Ken CurrieLeviathan 26 March – 9 May 2026

Preview: Thursday, 26 March, 10am-12pm

49 Tung Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Konghongkong@flowersgallery.com

Flowers Gallery Hong Kong is pleased to announce Leviathan, marking the acclaimed Scottish artist Ken Currie’s second soloexhibition in Asia. Presented in Sheung Wan, a district historically shaped by a maritime and trading past. Currie’s new paintingsenter into a quiet dialogue with the area’s longstanding relationship to its harbours.

In this exhibition, Currie explores our human instinctual terror and fascination with the unknown, using what may be found when we look into the depths of real and imagined seas. Two new monumental oil paintings, Immemorial III (2024) and Leviathan (2024), portray colossal, fictitious sea beasts as they appear to charge up through dark waters.

In the painting ‘Leviathan’, an improbably enormous halibut swallows a human being whole. All we see are the feet of the victim as the body goes down its gullet. 

The question of what lies beneath the water, and the huge creatures that may lurk in the depths, be it ocean, lake, or loch, tap into some of our most unsettling primordial fears of the unknown and has, over the centuries, across different cultures, been the fabric of myth. The most obvious of these is the biblical story of Jonah, but similar stories can be found in Greek and Icelandic mythology.

Of course, the painting is not a literal depiction of a human being swallowed by a fish - this would be biologically impossible - but notions of being consumed by something larger, predatory, and uncontrollable suggest metaphors and allusions across a whole range of human experience. (Ken Currie, 2026)

The foundation of Currie’s practice is a deep understanding of traditional oil painting; alongside the large-scale paintings are a series of oil on gesso panels, a technique historically associated with works of the fifteenth century. Intensely illuminated, their hardened physicality lends the finished panels a delicately formal, otherworldly clarity. With these intimate works, Currie plays with suggestion, purpose, and inherited narrative. In the painting Sea Jaw (2025), a glimpse of teeth flashes as they appear to cut through the water, seeming to pose a threat but with no understanding of the creatures' scale or intent. In contrast, in the painting DisinfeKtion (2022), a figure stands with his outstretched hands vibrant in orange rubber gloves, the implication being that this person is cleaning to remove the trace of, or to prepare for, something unclean. The artist leaves us with the question of who the true predator is.

About Ken Currie (b.1960)

Ken Currie studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1978-1983 and rose to attention within a generation of painters known as the ‘New Glasgow Boys’ in the 1980s. He is renowned for his unsettling portrayal of the human figure. The artist’s rich, luminous paintings depict mysterious rites, rituals, and quasi-medical practices, offering a meditation on the human condition in its many guises. Ken Currie has exhibited widely internationally, including a 2013 solo exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland, which also commissioned his painting Three Oncologists. Currie’s work is held in many major public collections, including Tate, London; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; New York Public Library; Imperial War Museum, London; Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; and the British Council, London. In October 2023, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery acquired Ken Currie’s painting of Professor Dame Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome, The Unknown Man, 2019. Ken Currie’s book, Ken Currie: Paintings and Writings, compiled and edited by art historian Tom Normand, was published in 2023, offering a rare insight into Currie’s challenging and enigmatic art, providing access to his private studio journals for the first time.

Image credit:© Ken Currie, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

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