26 January 2012 at 6pm
The Sculpture Show is a major new exhibition which uses the extraordinary collection at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to explore the development of sculpture over the last 110 years.
We will start by exploring a striking late work by American Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt which has been specially installed for the exhibition and has never before been on display in Scotland. Wall Drawing #1136 (2004) covers three walls of a single room, and reaches almost 22 metres in length.
We will also be looking at the work of Glasgow-based sculptor, Nick Evans, who has had access to the national collections as part of a National Galleries/Creative Scotland Fellowship. Recently Evans has been interested in the scholarship and history of the encounter between cultures, what is often called exoticism, the way that artists like Gauguin came across Oceanic art or Picasso’s encounter with African art.
Other works to explore will be an enchanting film, The Way Things Go by Peter Fischli and David Weiss which documents a 100-foot causal chain assembled of everyday objects triggered by fire and pyrotechnics; Ron Mueck’s monumental work A Girl (2006); and Simon Starling’s Le Jardin Suspendu (1998), a scale model of a 1920s French Farman Mosquito plane built using the wood from a balsa tree cut in Ecuador.
21 September 2006 at 6pm
To kick off the Autumn season, we will be taking a closer look at one of the most talked about shows at this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, Ron Mueck.
The Australian-born, London-based artist is the first contemporary artist to be given a solo show in the refurbished galleries of the Royal Scottish Academy Building. The exhibition contains ten works, including the recently completed monumental sculpture of a newborn baby, A Girl (2006), five new works first shown at the Fondation Cartier in Paris earlier this year, and four previous works including Man in a Boat (2002) and Ghost (1998).
Ron Mueck previously worked in the special effects industry, but his career took a dramatic turn when he was asked by his mother-in-law, the artist Paula Rego, to create a model of Pinocchio. The sculpture was noticed and bought by Charles Saatchi. So impressed was Saatchi by this work that he asked Mueck to create more and to appear in the 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. The now infamous sculpture, Dead Dead (1996-97), a half life-size replica of his dead fathers naked body, drew considerable attention.
Some critics love Muecks work. Others hate it. Jonathan Jones of The Guardian described the exhibition as ‘blank, empty and brainless’. You will get the chance to make up your own mind up as we discuss the works with our special guest, Edinburgh artist Wendy McMurdo.
