Ken Currie: Rictus review grisly art games with a serious moral purpose
Flowers Gallery, London
True shock value is rare these days, but these gruesome yet skilled paintings of Hiroshima victims and macabre medical experiments will give you the shudders
It is getting hard for artists to shock anyone. Provocateurs such as Jake and Dinos Chapman seem sadly adrift in today’s deeply strange world when a sculpture of a suicide vest elicits only a brief shrug among the much more surreal stuff reality keeps chucking at us. Ken Currie deserves credit for breaking through this moribund mood with grotesque new paintings that genuinely nauseate. You’d have to be a stone to see these without a few shudders, and anyone with a weak stomach should avoid them like the plague – and I mean a plague that causes bubbling pustules bursting out of dead flesh.
Two colossal canvases, each more than four metres wide, face each other across a fairly small space. The Flensers (2016) is a nightmarish vision of the whaling industry 100 years ago, except it is more timeless than that. Flensing is the bloody work of skinning and gutting a whale to get at its commercially valuable blubber. Gigantic pink and purple intestines swarm like foul invertebrate creatures at the centre of Currie’s painting, while workers with horribly sharp and bizarrely shaped (but authentic) flensing tools go about their gruesome task. Vast strips of flayed whale skin, showing marbled red and white insides, hang above the meaty labourers as they wade among shiny guts.
This is in no sense a realist painting. One man’s legs have turned into tentacles as if infected by the snaky intestines. A huge dead eye looks more like a shark’s than that of a whale. The space created by the theatrical tableau of suspended skin is eerily artificial, the poses of the flensers exaggeratedly formal. They stand heroically like people in an 18th-century history painting by Jacques-Louis David or Benjamin West. In the distance, a shadowy row of factory sheds is the most oddly haunting aspect of the entire morbid vision.
Patients and doctors enact rituals that have little to do with real healingKrankenhaus (2016) on the facing wall is, if anything, even more horrific. In a nightmare version of a first world war hospital, patients and doctors enact rituals that have little to do with real healing. A man with an antique prosthetic arm is cutting up meat. A doctor looks into the mouth of a naked male patient, who has sagging female breasts like the “withered dugs” of Tiresias in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, using a spoon and candle to light his investigation. The face of the doctor is compassionate and sensitive, his gaze caringly intent, until you start to wonder how he is actually helping his patient – or victim. Then you find yourself staring at a big, dangerous pair of scissors in his pocket.
Another medic is forcing a red rubber tube into a prone patient’s mouth. The tube is suspended from the ceiling; following it along the length of the picture, you discover it originates from the patient’s genitals. He is being force fed his own effluents. Meanwhile a nurse conducts a concert by a blind violinist and a facially injured man who plays the flute from a hole where his mouth should be.
This hospital is not making anyone well. It is monstrously industrialising sickness. It might have been painted by the early 20th-century German artists Max Beckmann or Otto Dix if they had seen the films of David Lynch. What makes it and The Flensers truly horrible, however, is their perverse beauty. Currie is a very skilled painter in an old-fashioned way. Details of painterly excellence in Krankenhaus catch the eye: the way he paints hair standing on end made my hair stand on end. Most unexpectedly of all, the whaleskin draperies in The Flensers are clearly inspired by a pink piece of cloth that hangs up in Titian’s masterpiece Diana and Actaeon.
So what’s it all about? Is this veteran painter, whose expressionism first made him known in the 1980s as one of the “New Glasgow Boys”, merely playing grisly aesthetic games? A third monumental canvas that hangs on an end wall makes clear the serious moral purpose of his apparent sensationalism.
Currie has painted the tragically damaged face of a victim of the Hiroshima bomb on a gargantuan scale, so big and pale and torn it is hard to look at. Looking at it, however, is a uniformed general who stands with his back to us, gazing close up at what a nuclear war does to the survivors. It is a blast of anger at the masters of war who play with our world as if it were their little toy. This is what Currie would like to do: make a warmonger stand up close to see the real face of his handiwork.
This furious, vomiting scream of a show proves that art can speak to our vile days after all, if it has brains, imagination and passion.
- Ken Currie: Rictus is at Flowers Gallery, London, until 9 December.
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