By the time Ken Currie graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1983 his work was steeped in politically driven socialist realism. The acquisition of two of Currie’s works from that time - Union Organiser (1987) and The Calton Activist (1987) – highlight the significance of such early pieces.
Currie is probably best known today for paintings such as Three Oncologists (2002), a study of three doctors at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. More recently, Currie’s fascination with mortality and the body saw him paint Unknown Man (2019), a portrait of forensic anthropologist Dame Sue Black. Many of Currie’s works are set against dark backgrounds full of foreboding that suggests his figures are spotlit as if for a film.
Currie’s early career saw him became part of a generation of artists – Steven Campbell, Stephen Conroy, Peter Howson and Adrian Wiszniewski were others – brought together in 1985 for the New Image Glasgow exhibition at the Third Eye Centre, now the site of the Centre for Contemporary Arts.
Currie’s focus then looked to historical grassroots class struggles that reflected contemporary opposition to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Large scale paintings by Currie included The People’s March (1981), The Mechanic (1982), Workshop of the World (1987) and The People’s Palace History Murals (1987). While smaller in scale, Union Organiser and The Calton Activist were just as heroic in their depictions of those in the thick of more recent struggles. For Currie, the stories behind each work are important.
“Both pieces are very much rooted in time and place,” he says. “The Calton Activist was from 1988 and exhibited that same year at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow and the Raab Galerie in Berlin, with whom I was signed up.My studio at that time was just off the Gallowgate in the Calton area - a very deprived but lively area just east of the city centre. In fact after my maternal grandfather and his siblings were orphaned at an early age they were adopted and brought up in the Calton so the area has a family connection.
“My studio was surrounded by hostels for the homeless and I used to see them and interact with them every working day. I made a series of pastel drawings about some of the people I saw there - quite a range of characters - some beyond redemption, others trying to make things better in the local community. So I suppose the pastel drawing is a depiction of a local activist who is trying to improve things, but there’s always ambiguities - his tattoos suggest dubious loyalties.
“Union Organiser was my first lithograph, editioned at Edinburgh Printmakers in 1986. It’s very much a riposte in my mind to the Thatcher Government’s attack on working people at that time. This would be just after the Miners’ Strike in 1985 when Thatcher described organised labour and trades unionists as the ‘enemy within’. I wanted to depict organised workers as confident, optimistic and perfectly capable of fighting off attacks. So the context for these very early pieces is important.”
For the Fleming Foundation’s director Theo Albano, the two works sit within an even bigger historical framework.
“The Fleming Collection has built up a wonderful body of the New Glasgow Boys from the 1980s and early 90s,” he points out. “However, we were missing some of Ken’s brilliant pastels and prints from the late 1980s. This period was such an exciting time in Scottish Art, and to be able to add Ken’s works really is such a pleasure and privilege. They will be key parts of an exhibition when the time comes.
“I was particularly attracted to the historical significance in The Calton Activist, which references the 1787 Calton Weaver’s Strike. These parallels between the activist and left wing movements of the 80s and the workers rights movements of the 17 and 1800s is a fascinating one, these are important stories that need to be told, and I look forward to putting Ken’s work of this period in that context”
For Currie looking back at the period of Union Organiser and The Calton Activist is a strange experience.
“I barely remember who that very young artist was,” he reflects. “Such idealism. The work took an altogether darker turn later, but at that time ‘British Art’ as we in Glasgow saw it seemed like just a bunch of English public school boys fiddling around with bits of wood and plastic. We wanted to blast that away and present ‘new images’ to people about what was happening in the real world. I suppose I’m still trying to do something like that but now in a different way.”
Scottish Art News, June 2025
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