Animals Ken Currie

This catalogue was published to coincide with the artist's solo exhibition Animals, 18 April - 17 May 2008.

Since the early 1990s, Ken Currie has become known for his closely observed and often unsettling portrayal of the body, depicting the damage inflicted by illness and decay as a response to what he felt was the sickness of contemporary society. 

The works featured in this publication focus on the brutality of existence, realised in a cast of gross and wild bodies. There are both beasts, in the Cartesian sense, - a white horse, a hooded kestrel, an elephant, a pair of mating pachyderms - and a horde of human animals - a 'gentleman', gun in hand, genitalia exposed, and a woman picking a tick from her thigh. What is fascinating about these subjects is how they confound and destabilise our understanding of the order of things - Currie's humans are more pathologically wild than their beastly counterparts.