26 May 2016
For this month’s event we will be visiting Dovecot Gallery, where curators Andrew Patrizio and Bill Hare will meet us to discuss their exhibition THE SCOTTISH ENDARKENMENT: Art and Unreason | 1945 to the Present.
This is a thematic group show that explores the darker side of Scottish art. Standing in contrast to the Scottish Enlightenment, this exhibition proposes a ‘Scottish Endarkenment’, suggesting that artists working in the post-war era have taken more inspiration from the darkness than the light. The show engages with a broad range of challenging topics: ever-escalating communal and international conflicts, social inequalities and consumer materialism, threatened gender identities, filial traumas and sexual prejudices. These issues are also related to the tensions which seethe within the Scottish psyche – moral struggles between good and evil, Self and the Other, Jekyll and Hyde. On show is work from over forty Scottish modern and contemporary artists from Joan Eardley and Eduardo Paolozzi to Christine Borland, David Shrigley, Katie Paterson and Kevin Harman.
16 March 2011 at 6.30pm
This month, we are visiting acclaimed Scottish artist Christine Borland’s first solo show in Glasgow in almost two decades which sees the artist create a new cast of a 19th-century anatomical work as part of an ongoing interrogation of the relationship between art and medicine.
Sixteen years after the seminal exhibition, From Life, at Glasgow’s Tramway which brought Christine Borland’s work to wide public attention, the artist presents a new solo show in the city, Cast From Nature. Christine Borland’s new work, created during a Glasgow Sculpture Studios Production Residency, takes as its starting point, a striking fibreglass sculpture, From Nature (credited to John Goodsir F.R.C.S Edinburgh) which is part of the permanent collection of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh.
Cast From Nature explores and tests the performative interest in the relationship between doctors and patients as seen in her recent work. The piece will reflect on historical aspects of the anatomical process, the relationship between the early anatomist, his subject (most commonly a criminal, fresh from the gallows) and his ‘audience’ bearing witness to a process presented as ‘educational’ yet simultaneously a punishment worse than death.
Throughout the exhibition, Borland has cast the damaged From Nature through a series of public events. The process is streamed into a form of theatre located in the GSS main gallery reflecting the mediation of the body that is part of everyday life in the 21st century. Elsewhere in the gallery, as the casting proceeds, Borland will show a record of the process to date, pointing the way towards the future evolution of the project. Once the mould is complete, she will create a new version of From Nature.
29 October 2009 at 6pm
An Entangled Bank is the partner exhibition to Darwin’s Edinburgh. It will present a series of diverse but interrelated works by five contemporary artists, who have drawn inspiration from one of Darwin’s most famous visual metaphors the term ‘an entangled bank’ which appears in On the Origin of Species, and encapsulates both Darwin’s vivid literary style as well as the density, difference and dependence he observed in the natural world.
The exhibition will include work by Christine Borland, Ilana Halperin, Brian Hewitt, Kenny Hunter and Ben Rivers who all have national and international reputations and work in various media including film, photography, digital projection, sculpture, installation and film.
Joining us to discuss his work, will be Glasgow-based artist Kenny Hunter. Kenny was the very first artist invited to join Spin in discussions back in 2003, so it will be a pleasure to have him with us again.
Kenny Hunter was born in Edinburgh in 1962 and studied Fine Art and Sculpture at the Glasgow School of Art during the mid 80s. He has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad. He has also a number of high profile, commissions for Scotland including Cherub/Skull for the Tron Theatre, and Citizen Firefighter outside Glasgows Central Station.
This will be an opportunity for us to discuss how Darwin’s ideas about evolution have influenced the artists involved and how their work incorporates and presents these.
16 September 2009 at 6.30pm
Trongate 103 is a brand new arts resource for the city of Glasgow and will be the new home for a range of Glasgow-based creative organisations including: Glasgow Independant Studio and Glasgow Project Room, GMAC, Glasgow Print Studio, Project Ability, Russian Cultural Centre/Cafe Cossachok, Street Level Photoworks and Transmission Gallery
Our visit will be hosted by the Glasgow Print Studio with Kerry Paterson, Archive Curator, presenting their celebratory launch exhibition, Past impressions – 30 years in print. The visit will also include a unique opportunity to tour the Glasgow Print Studios new custom-built printmaking workshops and studios.
