ART REVIEWS
Ken Currie is renowned for his disturbing pictures of human figures around which violence of a sort looms. He first came to prominence as one of the New Glasgow Boys of the 1980s and is well known for his public murals commissioned for the People’s Palace in Glasgow as well as his Three Oncologists artwork in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery collection.
Continue reading “Ken Currie – Red Ground”
Some years ago, a friend of John Kirby developed a brain tumour which made him both depressed for his friend and depressed for himself. It was around Christmas time and the pair pulled a cracker which contained the regulation paper hat. “I looked totally miserable wearing this pink or yellow hat. It’s a kind of move towards enjoyment without getting anywhere near it,” he tells me.
Continue reading “John Kirby – All Passion Spent”
As in the top picture, Pergamum, Peter Howson’s world is a dark, apocalyptic one populated with grotesque low-lifes, disfigured and violent, decadent and despairing. Dominating are colossus-like males, with over-sized muscles and bulging eyes, machismo in the extreme. They exist beneath crumbling buildings in a nightmare vision recalling the works of Hogarth, Bosch, Dürer, Breughel the Elder, Dix, Beckmann and Goya. Continue reading “Peter Howson – Acta Est Fabula”
