Gallowgate Lard

Gallowgate Lard
Artist: Ken Currie 1995
Aberdeen Art Gallery

Since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1983, Currie has specialised in grim, socio-realist subjects inspired by his own working class background.
In his recent work he has examined the brutality and poverty of urban life in Scotland through deeply disturbing images.
This work, painted in thick oil paint, the surface (to rather macabre effect) given further texture and a sense of real skin by the adition of beeswax, is, in simple terms, a self portrait.
More than that, it is a comment on life itself; not the more usually depicted pleasant aspects of life, but as Currie sees it and has always seen it - a struggle for survival.