25 January 2018
For our first event for 2018, we will be exploring NOW – the second in a series of exhibitions which highlight the range of quality of work being made by artists associated with Scotland and across the globe.
The centrepiece of NOW is new and recent sound installations, paintings and photographs by the Turner Prize-winning artist, Susan Philipsz. Born in Glasgow in 1965 and now based in Berlin, she is renowned for her installations and how sound can trigger memory and heighten perception.
Seven Tears (2016) features seven synchronized record players each playing a single note taken from the baroque lament, Lachrimae or Seaven Teares Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans (1604) by the English composer, John Dowland (1563-1626). The original composition was written for viol and lute and is based on the motif of a falling tear. Philipsz has isolated individual tones from the original song, making it less recognisable. Each note was produced by running a wet finger around the rim of glasses filled with water. These recordings have then been rendered onto transparent vinyl records.
To complement Seven Tears, Philipsz has made a series of salt paintings, produced by submerging painted canvases into a bath of salted water.
Other featured artists include paintings by Michael Armitage, a newly commissioned installation by Sarah Rose, photographs by Yto Barrada, video installation by Hiwa K and a display pairing 19th-century dolls with drawings by Kate Davis.
A key thread woven through the exhibition is storytelling and ideas around collecting, play, legacy, memory and loss.
28 September 2017
For our autumn programme, we will be exploring the work of Glasgow-based artist Kate Davis, in this her first solo exhibition in Edinburgh. Nudes Never Wear Glasses brings together a new photographic series with drawings and two film works on the subject of women’s domestic labour. The title of exhibition refers to a comment made by the photographer Jo Spence.
The film work Weight (2014, 11mins) takes John Read’s 1961 BBC documentary about the artist Barbara Hepworth as its starting point. Replacing references to art with references to housework and childcare, this clever satire explores how televised depictions of creativity have constructed our understanding of artistic production and other forms of labour.
Also on show is the first gallery presentation of her Margaret Tait Award film, Charity (2017, 16mins). This is a witty, filmic essay on the subject to women breastfeeding told through a variety of art historical still imagery, interlaced with moving images of the artist undertaking household tasks and a narration recited by Gerda Stevenson of extracts adapted from the writings of Margaret Tait (1918-1999). Tait was an Orcadian filmmaker, poet, artist and writer whose film poems, hand-painted animations and documentaries were pioneering in the field of experimental filmmaking.
26 November 2009 at 6pm
The Fruitmarket Gallery celebrates the contemporary resurgence in drawing, featuring eleven young international artists including Jan Albers, Michael Borremans, Marc Brandenburg, Fernando Bryce, Kate Davis and David Haines.
In the Western tradition, drawing was the foundation of art education, the essential discipline underlying all others. In the second half of the 20th century, a more academic approach to art-making threatened the authority of drawing as a pure art form; as a result, many schools cast it out as a throwback to past times. Recently drawing has returned to the mainstream as a cheap and autonomous activity, a democratically available form of image making, uniquely capable of intimate, spontaneous self-revelation.
This exhibition of new work by eleven highly acclaimed young international artists includes small, intricately-crafted pencil drawings; large scale installations in which the ‘drawn’ lines are made from masking tape; and drawings that mutate into animation.
17 September 2008 at 6.30pm
Join us to hear curator Sorcha Dallas discuss Outsider, an exhibition of new work by Glasgow-based artist Kate Davis (born New Zealand 1977).
Sorcha Dallas graduated from the Painting Department at The Glasgow School of Art in 1998. Between 1999-2004, she co-founded and curated the moving gallery space, Switchspace, working with property agents to deliver a programme of cutting-edge contemporary art within alternative environments throughout Glasgow.
In April 2004, she opened Sorcha Dallas, a permanent commercial gallery dedicated to representing and promoting Scottish artists on a local, national and international level. She has also written for (a-n) Magazine, Circa, The Fruitmarket Gallery and The List, has worked as an artist within education and worked in 2004 as a project coordinator on Reputations, an international public art project in Castlemilk.
