London / Hong Kong
Cover Image: Sea Creatures, 2020, Oil on canvas
Flowers Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new oil paintings by the Glasgow based artist Ken Currie, Interregnum. This body of work was completed by the artist in 2020, in what Currie describes as the unprecedented limbo caused by the global pandemic. The title for this exhibition is taken from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, in which he wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Ken Currie rose to prominence in the 1980s as part of a generation of painters known as the New Glasgow Boys. He received acclaim for his public murals for the People’s Palace in Glasgow, as well as his enduringly popular and poignant work, for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery collection in 2002, Three Oncologists. Within his rich and luminous paintings Currie observes what he describes as the sickness of contemporary society, the fragility of mortality and the disturbing impact of the corrosive human propensity for cruelty and violence.