Painting & Drawing

Steven Campbell: Wretched Stars, Insatiable Heaven (new work 2006-2007)

4 Sep 2008

Steven Campbell's work may not be to everyone's taste, but it's certainly powerful and affecting. Large-scale paintings assail the viewer with bright colours; paisley patterns merge with abstract designs and motifs borrowed from art history while…

The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: The Renaissance

Treasure trove of Italian masters

31 Jul 2008

You wonder what Prince William was thinking when he switched courses at university – when your Grandma owns art like this, studying Art History must have been a doddle. This exhibition, the first of two from the Royal Collection’s holdings of 16th and…

Quiet revolution - Scottish Impressionism

17 Jul 2008

Liz Shannon considers the enduring appeal of work by the ground-breaking French Impressionists and the Scots they inspired

Altered States of Paint

17 Jul 2008

REVIEW PAINTING (GROUP SHOW) DCA, Dundee, until Sun 7 Sep DCA’s excellent new exhibition manages to assail you before you even enter the gallery, thanks to Rabiya Choudhry’s vibrant wall painting that presents the show’s title across the blade…

Au Fil D’Ecosse

17 Jul 2008

REVIEW PAINTING, PHOTOGRAPHY, INSTALLATION Institut Français, Edinburgh, until Fri 29 Aug This collaboration between artist Cyril Barrand and poet John Hudson leaves no thread untied, no thematic ambiguity unresolved, with the result that our…

Harry Smith Anthology Remixed

17 Jul 2008

REVIEW PAINTING, DRAWING, PHOTOGRAPHY, MUSIC CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 26 Jul Artist, filmmaker, musicologist: just a few of the labels attached to Harry Smith, the great American polymath of the 1950s. This exhibition celebrates the chain-smoking…

Karin Christiansen and Lys Hansen: The Other Side – A Dialogue

17 Jul 2008

REVIEW PAINTING & SCULPTURE Collins Gallery, Glasgow, until Sat 16 Aug (closed Fri 18–Mon 21 Jul) Lou Reed had never been to Berlin before he wrote his doomed rock opera named after the then divided city. If he had, it might have been even…

Visual Art - List picks

17 Jul 2008

Mark Neville With Fancy Pictures (which features Neville’s new 16mm film and audio-slide installation of still photographic work) the artist captures 21st century Bute in wonderful living, breathing colour. See review, page 87. Mount Stuart, Isle Of…

GROUP SHOW, Doggerfisher

13 Mar 2008

Doggerfisher, Edinburgh, until Sat 26 Apr Doggerfisher’s annual group show brings together work by recent graduates and more established artists. Refreshingly, the gallery unites the six artists via an interest in formal concerns with space and…

Lotte Gertz

14 Feb 2008

PRINTING, PAINTING AND DRAWING Mary Mary, Glasgow, until Sat 1 Mar Narrative of sorts emerges through the manipulation of formal elements in the printed, painted, drawn and collaged works of Lotte Gertz. In this, her first exhibition at Mary Mary, the…

Split Personality - Alan Michael

31 Jan 2008

Rosie Lesso creates an imaginative map of associations as she considers the work of painter Alan Michael Like many artists before him, Alan Michael’s first point of reference is the sea of visual information we encounter as by-products of…

Kendall Koppe and Douglas Morland: The Great Release

31 Jan 2008

PAINTING, SCULPTURE AND PRINT The Intermedia space is a slippery fish, but it is usually worth trying to land the thing. The exhibition by Kendall Koppe and Douglas Morland is a case in point. The work on show deals with aspects of subjectivity that…

Spencer Sweeny

31 Jan 2008

PAINTING There’s less shtick and more confidence in this exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist Spencer Sweeney. The freewheeling, almost accidental approach to image-making that the artist employed in his previous exhibition in the space…

Carol Rhodes

4 Jan 2008

Carol Rhodes’ meditative, repetitive approach to landscape painting could be linked to artists such as Friedrich, Corot, Monet or Cezanne, each in their own way sharing an obsession with the genre, though, as the artist Merlin James points out: ‘Rhodes…

Bacon and Koons wow at art auction

16 Nov 2007

Two paintings by Francis Bacon have sold for more than £34 million at Sotheby’s, in a record-breaking sale of contemporary and post-war art for the auction house. The artist’s Self Portrait and his Study for Bullfight No 1 (second version) sold for…

Export ban imposed on £2m Turner

13 Nov 2007

A watercolour painting by Turner, considered by experts to be one of the finest in its medium, has been banned from going on sale abroad until next year to give the UK a chance to retain it. The painting is a view of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland and…

Music hidden in da Vinci’s Last Supper?

12 Nov 2007

A computer expert claims to have discovered music hidden in Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece The Last Supper. By superimposing the five lines in sheet music over the painting, Giovanni Maria Pala said a 40-second composition then becomes…

Art collection sells for £188m in New York

8 Nov 2007

A collection of art works, including paintings by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, have sold for £188 million after going under the hammer in New York. Matisse’s 1937 painting L’Odalisque, Harmonie Blueue, set a new record fetching £16 million at…

Tom Phillips

Big picture

1 Nov 2007

Tom Phillips Widely considered a touchstone of postmodernism, Tom Phillips’ artistic project, ‘A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel’, has achieved cult status since its initial publication in 1970. One day, Phillips went into a book shop with the…

Feral Kingdom

18 Oct 2007

DRAWING, PAINTING, FILM AND SCULPTURE CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 10 Nov There seems to be little or no relationship between the works showing at Feral Kingdom in the CCA – all conceptual and aesthetic decisions seem almost arbitrary. It is true that…

Artist reveals hidden initial on Che artwork

9 Oct 2007

The artist behind the iconic artwork which immortalised Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara in black, white and red has revealed a secret initial in the picture to identify the work as his own. Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick, who created the image from…

Final Van Gogh painting expected to fetch £17m

9 Oct 2007

A Van Gogh painting has gone on show in London before being auctioned in New York next month. Thought to be the artist’s last painting, the vibrant masterpiece The Fields (Wheat Fields) was painted 19 days before Van Gogh’s suicide. The picture is…

Monet painting damaged by intruders

8 Oct 2007

A group of intruders punched a hole in a painting by Claude Monet after breaking in to the Orsay Museum in Paris. The French culture minister Christine Albanel said that four or five people, who appeared to be drunk, had broken through a back door at…

Stolen da Vinci painting recovered after police raid

5 Oct 2007

A painting by Leonardo da Vinci worth around £25 million, which was stolen from the Duke of Buccleuch four years ago, has been recovered after a police raid. The 16th century Madonna of the Yarnwinder had been put the FBI’s list of 10 most wanted…

Alasdair Gray - art review

4 Oct 2007

To cherry pick from one’s own oeuvre sounds delightfully painful, a self indulgent task requiring sticky fingers and a good eye. It should be someone else’s enviable job, especially when the artist in question is Alasdair Gray, one of Scotland’s most…