Visual art

The Blind

Stunningly powerful outdoors multimedia spectacle

Krakow-based KTO Theatre pulls off a rare feat in combining stunning visual effects with a potent emotional impact in its gripping, wordless show The Blind. Whether through pounding music, imagery that’s by turns shocking and poignantly beautiful, or…

Still Life: An Audience With Henrietta Moraes

Immersive monologue-cum-life-drawing-class

It’s pretty disconcerting being addressed by a naked, middle-aged woman, but you soon get used to it. And when she invites you to draw her body, you might feel self-conscious at first – but as writer and actor Sue MacLaine’s life drawing-cum-monologue…

Watch it!

Small-screen addiction writ large with dance, theatre and visual trickery

Watching too much television is bad for you. This is not a new piece of information, the psychology behind why has been well documented. But if people only created shows about new subject matters, there’d be a lot of empty stages, so we can’t really…

Ian Hamilton Finlay: Twilight Remembers

Outstanding overview of work by a remarkable artist

Poet, artist, avant-gardener; the late Ian Hamilton Finlay is best known for Little Sparta, the Pentlands garden he created with his wife, Sue. From this remarkable realm, populated by Greek gods, French revolutionaries, pastoral images and military…

Rachel Mayeri: Primate Cinema - Apes as Family

Dual screen video installation fails to create monkey magic

Los Angeles-based visual artist Rachel Mayeri’s anthropomorphic study of entertainment created for simians, a series entitled Primate Cinema, is perhaps best appreciated for its conceptual design, one of those off the wall ‘somebody had to do it’ ideas…

Dieter Roth: Diaries

Moving and sensitive, if frustrating, insight into Roth’s final days

A wall full of flickering video screens dominates the downstairs space of the Fruitmarket Gallery, labelled and ordered like surveillance monitors. Roth filmed ‘Solo Scenes’ on cameras that he positioned in the most personal spaces of his home and…

Cheer Up! It’s Not the End of the World

Apocalypse images and tormented childhood dreams from Gordon Cheung, Damien Hirst and more

It’s coming. The end of the world, that is. Or at least that’s the case according to those who subscribe to the ancient Mayan theories of disaster-movie-style apocalypse, who reckon it will all be over by Christmas. As the title of this group show…

7x7th Street

Interactive sounds sculptures create a musical promised land

Seven and seven is, well, a very magic number indeed in Jean Pierre Muller's walk-through collaboration with musical icons including Robert Wyatt, Nile Rodgers, Archie Shepp and Terry Riley. Free-associating ideas based around the number seven (days a…

Anonymously-created book sculptures to tour UK

Here at List HQ, we adored the anonymous pieces of book art being left at venues around Edinburgh over a nine-month spell last year. Left with the simple message ‘in support of libraries, books, words, ideas,’, the creator remains unknown but the…

A royal Tattoo will mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in August 2012

The programme includes music, Dennis the Menace, and Brave-inspired medley

Musicians from Switzerland, Norway and Australia, as well as some unexpected guests, will be among the sparkling line-up at this summer’s 62nd Tattoo, which will welcome a fusion of well-loved traditional elements and exciting new contributions. As…

James McLardy - The Swan and Hostage

Enjoyable exhibition questioning the inherent value and fakeness of sculpted pieces

James McLardy’s solo show 'The Swan and Hostage' is the result of his six-week residency at the Duchy gallery in the east end of Glasgow. The title echoes the pub-like feel to the gallery’s name and location: the swan symbolises the beautiful, the…

Karen L Vaughan

Textile exhibition lacks the depth required to overcome its busy surroundings

I can’t get that sound you make out of my head is a small display of Karen Vaughan’s series of embroidery panels in the Arches’ foyer. The works are hand-sewn panels of torn up old clothes from second hand shops, which are re-sewn with carefully…

