Reviews
| 06 September 2009
7 August- 27 September
Collective Gallery/ Dean Gallery/ Talbot Rice Gallery
Often I find that installations in art galleries fail to interest me. There is that notion of pretension within “contemporary art” which generally repulses rather than woos the spectator.
| 29 August 2009
Patriothall Gallery, WASPS Studio
Until 29 August, 11.00 – 17.00
Tucked away in the corner of a Stockbridge courtyard is a rich exhibition of multimedia tapestries. Though most of the finished pieces themselves are stunning, the addition of perspex boxes containing samples, working drawings and notes that showcase the processes and thoughts behind them give the exhibition another intriguing strand.
| 27 August 2009
Edinburgh Printmakers
18 July- 29 August
This Union Street institution presents a new body of work by the bearded patriarch of British PopArt. With a whimsical smile and sideways nod to Turner, Canaletto and the accompanying hordes of artists who have drawn inspiration from the floating city, Venice finds Blake at his playful and jocular best.
| 26 August 2009
Doggerfisher @ 11 Gayfield Square
1 August – 26 September
Drawing from Paul Nash’s Flight of the Magnolia Nashashibi and Skaer’s Our Magnolia is a film study into ideas of expectation and the inevitable. The painter’s original, part of the Aerial Flowers series painted during the Second World War, is a serenely apocalyptic vision set to the tune of Nash’s particular brand of surreal and prehistoric otherworldliness.
| 26 August 2009
Inspace, Crichton Street
5 August - 5 September
An exhibition featuring pieces from nine Alt-w funded artists, Reveal/Reset is an evocative and thought-provoking inquiry into digital cultures of communication and expression.
| 26 August 2009
Fruitmarket Gallery
5 August– 25 October
Eva Hesse – Studiowork currently on show at the Fruitmarket gallery is an exhibition of works by the influential 20th Century sculptor, curated by Hesse scholars Briony Fer and Barry Rosen, offering a new presentation of a selection of her otherwise peripheral creations.
| 23 August 2009
Talbot Rice Gallery
The University of Edinburgh
7 August – 26 September
This year, amongst other prominent works on show in the Edinburgh Art Festival the Talbot Rice Gallery hosts Jane and Louise Wilson’s first Scottish solo exhibition centred around their most recent film work Unfolding the Aryan Papers, commissioned by Animate Projects and the BFI with The Stanley Kubrick Archives, University of the Arts London.
| 21 August 2009
National Museum of Scotland
5 August- 8 November
Rather aptly given this year’s emphasis on Homecoming, ‘Ballast’ at the National Museum of Scotland explores the cultural effects and personal implications of the Scottish Diaspora through a collection of works by the New Zealand born sculptor John Edgar. Themes of travel, cultural adaptation and ancestry run through this series of stone sculptures which highlight cultural difference and assimilation through the signs of traditional culture.
| 19 August 2009
Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden
6 August- 11 October
Contemporary art demands an open mind especially when approaching a sculptor who admits to drawing inspiration from, ‘my imagination, my interests in psychology, metaphysics (when I was seven I saw my grandmother’s ghost and at seventeen I time travelled), cosmology and UFOs.'
| 15 August 2009
Royal Botanic Garden
12–30 Aug, 21.30 – 00.00 (tours depart at ten minute intervals)
At once nightmarish and calming, Power Plant runs the risk of being reviewed with too many superlatives. But here goes -
| 15 August 2009
The Scottish Gallery
7 August – 5 September
I hear, as an Englishwoman, that James Morrison is a rather big deal here in his homeland. A long and distinguished career in landscape painting and broadcasting has preceded this showing of forty or so beautiful paintings at the Scottish Gallery. Despite being naively unaware of the established roots of the artist on entering the cool space earlier this month, I was besotted.
| 02 August 2009
King of Pop
Extraordinary vision, a collector’s eye, an innate sense of colour and composition, and oh yeah, the cover of one of the world’s most iconic albums all add up to make Peter Blake the legendary artist he is today.
| 02 August 2009
Rip it up and start again
With the National Portrait Gallery about to undergo a major renovation, what better time to let a bunch of guerilla artists lose in this historic space?
| 02 August 2009
Let there be light
Tying in with the theme of this year's International festival, Enlightenments will see you criss-crossing the city in search of insight.
