The work of Ken Currie, Kehinde Wiley and Susie Hamilton can be seen currently in central London. Each knows the communities they paint intimately and create insightful figurative work as a result.
Currie’s latest collection, ‘The Crossing’, derives from his love for Scotland’s Western and Hebridean islands. His love for these places, as revealed in the recently published book ‘Ken Currie: Paintings and Writings’, derives from the extent to which these “places are haunted with tragedy”, making their vistas “all the more poignant, knowing the suffering and injustice that was meted out to the people that once lived there and were so brutally removed.” As a result, he feels there “are ghosts everywhere” and “a deep melancholy about the place which sometimes stares back at you when you look for too long.”
Under the influence of John Bellany, whom he views as “one of the great North European expressionist masters” and whose breath he has felt on the back of his neck in coming up with recent images, Currie has created for this exhibition a water world landscape and community that is reminiscent of the westernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides, featuring eroded rock towers emerging from a deep, black sea.
Water invades these canvases, streaming down as rain-like drips and runs, welling up from the sea that foams and sprays at their bases. Life in these islands is lived in boats – whether fishing or transporting people and livestock – and the people are primarily depicted in their boats – whether in their Sunday best or shrouded from the weather – in revelatory poses – whether of ritual or resilience. In their stark and unforgiving environment, this community endures a precarious existence without significant shelter and bending – whether in prayer or submission – to the forces that constantly swirl around them. These are weather-beaten images and communities – whether in the silt-stung, red-tinged eyes and skin of the people depicted or the sense of sea salt coagulating on the works themselves.
Currie has shared the following words about this new body of work from his studio journal: “People of the Sea. People on the Edge. People at Extremes. Contested Land. Crossing the Sea. Eviction. Evasion. Evacuation. Displacement. Dispossession. Destitution.” Tom Normand, who edited ‘Ken Currie: Paintings and Writings’, describes Currie’s motivation “that drives his art towards extremes” in terms of “the perfidy of those in power, the betrayal of truly human aspirations, the ruthless exploitation of subject peoples, the myriad destructive impulses of humanity and even the self-serving opportunism of the cultural nexus”. This leads him to embrace “the wildness of a terrifying reality”; the “abiding primordial truth” of the “grotesque travesty in human life”.
This motivation leads Currie, like Bellany, to paint with a life that “is unbound in gestural energy and passion”, “putting his life on the line with every brushstroke”; “all-consuming and ‘existential’, rather than professional or calculating”. With ‘The Crossing’, Currie is again following his instincts and not looking over his shoulder.
Portrait of Jouifsoif Esther Itoremikesi, 2024, Stephen Friedman Gallery
Kehinde Wiley’s work responds to a similar narrative of injustice and exclusion by challenging and reinterpreting the narratives of art history. He celebrates people of colour by reconstructing the hierarchies and conventions of classical portraiture to include contemporary African American and African Diasporic men and women. With ‘Fragments from the Treasure House of Darkness’, his first solo exhibition in London in three years following ‘The Prelude’ at The National Gallery, he highlights the beauty, self-invention and magic of being young and hip on the streets of West Africa in works inspired by the historic miniature portraits that first appeared in European royal courts in the sixteenth century.
His sitters, whom he met on the same day at the University of Lagos, are a diverse cross-section of young people, some donning streetwear and others traditional West African dress. Wiley paints them in heroic poses that reference European and American portraiture through their sense of authority and grandeur. His lavishly detailed, floral backgrounds, an aspect of his work which connects back to explorations of his mother’s thrift store as a child, entangle his subjects, setting beauty against beauty and creating a celebration of life through an emotive extravagance of pattern, texture and colour.
Susie Hamilton goes further into distressing or abusing the canvas and image than either Currie or Wiley. Her work exists in the liminal space between abstraction and figuration, and she uses a range of methods to overwhelm or overload her image with threatening forces while revealing to us, through her resilient individuals found in wilderness spaces, the fundamental indomitability of the human spirit. For her, less is more, particularly in her magical ability, through a minimal number of brushstrokes, to suggest profound elements of character in the pose or stance of her individual characters while positioned centre-stage.
Her community is that of the “discarded or over-looked people, which include road sweepers, pensioner shoppers, stranded drunken hen-nighters and Caliban in The Tempest“. These characters are “like lost souls looking for something . . . searching for something more fulfilling, some deeper good that the brands promise when they say ‘Open happiness’, ‘Because you’re worth it,’ ‘Live the dream.‘ And the search goes on. Shopping becomes unending . . . shopping is a metaphor for human desire . . . and because it never gives true fulfilment . . . is also a metaphor for this endless search.“ The situations that she paints suggest isolation. Still, the figures themselves, standing out against distressed backgrounds, have “a resilient singularity with which they resist the dreariness of the uniformity of contemporary urban life”.
Although differing considerably in application and style, these works have a common core in relation to the empathy and attention shown and paid to the communities depicted.
‘Ken Currie: The Crossing’, 9 October – 16 November 2024, Flowers Gallery.
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‘Kehinde Wiley Fragments from the treasure house of darkness’, 3 October – 9 November 2024, Stephen Friedman Gallery.
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‘Susie Hamilton Radiance and Shadows’, 8 October – 31 October 2024, Paul Stolper Gallery.
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