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
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
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.
Peter Higgs, Sue Black and the studio journals
The three doctors in Three Oncologists are Professor Robert Steele, Professor Sir Alfred Cuschieri and Professor Sir David Lane, and many of Currie's other heads are loosely based on his own face. In 2005 the University of Edinburgh commissioned his portrait of the physicist Peter Higgs, and in 2011 he showed Immortality, a body of paintings of the rich and famous. Unknown Man, a large portrait of the forensic anthropologist Dame Sue Black, followed in 2019 and is on long-term loan to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; the two had met on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Anatomy Lesson, and she then showed him round the dissection room at the University of Dundee.
The inky backgrounds date from the time he spent studying surgeons, with the darkness and spotlight of the operating theatre, and he has said he wants to show something emerging out of darkness, with an admittedly theatrical element. He has named Francis Bacon as his idol and says he worships Velázquez. In 2023 the art historian Tom Normand, a long-time collaborator, edited his studio journals into Ken Currie: Paintings and Writings. Besides Tate and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, his work is in the New York Public Library.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
