Ken Currie's ‘The Cripples’ (1984) and ‘The Embattled City’, offered in our 13 August auction of Contemporary Art, are complex, theatrical compositions in which Currie brings his newly honed directorial eye to illustrate his fascination with recording the reverberations of Europe’s turbulent political history.
The current work was executed on hand-made paper created by Ken Currie and his friend Keith McIntyre who shared a studio on East Campbell Street in Glasgow, opposite the famous Barrowland Ballroom. McIntyre utilised pulped hospital bed sheets as the base material for this paper which lends this gritty image an extra dimension.
Ken Currie’s early work is celebrated as a remarkable, modern interpretation of 19th century history painting fused with the revolutionary dynamism of pivotal twentieth century artistic movements. Currie studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the late 1970s and early '80s. Living in a city in the grip of immense poverty and decay, ruptured by sectarian violence and in an era which was witnessing the rise of a ‘New Right’, he turned to the figurative tradition to address the sense of existential crisis and undercurrent of brutality he perceived around him.
Currie’s urge to record this zeitgeist produced its greatest results when he simultaneously imbued his art with his passion for community engagement.
