29 July 2015
This month Spin will be meeting at the National Galleries on Wednesday 29 July (please note change of date) to talk about Bailey’s Stardust exhibition which opened last week.
The exhibition includes hundreds of photographs by David Bailey. Coming to prominence in Swinging Sixties London he has made an outstanding contribution to photography with his thought-provoking portraits.
Bailey’s Stardust is the largest exhibition of David Bailey’s portraits to be shown in the UK with over 300 portraits including works that depict Bailey’s time in East Africa, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Delhi and the Naga Hills, as well as icons from the worlds of fashion and the arts, striking portraits of the Rolling Stones, Catherine Bailey and the East End of London.
We will be joined for the discussion by Edinburgh-based photographic artist, writer and critic
26 October 2006 at 6pm
This month, you are invited to join us at Stills Gallery to view the work of Tracey Moffatt.
We will be joined by Kirsten Lloyd, Stills Programme Manager, who is also a practisng artist and a member of the artists group, Emerged. Kirsten will first introduce us to the most recent developments at the Gallery, and then we will discuss its current exhibition, Adventures by Tracey Moffatt.
Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists and is highly regarded for her formal and stylistic experimentation in film, photography and video. She often describes herself as a director of photo-narratives, creating distinctive photographs which reference popular and visual art culture – an amalgamation of 70s television, comic books, B-movies and 007.
Shown alongside these photographic works is a group of her earlier films including Love (2003), a spectacular cut-and-paste video work which carefully splices together scenes from some of the artist’s favourite Hollywood melodramas. Cinematic cliche gives way to a darkly sexy feminism with hours of film edited down to a succession of passionate embraces, acts of betrayal, frenzied violence and revenge.
This should all make for a very interesting and entertaining event. We look forward to seeing you there.
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.
