exhibitions & events 2022

Ken Currie: Chunnacas na mairbh beò (The Dead Have Been Seen Alive)

Glasgow Print Studio is pleased to present Chunnacas na mairbh beò (The Dead Have Been Seen Alive), an exhibition of new monoprints by renowned Scottish artist Ken Currie. The title of the exhibition is taken from Sorley MacLean's Hallaig *, which is a poetic response to the Clearances on the Isle of Raasay. It is a mysterious and haunting line which is open to speculation and has a certain poetic evocation.

Seven years since his last solo exhibition at Glasgow Print Studio, Ken Currie has been developing this new body of work ever since. Inspired and propelled by the printmaking techniques which Currie studied and began to master in 2015, this exhibition is composed of a series of figures influenced by Egyptian funerary portraits from AD 40-250 .

Frozen in time like photographs, these ancient and remarkable images are unique, extraordinarily beautiful artefacts which have, for many years, fascinated and haunted Currie. Created as portraits of the deceased, funerary portraits provide us with various socio-economic details about the individual depicted, whilst helping to uncover facets of early Egyptian culture, especially in relation to the empire’s trade, economic, and social structure.

Here, Currie invites the viewer to draw their own conclusions about who the figures in his monoprints might be, what their backgrounds are, and how they came to be depicted here.

Click here to see works from the exhibition.

 * Thanks to Carcanet Press for permissions for the use of the Sorley MacLean line from the poem Hallaig in the title of this exhibition.

 Hallaig can be acquired from Carcanet here

Image: Ken Currie, 'John the Revelator', 2017, monotype, 43 x 63 cm, © Ken Currie. Image courtesy Flowers London and New York. Ken Currie, 'Head and Ground', 2017, monotype, 43 x 63 cm, © Ken Currie. Image courtesy Flowers London and New York. Ken Currie (photo courtesy Ken Currie).