Visual art, Reviews and Paul Dale

Nick Sargent: A Scottish Land

Bold and charming celebration of the Scottish landscape

16 Sep 2011

With A Scottish Land, one-time set and costume designer and Edinburgh resident Nick Sargent returns to Oliver Chapman Architects in-house gallery space for the first time since their inaugural exhibition. Inspired by a photograph of a generic…

Smile

Feeble collection riffing off ill-conceived ideas

24 Aug 2011

Between the Spangles wrapper psychedelia of its poster to the feeble collection of art in the gallery, Smile does nothing to live up to its name. Riffing off ill-conceived ideas honed from (a misunderstanding of) the Fluxus movement and the writings of…

Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys

An art world friendship under a Scottish sky

17 Aug 2011

A single rose can make a garden; a single friend can make a world. Writer, artist and philosopher Richard Demarco’s friendship with the humanistic artist Joseph Beuys was something special. These two passionate, occasionally obtuse men were drawn to…

Stephen Sutcliffe: Runaway, Success

Biography-obsessed artist hides behind his heroes

11 Aug 2011

It’s been a while since Yorkshire-born Glasgow resident Sutcliffe has trotted out his curious wares in Scotland, and it’s not difficult to see why. His work is moody and peppered with arch cultural references to complex arty prima donnas Joe Orton…

Chris Drury - Land, Water and Language

A man, his boat and some nice scenery

11 Aug 2011

Life’s a journey not a destination and other such homilies. God preserve us from the travelogue artists. Chris Drury is one such artist. This exhibition, which was initially created for Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre in North Uist, takes its…

Ingrid Calame

Water water everywhere with only a doodle to drink

5 Aug 2011

A river runs through Ingrid Calame’s work. But this river has been drained and all that remains are detritus and old stains. Somewhere between Google Earth screen grabs, weighty childhood nature books with their own illustrative key codes and fey…

Anton Henning: Interieur No. 493

Curious and bemusing conceptual art salon at 2011 Edinburgh Art Festival

5 Aug 2011

If, as critic and writer Cyril Connolly once noted, ‘vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life’ German artist Anton Henning might just have halitosis. Henning’s first solo show in Scotland is just about as curious and bemusing an exhibition as you…

Tony Cragg

Stunning showcase of sculptor’s poetic, monolithic output

3 Aug 2011

From Scouse lab technician to director of Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, Cragg’s prolific artistic journey has been one of inspiration and rejection, absorption and a will to move beyond. While the works of Max Ernst, Richard Long, Joseph Beuys and Henry…

Elizabeth Blackadder

Brilliant retrospective of work by one of Scotland’s major artists

3 Aug 2011

Elizabeth Blackadder is a Dame, a Royal Academician and arguably Scotland’s most popular female painter and printmaker. A major retrospective of her work at Scotland’s biggest gallery space was only ever going to draw sighs of resignation from art snobs…

Narcissus Reflected

The David Lomas-curated Fruitmarket exhibition is an effective reflection of the nature of vanity

27 May 2011

Don McLean got it right in his 1972 song ‘Narcisissima’: ‘Narcissima, Narcisissma is the pride of Pomona/Pomona, Pomona says she looks like me/But she will look like you when I’m set free.’ Narcissus of Greek myth and his Freudian descendant have long…

The Artist Rooms: Jeff Koons exhibition displays the artist's conceptualism, but is at odds with the age of austerity

13 Apr 2011

Stockbroker-turned-mass-media-manipulator Koons has always been a contentious figure in the apolitically voyeuristic world of pop art. A Brooks Brothers outfitted amalgam of Warhol and Duchamps, Koons is only ever as interesting as the times he lives…

Jean-Marc Bustamante: Dead Calm

Toulouse born artist’s debut Scottish show

24 Feb 2011

Toulouse born artist Jean-Marc Bustamante’s debut Scottish show carries with it the weight of Dickens’ sentiment that, ‘There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.’ Bustamante’s ‘thing’ is incongruity in technique…

