Rosalie Doubal

Smith/Stewart: Enter Love and Enter Death

15 Nov 2007

SCULPTURAL INSTALLATION Royal Botanic Gardens, Inverleith House, Edinburgh, until Sun 20 Jan Simply entering Smith/Stewart’s new exhibition is difficult. Faced directly with a black horizontal girder, one feels tempted to advance, yet hesitant.

Neville Rae

3 Oct 2008

For want of a little creative breathing space, new gallery partnership Sierra Metro has bravely shunned the inner-city Edinburgh gallery scene. Directors Janine Sproule and Martin Minton have appropriated a disused warehouse in the North of Edinburgh…

St Andrew’s Day

29 Nov 2007

Around this time of year, a flurry of twee tartan tat begins to take over our streets and schools. Gym halls fill up with tinny, taped ceilidh tunes, canteens are plagued with watery tatties and sloppy neeps, and supermarkets surrender to dusty displays…

Black, White + Gray

4 Sep 2008

James Crump’s documentary revisits the contentious work, life and times of seminal 80s photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The artist’s legacy is re-examined through a close study of the life of his partner and patron, the curator and collector, Sam…

Gamarjobat

21 Aug 2008

The playful Japanese pair deftly animate all the trappings of a silent Western, complete with a revenge killing and a big-hearted prostitute. A clever use of shiny happy plastic props and stylishly twee sound effects successfully endow the sex and guns…

The Art of Dating and Dumping

It's official: romance is dead

14 Aug 2008

Ghost tours are annoying because the part of you that secretly believes you may actually see a ghoul, is always let down. This show similarly disappoints. You are drawn to it, suspecting that it may just present you with the holy grail of practical…

Dr Sketchy’s Anti Art School

7 Aug 2008

I blame after-school ‘buff club’ for the prudish apprehension I felt on entering Dr Sketchy’s Anti Art School. The life drawing class of my youth utterly succeeded in repressing my schoolgirl giggle. Week after week the models’ towelling gowns would…

What is Life?

Scottish sculptors take on biological investigation

31 Jul 2008

Exploring a common interest in plants and scientific enquiry, Inverleith House curator Paul Nesbitt has drawn together works by Scottish sculptors Christine Borland, Graham Fagen and Simon Starling. In a bold and considered move, he’s chosen to eschew…

Duncan Marquiss: The Clay Wall

4 Oct 2007

To see our insides on the outside disrupts our idea of self. Blood and vomit repulse us because they muddy our notions of the self/other split, and expose the fragile nature of our subjectivity. It is this state of troubled subjecthood, and most…

Treasure Hunt

Rosalie Doubal leads a team around the city on a scavenger hunt in the name of art

21 Aug 2008

9am City Art Centre Equipped with a bike, a laptop, a compass, eight sandwiches and some anoraks, my team – a dyspraxic researcher, a father-of-one, a diehard Buckfast drinker and a token ginger – joins a long queue of eager scavengers. Neither the…

Alexander Heim: Doves

Harnessing pigeon power

21 Aug 2008

Lyrical and sophisticated, young German artist Alexander Heim’s first solo UK show exhibits a fascinating lightness of touch. Doves pivots around a video of pigeons at a London Costa Coffee branch. Exquisitely-composed photographs of fragments of…

Nick Mohammed

7 Aug 2008

Impressively, Mohammed's airtight character comedy had his spellbound assembly gleefully chanting 'witch, witch, witch' at a poor audience member. Neatly utilising his hairdresser, his cockney and his pashmina-wearing 'yah' characters, Mohammed linked…

Lucy Skaer

5 Jun 2008

DRAWING, SCULPTURE & FILM Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until Wed 9 Jul Looking at Skaer’s black drawings is like watching someone trapped under a thick sheet of ice. Admittedly, the likelihood of ever having witnessed such a death is rare, but the…

Ladyfest

Various venues, Edinburgh, Sun 4 May–Sun 1 Jun

24 Apr 2008

Ruby-red lips, set perms and Avon panstick. Not the traditional image of a feminist – certainly not the popular, laddish stereotype of a feminist. However, Ladyfest, Edinburgh’s first female-focussed festival, launches this fortnight with an event that…

Ten Decades

29 Nov 2007

PAINTING AND SCULPTURE City Art Centre, Edinburgh, until Sat 19 Jan Like a weighty history text, this commemorative retrospective, celebrating the centenary of Edinburgh College of Art, is exhausting. While seepage thankfully dapples its linear…

Achtung Pal

21 Aug 2008

Twelve hopeful students chew, gag and gurn their way through a barrage of German and 'Schottish' accents in this dreary 1943-Nazi-occupied-Dundee-set comedy. Sparky performances from the stinky Scottish gypsy prostitute and an officer's secretary are…

Madame with an 'E'

21 Aug 2008

Madame is a scrawny, dirty puppet who bears an uncanny likeness to Joan Rivers. As unappealing as she may sound, the ageing showgirl's rampant filth and alcoholism has a rather endearing quality. Her puppeteer whisks her around a decaying Hollywood and…

The Shadow

21 Aug 2008

Enthusiastic acting is let down here by an over-written, confused and dizzyingly fast-paced script about a poet who loses his shadow. A barrage of contradictory metaphors dealing in the currency of light, dark, joy, greed, friend, foe and princesses…

Frida Kahlo: Viva La Vida

14 Aug 2008

A poised yet gutsy one-woman performance from the talented Gael Le Cornec offers a moving insight into the vibrant life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Avoiding sentimentality, Le Cornec tenderly portrays a woman struggling with physical pain and a…

Andrew Grassie: Painting as Document

7 Aug 2008

This survey exhibition of recent and new work by Andrew Grassie, his first major solo show in Scotland, exhibits a selection of the artist’s paintings from the past ten years. When first viewed together, this output appears terribly uniform. The…

Karl Spain

7 Aug 2008

Spain's show spins off an endearing premise: he has diabetes, but doesn't really know what it is. Regaling the crowd with down-the-pub tales of his unquenchable thirst, leg boils and an infected penis, this self-proclaimed food addict gets off to a…

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…

Ori Gersht

15 Nov 2007

PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM Stills, Edinburgh, until Sun 20 Jan In the dark back section of the bisected Stills space, Ori Gersht’s video installation ‘The Forest’ intermittently emits the overwhelming roar of trees being felled. Meanwhile, a series of…