Artbeat: Jock Mcfadyen

London-based artist at the Edinburgh Art Festival 2012

What was the first exhibition you went to see? My grandfather used to take me to Kelvingrove when I was a boy and I remember red drapes as he showed me the Salvador Dali crucifixion and the blasphemy of the viewer looking down on the head of Christ. He…

National Theatre of Scotland & Bank of Scotland join forces to support emerging theatre-makers

The National Theatre of Scotland and Bank of Scotland announce today that four emerging artists and three emerging directors have been successful in their bid to join Scotland’s National Theatre company on a programme aimed at developing the talents of…

Aberdeen International Youth Festival 2012 takes to the streets 1-11th August

Sculpture and street dance to feature in port-themed parade

Aberdeen will come alive with colour as a several-hundred strong parade marches through the town’s streets on 4 August in celebration of the festival’s 40th anniversary. The parade takes on the theme of Aberdeen’s port which has been a vital gateway…

David Michalek discusses his life as an artist - interview

The multi-disciplinary artist reflects upon Bill Viola and trading art for baseball cards

What was the first exhibition you went to see? The first two contemporary art exhibitions that I went to see were at the Los Angeles MOCA. The first works we saw upon entering the museum were very large and impressive paintings by Anselm Keifer. But…

Roderick Buchanan: Legacy

Feature-length film installation exploring both sides of the Troubles in Northern Ireland

For a work that brings together the two sides of the same coin that are Irish Republicanism and Northern Irish Loyalism, the black wall that divides the two screens of Roderick Buchanan’s feature-length film installation without comment is a silently…

George Leslie Hunter: A Life in Colour

Comprehensive survey of the work of Rothesay-born colourist

More than 70 paintings and prints by the least known of the four Scottish colourists not only demonstrate the breadth of Hunter’s painting practice and his constantly changing approach and style, but also reveal the influences on the Rothesay-born…

Philip Guston (1913-1980): Late Paintings

Late work by renowned US artist in Scotland for the first time

Continuing its growing tradition of presenting some of the greats of 20th century art in striking surroundings, this festival Inverleith House plays host to Canadian painter Philip Guston, a contemporary of Pollock and De Kooning in 1950s New York. The…

Susan Philipsz, Kevin Harman and Anthony Schrag take art to the streets

The artists are staging outdoor works as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival's Festival Promenade

'I’m checking them out / I’m checking them out / I got it figured out / I got it figured out / There’s good points and bad points / Find a city / Find myself a city to live in.’ (David Byrne / Talking Heads – ‘Cities’) If Edinburgh’s town planners…

Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910

Extraordinary exploration of Symbolism and landscape painting

There is something timely and relevant about a major exhibition of paintings created during a time of economic change and uncertainty in society, and against a backdrop of modern living that engendered feelings of fear, alienation and disillusionment…

Iconic America artist Carolee Schneemann appearing at the Edinburgh Art Festival 2012

Artist known for discourses on the body, gender, sexual expression and liberation

Carolee Schneemann, the iconic American visual artist, known for her discourses on the body, gender, sexual expression and liberation, is exhibiting at Summerhall during the Edinburgh Festival. Her seminal works, ‘Meat Joy’ (1964), ‘Fuses’ (1967) and…

Group show - Studio 58

Inspiring, non-didactic collection of female artists' work since 1939

Glasgow School of Art brings together a collection of 54 women artists of working Glasgow since World War II in an unusual mix of craft, textile, painting and performance curated by Dr Sarah Lowndes. The GSA acts as a geographic tie for the show…

Katja Strunz: Dynamic Fatigue Test

Thought-provoking exhibition of metallic sculpture and works on paper

Metal fatigue is the progressive and localised structural damage that occurs when a material is subjected to cyclic loadings. Berlin-based artist Katja Strunz has set up fatigue tests in the gallery to determine how materials will hold up during…

Weaving the Century

One hundred years of tapestry from the Dovecot weavers

It’s 100 years since the Dovecot Studios was established in its first home in Corstorphine, and this exciting tapestry exhibition over three floors of its current premises in Infirmary Street is a fitting celebration of how this very traditional art…