Ken Currie valuation
Glasgow painter of heroic workers, then of damaged bodies and the stark Three Oncologists.
Ken Currie was born in North Shields in 1960 to Scottish parents and grew up in Barrhead, near Glasgow.
What a work by Ken Currie is worth
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Bio
Ken Currie was born in North Shields in 1960 to Scottish parents and grew up in Barrhead, near Glasgow. He studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1978 to 1983 and came to attention in the 1980s as one of the New Glasgow Boys, alongside Peter Howson, Adrian Wiszniewski and Steven Campbell. His paintings of the 1980s celebrated Clydeside workers and labour history, most famously eight large canvases on the massacre of the Calton weavers in 1787, painted for its bicentenary in 1987 for the People's Palace in Glasgow, where they hang on the ceiling. From the 1990s, moved by the wars in Eastern Europe, he turned to dark, decaying figures that hover between beauty and horror. He was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 2024.
Paintings, drawings and prints all come up, the large early history paintings rarely. His work is in Tate, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Yale Center for British Art, and provenance through his galleries is usual.
Barrhead, the People's Palace and Three Oncologists
Three Oncologists, painted in 2002, shows three cancer specialists from Ninewells Hospital in Dundee emerging from darkness. It is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
In the 1980s Currie was involved with the Communist Party, and his early work answered the politics of the Thatcher years.
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