Ken Currie was born in North Shields in 1960, and graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1983, studying alongside some of his contemporaries in the group that would come to be known as the New Glasgow Boys.
Since then his work has been acquired by several public collections, including the Tate Modern in London, the National Galleries of Scotland and abroad. In 2013 Currie held a well-received solo show at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. His paintings are documents of the human body and the effects of time, greed and injury.
Currie is highly aware of, and influenced by, the tradition of Western art, drawing inspiration from a variety of artists including Goya and Velazquez. Similarly to Francis Bacon, he is fascinated by the human face as a mechanism of expressing trauma, pain and powerful psychological expression. Currie’s masterful portrait draws the viewer in with its thought-provoking qualities.
The New Glasgow Boys were an influential group of artists who studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s. The group achieved national and international success and renewed interest in figurative painting during a period when Western art was dominated by Abstract Expressionism, Conceptual and Pop Art. Their paintings are honest and powerful. 2017 marked the 30th anniversary of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s ground breaking exhibition The Vigorous Imagination: New Scottish Art. The exhibition showcased the work of the New Glasgow Boys including Peter Howson, Ken Currie, Adrian Wiszniewski and Steven Campbell.
