Contemporary Art

Ken Currie: From Politics to Mortality

10 September 2026

Amelia Hacking

Born in North Shields to Scottish parents, Ken Currie studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1978 to 1983 and rose to prominence as part of the generation of figurative painters who became known as the ‘New Glasgow Boys’. Alongside Steven Campbell, Adrian Wiszniewski and Peter Howson, Currie helped establish Glasgow as an important centre for contemporary figurative painting during the 1980s.

Although diverse in style, these artists shared a renewed commitment to the human figure at a time when figurative painting was enjoying an international resurgence.

From the outset, Currie’s work was shaped by a strong social and political consciousness. Over the decades that followed, however, his focus shifted. The workers, industrial landscapes and collective histories of his early work gradually gave way to isolated figures and broader questions of violence, vulnerability, mortality and the human condition.

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Art and Politics in 1980s Glasgow

Currie’s early work looked to Glasgow’s industrial heritage and working-class communities for inspiration, frequently depicting workers and industrial landscapes in a stark, Expressionistic visual language. His emergence onto the wider British art scene was cemented by the landmark exhibition The Vigorous Imagination: New Scottish Art, held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art as part of the 1987 Edinburgh International Festival.

During this period, his paintings were increasingly concerned with the social consequences of Glasgow’s industrial decline. His monumental Glasgow Triptych (1986) and 1989 series A Scottish Triptych highlight most profoundly this examination of working-class experience.

Currie described the ambition he shared with some of his Glasgow School of Art contemporaries, under the tutelage of Alexander Moffat, as a desire:

“to construct a new programme of painting relevant to the concerns of Scotland in the nineteen eighties”

He recalled their determination to become ‘total artists’, capable of producing everything from large-scale murals to politically engaged realist painting.

Glasgow After Industry: Study for Arcade

Study for Arcade, painted in 1988, belongs firmly to this period. Depicting a couple within the artificial illumination of an amusement arcade, the work demonstrates Currie’s characteristic linear handling of the human figure and an almost electric handling of light and surface. The everyday setting becomes psychologically charged, transforming a familiar scene of popular leisure into something more ambiguous and unsettling.

Story

The Carefully Choreographed Chaos of Ken Currie

Ken Currie’s The Cripples and The Embattled City are complex, theatrical compositions in which the artist brings a newly honed directorial eye to his fascination with the reverberations of Europe’s turbulent political history.

From Collective History to Human Experience

By the end of the 1980s and into the following decade, Currie’s practice underwent a profound visual and conceptual transformation. While his earlier political convictions became increasingly difficult to reconcile with a rapidly changing world, Currie chose to reflect on the more overtly ideological character of his work, later remarking, “it’s not for me to proselytise.”

Deeply affected by the political upheaval and humanitarian crises unfolding in Eastern Europe, his attention shifted from collective histories towards broader questions of violence, mortality and physical and moral corruption.

Wailing Women: A Turning Point

Wailing Women, 1989, anticipates this transition. The composition depicts a group of women accompanied by weapons and propaganda, set against a landscape littered with aircraft remains. Significantly, the scene cannot be readily located within a specific place or historical moment.

This absence of identifiable geographical or temporal markers lends the work a distinctly eerie, almost timeless quality, suggesting a cycle of violence and human suffering that belongs equally to the past, present or future.

Mortality and the Human Body

From the 1990s onwards, Currie increasingly stripped his compositions of narrative detail, crowded groups and linear form, concentrating instead on isolated figures emerging from dark, indeterminate spaces.

His palette became hauntingly luminous and his treatment of flesh increasingly visceral and transient. The human body became a vehicle through which to explore vulnerability, illness, violence and the inevitability of physical decay and death.

Like Francis Bacon before him, Currie has repeatedly returned to the human face and body as sites of profound psychological expression, capable of communicating trauma and unease beyond conventional portraiture.

Yet Currie has resisted describing his work simply as an exploration of death.

“I don’t really think my work is about death... It’s mortality that interests me, the fact that we are capable of dying… It’s the fact that we are mortal, and the implications that has for the way we live our lives.”

- Ken Currie

Death Masks and the Development of Currie’s Later Style

An important source for this development was Currie’s fascination with death masks. To Currie, the death mask captured individual identity at the threshold between presence and absence.

His interest began after encountering the death mask of Heinrich Himmler at the Imperial War Museum and developed further between 1995 and 1997, when he studied examples held by the University of Edinburgh’s anatomy department.

Echoing the presentation of Himmler’s death mask, its pale features starkly illuminated against a black velvet background, Currie’s faces and bodies increasingly emerge from deep, impenetrable darkness, their luminous surfaces acquiring an uncanny physical presence that would become a defining feature of his later work.

Copse: Emerging from Darkness

Copse, 1997, is a compelling example of this developed visual language. The work depicts the head of a phantom-like man, his starkly pale face emerging from an ominous, near-impenetrable darkness. Vertical lacerations of shadow appear to cut across and distort the face, obscuring the sitter’s identity and lending the figure an unsettling, spectral quality.

Although menacing at first glance, Currie’s ability to apply paint with such luminosity provides an ethereal quality to the figure, holding the viewer’s gaze despite its unsettling presence.

Portraiture, Identity and Presence

This preoccupation with mortality and the vulnerability of the human figure has continued to underpin Currie’s practice over the past two decades.

Increasingly, his attention has turned towards portraiture, exploring the tension between identity, physical presence and impermanence. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery commissioned Three Oncologists (2002), while Currie’s later sitters have included the theoretical physicist Professor Peter Higgs and forensic anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black.

However, whether depicting a recognised public figure or an anonymous sitter, Currie imbues his subjects with a profound psychological intensity through his handling of form, expression and light.

Study (Reading a Newspaper): The Anonymous Sitter

Study (Reading a Newspaper), 2009, is a compelling example of Currie’s ability to imbue his subjects with a profound psychological intensity through his handling of form, gesture and light. The unidentified man is shown in darkness, absorbed in the act of reading, his head lowered intently towards a newspaper that remains beyond the confines of the composition.

By excluding the object of his attention, Currie concentrates entirely on the figure and the quiet intensity of his expression. Removed from any clear narrative or setting, the sitter becomes both intimately observed and curiously unknowable, transforming an ordinary, fleeting moment into a meditation on human presence and introspection.

From Politics to Mortality

Across Currie’s career, the human figure has remained constant while its purpose has changed. The collective histories and political narratives of his early work gradually gave way to more isolated and psychologically charged subjects, through which Currie has explored violence, vulnerability, identity and mortality.

From the socially engaged paintings of 1980s Glasgow to the spectral figures emerging from the darkness of his later work, Currie has continually reinvented his approach to figurative painting while retaining an intense interest in what the human body can reveal about the world around it.

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