Ken Currie – Recent Paintings
Saturday, October 18 - Saturday November 8, 2003

Opening reception – Saturday, October 18, 2-5pm
*The artist will be in attendance.

Miriam Shiell Fine Art
16A Hazelton Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5R 2E2

Tel: 416 925-2461
Fax: 416 925-2471
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.miriamshiell.com

Press Contact: Rob Waters

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Ken Currie at Miriam Shiell Fine Art

Currie’s recent paintings are an unsettling combination of violence and tranquility. Paint and canvas have become the coroner’s formaldehyde, bodies suspended in the calm of eternity. While the bodies are stripped bare, however, the brutality towards them is only ever implied. Ultimately, it is our own mortality that becomes obvious in the chill and goose bumps that Currie’s paintings evoke.

"What makes Currie’s subjects so powerful, so horrifying an assembly of societal cruelty, is precisely their everydayness: crack babies, youth without hope, destitute families, the abandoned elderly, those ‘losers’ boxed and contained along the margins of our ‘civilization’." - Rene Detroye, 2003

Currie looks to the individual with an insight and caring seldom admitted to today. He shows us the pain and suffering of the aged and the ill but never exploits their emotions for his own ends. We may be initially shocked or horrified but the pathos of Currie’s work will draw you back time and time again. There is beauty in his reality and we should welcome the opportunity to share it.

Ken Currie lives in Glasgow, Scotland. He has exhibited and is collected, both publicly and privately, in the UK, Europe, Australia, the USA, and Canada.