Profile on Ken Currie

Ken Currie

A graduate of Glasgow School of Art (1978-1983) Ken Currie is an eminent Scottish artist and one of the New Glasgow Boys along with contemporaries Peter Howson, Adrian Wisniewski and the late Steven Campbell who also studied together at the GSA. Born in 1960 Currie grew up in industrial Glasgow which played a significant influence on his early works. During the 1980s, Currie’s art celebrated a romanticised red Clydeside of heroic shipyard workers and firebrand shop stewards and was a political response to the policies of Margaret Thatcher, who he believed was destroying the culture of labour. The artist’s focus may have moved on from Scotland’s labour history to deeper, more universal questions of mortality and the human condition, but he still felt the demise of his bête noire should be marked.¹

The UCS
Oil on canvas

In 1987 Currie made a series of murals on the history of the workers’ struggle in Glasgow for the People’s Palace, Glasgow, beginning with the massacre of weavers in 1787 and concluding with a future in which enlightenment is suggested by miners’ lamps. Deeply affected by political and humanitarian events in Eastern Europe, Currie began to depict decaying and damaged bodies as a response to what he felt was the sickness of contemporary society. In 1987, on the 200th anniversary of the Calton weavers Massacre, Currie was commissioned to paint a memorial which is displayed on the ceiling of the People’s Palace.

Peter Higgs (b. 1929)
by Ken Currie

Currie was commissioned by the University of Edinburgh to paint a portrait of Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist, which was unveiled in 2009. He is a “reluctant portraitist”, and this was only his second portrait.^[2] He said, referring to the Higgs boson, “I am very interested in Peter’s work. I don’t for one second claim to grasp the theory, but I do understand the sublime, and there is a sublime quality to it all, a beauty, an awesome quality. In some respects, the subject is quite terrifying.”²

¹The Scotsman (Scotland on Sunday): New artists ‘neglect’ hard graft, says Ken Currie by Stephen McGinty 14th July 2013.

²http://www.flowersgallery.com/artists/ken-currie/