Ken Currie at Glasgow Print Studio

Ken Currie has never shied away from dark, difficult themes such as death, decay and political and social dissidence. It is as if he is tapping into a river of consciousness which runs parallel to the current of contemporary concerns. His work is the antithesis of celebrity culture, the quick fix, junk TV, the fast flickering images that define our modern sensibility.

Currie is primarily a painter and his primary genre is portraiture. His paint has a luminosity and light vibrates like synaptic flashes on the surface of the canvas. Here, in a series of etchings and monotypes, working in conjunction with the highly skilled craftsmen of Glasgow Print Studio Currie has extended his media and his thematic range.

Currie has long been absorbed by the landscape of Scotland — in particular the northwest, where some of the oldest rocks on the planet may be found — although he has shied away from depicting it.

Here, the precambrian schist and gneiss have formed over billions of years into mountains such as Suilven. This landscape also held a deep fascination for the poet Norman MacCaig and here a subset of nine monotypes pays homage, with one in particular, A Man in Assynt, showing a lone fisherman set against Suilven’s unmistakable back-drop, recalling MacCaig’s words:

Glaciers, grinding West, gouged out

these valleys, rasping the brown sandstone

and left, on the hard rock below –

the ruffled foreland –

this frieze of mountains, filed

on the blue air –

Stac Polly

Cul Beag, Cul Mor, Suilven

Canisp –

a frieze and

a litany.

This landscape is kinetic, defined by water. This finds an echo in the monotype process, where the manipulation of liquid is a crucial element and successive prints have been created by the subtraction of ink. This can be seen in several series of portraits, where the facial characteristics of the subjects have become distorted and gradually erased, echoing the processes of death and decay.

The Death of Marat (I-III) and The Death of Rosa Luxembourg (I-III) show successive disintegration in their “ghost prints”. Currie points out that the murders of the revolutionaries were both linked to water — Marat in his bath and Luxembourg in the Landwehr Canal, Berlin. These murders have been the subjects of treatments by other artists — RB Kitaj famously painted the death of Luxembourg in 1960 while Jacques-Louis David depicted the death of Marat in 1793. Currie situates himself in this kind of historical context, paying implicit homage to great artists such as Otto Dix, Edvard Munch and Francisco Goya — all well known for printmaking — who have gone before and to whom he owes a debt of gratitude.

Currie is that rare thing — an artist of stature whose work has what Matthew Arnold called “high seriousness” and who also retains a genuine accessibility and popularity.

Details: glasgowprintstudio.co.uk; to October 18