract/hearing aid/crutch/Courbet's Beggar/Courbet's The Wandering Jew/an outsider observing/rucksack with books/Giacometti sculpture/Breughel central figure Dulle Griet"), a now redundant trade unionist heading out to do odd jobs on a peripheral estate.  An evicted figure and chained dog are visible in the background, with pub signage indicating how others spend the evenings.  Saturdays shows a steely young woman reading a political primer as she wheels a buggy past an ironically-named, windowless block bar. She has been shopping at a cut-price store and her son, features obscured, flails military toys in an unsettling manner.  Departure, the central panel, depicts the same figure motif in motion through a harsh and broken landscape on the city margins at dusk.  His cycle light, blazing bonfire and pub neon again pierce the gloom.  The rucksack of books alludes to the important theme of the autodidact in Currie's painting.