Marc Camille Chaimowicz

Journey of Parisian artist from the punk performance early work to lyrical, introspective and politi

14 Jan 2011

Echoing the words of his hero Gustave Flaubert, Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s first solo exhibition in Scotland is testimony to the notion that ‘Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; only faith and freedom.’ Parisian Chaimowicz’s art shares…

Edward Weston: Life Work and William Wegman: Family Combinations

A pair of fascinating photography exhibitions for the price of one

12 Aug 2010

These two fascinating exhibitions by two very different photographers challenge John Steinbeck’s belief that cameras should be disparaged because ‘they are so much more sure than I am about everything.’ Weston was the natural, a pioneer and a comrade…

Paul Rennie - Modern British Posters

14 May 2010

(Black Dog Publishing) As its title hints, with allusions to the gallery and the auction house, Paul Rennie’s intellectually rigorous, aesthetically pleasing book deals with a very specific type of art in Britain from the mid-20th century. Rennie’s…

The Creative World of Alan Davie

Remarkable mix of the dark and the sublime from much-loved Scottish artist

8 Aug 2009

Saxophonist and journeyman translucent Alan Davie is surely one of Scotland’s greatest living artists. At almost 90 years old it’s remarkable to think that this is the first exhibition of his work to embrace the breadth of his output in painting…

Self-made Cavalcade

Playful, engaging group show by international artists

8 Aug 2009

Artists from Munich, Edinburgh and Glasgow go head to head in this enjoyable and playful exhibition of multimedia, multi-discipline work developed from a previous exchange show in the German city. Christian Newby’s ‘Kromvex Mirror’ opens the show…

Francesca Woodman

28 May 2009

Francesca Woodman created a remarkable body of work in her short life (she committed suicide in 1981 at the age of 22), some of which can currently be seen at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s Artist Rooms. This beautifully presented…

Boneless Box

16 Apr 2009

Naming their inaugural show at this new gallery space after one of KFC’s advertising campaigns, the curators of Boneless Box have opened their doors to all that is finger lickin’ and artificial. Things start sweetly with Debjani Banerjee’s miniscule…

Hayley Tompkins: Autobuilding

2 Apr 2009

MIXED MEDIA Over the past ten years GSA graduate Tompkins has drawn recognition for her abstract compositions. On the strength of this show, however, hers is an oeuvre that seems to have (to quote American cleric/writer Norman Vincent Peale) been…

Urban Reflections

22 Jan 2009

FILM/PHOTOGRAPHY Five artists attempt to answer novelist Jonathan Raban’s call (from his wonderful 1974 book of ‘interdisciplinary’ urban reflections, Soft City) to create a ‘vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the continual creative play of…

Luca Frei

8 Jan 2009

Entrenched in a Dadaist slipstream of playful bemusement, Swiss-born, Swedish-based artist Frei is usually as mad, bad and fun as a bag of rainbow painted spiders. His contrived installations, which have graced cutting edge galleries in Paris, New York…

Close Up

27 Nov 2008

PHOTOGRAPHY/FILM ‘Why has not man a microscopic eye? For the plain reason man is not a fly.’ The early 18th century poet Alexander Pope’s wrote that, perhaps in a moment of peevishness. Between Pope’s witticism and writer and critic William Hazlitt’s…

Richard Forster

13 Nov 2008

DRAWINGS Recalling poet laureate John Masefield’s most famous poem, Sea Fever (‘I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide / Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied’), Untitled (Seascapes), Forster’s first solo…

Chad McCail

Puberty, print, perversion and compulsory education

21 Aug 2008

What a remarkable and strange artist Chad McCail is. By his own admission half of his output tends to be peopled by ‘robots, zombies or wealthy parasites’, while the other half looks like loose leaves from a particularly perverse Ladybird book. Both…