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Rarely can a portrait, including a dead body under a sheet, have created such a powerful, immediate, critical and public response.
Ken Currie, undoubtedly among the most significant painters of our time, is known for his dark side, his bleak, black pictures of haggard figures and harrowing happening, tortured flesh, forensic finales, illness, death. Long before Co-vid, he recognised the fragility, vulnerability and desperate aspects of human life and, never flinching, captured them with an evocative intensity.
Ken Currie Unknown Man
Death is also central to this new work. Yet, it is transformed into a welcome statement about power for good, knowledge as key, medicine’s possibility to resolve problems, and – in the right hands, a consoling ability to reveal lost identity.