Ken Currie
(born 1960)
Ken Currie is active/lives in United Kingdom. Ken Currie is known for painting.
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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.