Past impressions – 30 years in print is a rich and varied exhibition celebrating the art of printmaking as an integral part of contemporary Scottish visual arts. A precis of the fabulous work produced at Glasgow Print Studio over three decades, this exhibition is also the culmination of the initial stages of a larger archive project. Two years of cataloguing and conserving a treasure trove of art works, printing blocks and plates, associated drawings and related objects has ensured the preservation of the largest and most significant collection of printmaking in Scotland from the 1970s to present day; providing a fabulous resource for learning and research.
Bringing together work from the archive by a number of highly-acclaimed international contemporary artists alongside major figures already firmly placed in the canon of Scottish art, this exhibition will feature over 100 works by many of Scotland’s leading artists including John Bellany, Elizabeth Blackadder, Alasdair Gray, Barbara Rae, Christine Borland, Hanneline Visnes, Richard Wright and Martin Boyce. New Glasgow Boys Adrian Wiszniewski, Ken Currie, Peter Howson and Steven Campbell are also well represented in the collection.
GLASGOW PRINT STUDIO
Founded in 1972, The Glasgow Print Studio exists to encourage and promote the art of printmaking in the West of Scotland. Traditionally an original print involves the artist making blocks, plates, stones or stencils which are then hand printed onto handmade paper using non-mechanical methods. Glasgow Print Studio offer world-class facilities and a wide range of services available to the public and artists.
16 July 2008 at 6.30pm
Before we take our August summer break, we will visit a really unusual exhibition, Simulated Patient taking place in a unique, purpose-built space in the Medical School of Glasgow University – a series of 10 pairs of rooms, the Communication Skills Suite, where medical students practice enacting potential future scenarios often dealing with difficult situations, like breaking bad news with actors in the role of patients.
Curated by one of Scotlands foremost contemporary artists, Christine Borland, a group of international artists including Borland herself, will include works which deal with issues of artifice/integrity, simulation/performance in art and medicine and more generally as inherent in all human communication.
26 January 2007 at 6pm
Welcome to a New Year of inspiring Spin events featuring gallery talks, studio visits, Spin-Off trips, art news and invitations to exclusive private views. We would also like to welcome back Suzanne Dunn from maternity leave as our Spin Co-ordinator.
January’s gathering will take place at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art with Off the Wall. As the title suggests, this is an exhibition of floor and ceiling-based works by a host of respected artists including the American hero of minimalism, Sol Le Witt, and some of Scotland’s most valued contemporary artists – Turner Prize nominees Martin Creed, Jim Lambie and Christine Borland, and Nathan Coley.
Off The Wall not only investigates the realm of modern-day sculpture, it also provides an opportunity for the SNGMA to present their more recent acquisitions. We will look the practicalities of site-specific work in collections, for example how realistic is Lambie’s ZOBOP when it must be recreated each time it is installed?
Considering the impact of sculpture or site work in the 20th-century, we will look at the role of the curator and deliberate their contribution as collaborator. We will also explore the issues of purchasing power and what these newly acquired works bring to our nation’s rich collection of visual art.
26 May 2006 at 6pm
This month, Spin: Edinburgh will visit Anatomy Acts, a comprehensive exhibition fusing art, science, history and medicine. There are over 160 exhibits on loan from a vast array of museums and universities across Scotland. We will be focusing on the contemporary selection, which includes specially commissioned work by Christine Borland, Joel Fisher and Claude Heath.
Joining us will be the exhibitions curator, Dr Andrew Patrizio, who will provide a valuable insight into the commissioned works that each present a unique view of this absorbing subject matter.
Patrizio’s selection is far more urbane than Gunther Von Hagen’s Bodyworlds and less sensationalist than Damien Hirst’s Hymn. We will have the chance to discuss the inspiration provided by the world of art and science which makes these works so exciting.
