Tag Archives: City Art Centre

A Parliament of Lines: Aspects of Contemporary Drawing

28 June 2012 at 6pm

Our July event will take place at the City Art Centre to see a survey of contemporary Scottish drawing showcasing fifteen artists work, all of whom use drawing as an important element in their practice. Artists include: Charles Avery, Moyna Flannigan, Nathalie de Briey, Paul Chiappe, Euan Gray, Alan Johnston, Andrew MacKenzie and David Shrigley.

A Parliament Of Lines gets its name from social anthropologist Tim Ingold’s studies of growth and movement, in particular his observation that ‘everything is a parliament of lines .  . . to study both people and things is to study the lines they are made of.’ The exhibition is built around five broad themes: The Body, Architecture/Landscape, Minimal Abstraction, Reproduction/Photography and Sculptural Investigation.

Curated by artist Euan Gray, most of the work has been created specifically for the show and includes Nathalie de Briey’s watercolour drawings of incinerated objects from the Hiroshima bomb site drawn on delicate paper; Paul Chiappe’s extraordinary miniature reproductions of old-school photographs; Shrigley animation entitled Friends; Andrew MacKenzie’s meticulous layered images of landscapes and trees; Moyna Flannigan’s new suite of six drawings in ink and gouache depicting the story of Adam and Eve;  and a site specific wall drawing by Alan Johnston.

Drawing is not, as it once was, the foundation on which everything else is built. It is just one option among many, but it has certain intrinsic characteristics, which make it attractive to artists with very different preoccupations.

Joining us to explore these different areas of enquiry will be one of the exhibiting artists, Andrew MacKenzie. Andrew is a painter and an MFA graduate from Edinburgh College of Art. He lives and works in the Scottish Borders and has exhibited with The Contemporary Art Society, London, The Talbot Rice Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Leeds and The Paul Khun Gallery in Calgary, Canada.

Anatomy Acts

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.

Incommunicado

25 March 2004 at 6pm

As promised, here is some more information about the upcoming Spin event in this impressive exhibition from the Hayward Gallery in London which opened here at the weekend. The Hayward blurb for the show is very illuminating, so I thought I would reproduce it here:

‘The desire to communicate can be a powerful motive behind the production of art, but it is the fallibility of communication that provides the subject for this exhibition.’

Curated by Margot Heller, Director of South London Gallery, Incommunicado brings together contemporary international film, video, photography, sculpture, drawing and text-based work to explore the manifestations and consequences of communication going wrong. The show examines personal misunderstandings, cultural and political clashes and linguistic and expressive limitations.

The importance of language in this context is introduced through work by Samuel Beckett, simultaneously signalling the writers influence on younger generations of visual artists. Central to the exhibition is Comedie (1966), a recently re-discovered film made in collaboration with Marin Karmitz, which reveals the poetic and absurd results of separating language from meaning. Other artists include: Pavel Buchler, Phil Coy, Omer Fast, Angus Fairhurst, Mona Hatoum, Christian Marclay, Bruce Nauman, Hirsch Perlman, Smith/Stewart, Erika Tan, Lawrence Weiner, Francesca Woodman and Chen Zhen.

You can probably tell from this that there will be elements of humour, absurdism, and poetry as well as a stimulating underlying theme to think about, and so it is highly appropriate (and gratifying) that we will have the artist John Beagles to help us negotiate it all! As well as being a lecturer in the Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies at Edinburgh College of Art, John works alongside Graham Ramsay in their art practice as the video/performance/installation art duo Beagles and Ramsay. They have had solo shows all over the place including Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, and are a very popular part of the contemporary scene in Scotland. You might have seen them last year at Zenomap, Scotland’s contribution to the Venice Biennale, the Stills Gallery or at the Collective Gallery.