Three Oncologists News Today

With a new portrait recently acquired by the national galleries in Edinburgh, the Scottish painter talks mortality, death—and why he moved away from overtly political art

Ken Currie’s Unknown Man, a portrait of the preeminent forensic anthropologist, Professor Dame Sue Black, has been acquired by the a href= https

/ Rarely can a portrait, including a dead body under a sheet, have created such a powerful, immediate, critical and public response.  Ken Currie, undoubtedly among the most significant painters of our time, is known for his dark side, his bleak, black pictures of haggard figures and harrowing happening, tortured flesh, forensic finales, illness, death. Long before Co-vid, he recognised the fragility, vulnerability and desperate aspects of human life and, never flinching, captured them with an...

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is to reopen on Friday with a new Ken Currie work depicting forensic anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black. Arriving at the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) on a long-term loan directly from the artist, the large portrait is titled Unknown Man and shows Professor Black in surgical robes standing behind the covered remains of a body. The pair met during a BBC Radio 4 discussion programme on the relationship between art and anatomy. Currie then visited...