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.
Fine Art
The Carefully Choreographed Chaos of Ken Currie
3 July 2024
Charlotte Riordan
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.
‘It was only through contact with my tutor, Alexander Moffat, that my work did not descend into the most mindless kind of nihilism… his belief in the centrality of the European figurative tradition provided essential support, putting me, along with other students* in touch with the vital moments of twentieth century painting… and that whole dynamic, revolutionary European culture that flourished between the wars.'
The Artist Comments
1984, the year the two artworks offered here for sale were produced, was also the year he received a significant grant to make a film called ‘Glasgow 1984’ with a group of unemployed youth from the Cranhill Arts Project, using professional equipment. Currie was intensely engaged with filmmaking at this point, a medium which afforded him the perfect vehicle with which to produce community-engaged art. He had temporarily almost wholly abandoned painting at this point, finding filmmaking both hugely powerful but also an all-consuming endurance test. After the film was finally completed, he felt drawn to return to the looser medium of charcoal, “…retracing my steps stylistically to a time perhaps in my third year at art school”.
In works such as ‘The Cripples’ (1984) and ‘The Embattled City’, the parallels with Weimar-era artists such as Backmann, Grosz, Dix and Kollwitz are clear to see. Visions of destruction, of war and annihilation, of malformity and insanity are shown unflinchingly. They are complex, theatrical compositions – a carefully choreographed chaos in which Currie brings his newly honed directorial eye to illustrate his fascination with recording the reverberations of Europe’s turbulent political history, past and present.
