Tag Archives: Glasgow

Michael Fullerton

29 January 2026
A Study in Uncertainty and Irresolution (Joseph Stiglitz, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre Italy, 26th June 2015) © Michael Fullerton

Happy New Year. We look forward to another year of incredible contemporary art!

Our first visit of the year is to the City Art Centre to discuss their exhibition by Glasgow artist, Michael Fullerton where we will be joined by curator Stuart Fallon.

Fullerton is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose practice places portraiture at its core. His work engages with complex figures, exposes socio-political power dynamics, and brings to light hidden or forgotten histories.

For this exhibition Fullerton has created a new series of paintings of individuals he met whilst working in the Hilltop Hotel in Carlisle, Cumbria. For five months in 2023 he lived and worked in the hotel – then serving as accommodation for people seeking asylum in the UK.

Ken Currie: New Work

25 July 2013, 6-7.30pm

For our July Spin evening, we will be back at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery to discuss the exhibition of new paintings by Ken Currie. We will be joined by Glasgow-based artist Sharon Thomas who, amongst other projects, has recently exhibited Herstory, a series of portraits of notable women in public life in Scotland.

Ken Currie is one of the outstanding figurative painters of his generation renowned in the context of the Portrait Gallery for his haunting, luminous painting Three Oncologists (2002) and his self-portrait Unfamiliar Reflection (2006). Widely admired for his intensely powerful and provocative work, the portraiture of the Old Masters, such as Velázquez, Goya and David has always fascinated Currie, and his own work often references similar traditions and concerns. In this exhibition of new paintings, on public view for the first time, Currie meditates upon the idea of the portrait, its origins and purposes, and its continued significance in the modern world.

END OF THE RED ROAD

21 March 2012 at 6.30pm

Glasgow: Spin discuss photographic work created at the Red Road flats in north Glasgow. This exhibition has been created in partnership between Street Level Photoworks and the Red Road Flats Cultural Project.

This exhibition contains a selection of work by Iseult Timmermans focusing on the lives of people living in the Red Road flats, where she has worked since 2004. It includes portraits, creative photography from the collaborative programme, documentary images from inside the last inhabited flats at 10 Red Road Court and the sealed off depths of the underground entertainment complex. The exhibition explores both the capturing of reality and the creative playing with representation as a way of preserving a sense of the place and the people that have passed through it.

Iseult has co-ordinated the Red Road Community Studio for the past two years and involved hundreds of current and ex-residents of the flats in a series of creative photography projects and events. The Community Studio closed on 31 January 2012, as 10 Red Road flats are iconic in Glasgow – once the tallest in Europe and the showcase of Glasgow Housing Corporation’s social housing policy – they now stand poised on the brink of demolition. The history of the Red Road Flats is much more than the powerful architecture and the aspiration of housing policy – it is a history of changing populations, an intricate web of stories and the many thousands of individual’s lives that have crossed the path of the Red Road.

Anna Barriball

23 February 2012 at 6pm

This month we will be visiting The Fruitmarket Gallery to see and discuss the work of Plymouth-born artist Anna Barriball who makes work which moves between the parallel languages of drawing and sculpture.

Barriball often uses the practice of drawing to create something which might be more properly understood to be sculpture.Much of her practice explores and depicts the accretion of time – from the length of time it takes for a candle to burn down to the repetitious activity of taking graphite rubbings from objects that bare the traces of their use or function. Her interventions produce objects that combine a minimalistic rigour and the seemingly endless endeavour to make sense of the world of objects by empirical study.

This exhibition brings together work made over the last ten years, and encompasses drawing, sculpture and video. It includes the kind of works on paper for which Barriball first became known, and also major new commissions: a large windbreak sculpture and a wall drawing.

Carol Rhodes

31 January 2008 at 6pm

For our first Spin event of 2008, we will explore the work of Glasgow-based artist, Carol Rhodes. This exhibition of paintings features almost fifteen years of work, exploring her very distinctive approach to landscape.

Carol Rhodes’ paintings resemble oblique aerial photographs. They depict fictional landscapes, depopulated, yet shaped, by human activities of industry, habitation, forestry, landscaping, transport and quarrying. Nearly all of these ‘landscapes’ are seen from a bird’s-eye view and almost all possess a hazy atmosphere.

Joining us in our exploration of these fascinating landscapes will be Edinburgh-based artist Alan Kilpatrick, who currently has a solo show at Art First in London. We will discuss the content and psychological effect of these peculiar, yet familiar images. Rhodes grew up in Bengal in India and at the age of fourteen came to the UK. We will think about Rhodes use of colour and, in particular, how the dry, earthy, muted colours of Indian colours have informed her palette.

Douglas Gordon: Superhumanatural

30 November 2006 at 6pm

‘I provide the board, the pieces and the dice, but you are the ones that have to play. ‘

Douglas Gordon

We will be visiting the much-anticipated retrospective exhibition by Douglas Gordon, one of Scotland’s most celebrated contemporary artists. And it doesnt disappoint.

The Royal Scottish Academy Building has been transformed beyond recognition with specially constructed blacked-out spaces, TV monitors and installations where the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Superhumanatural is Gordon’s first retrospective exhibition to be held in Scotland and features key works including 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Through a Looking Glass (1999) and 30 Seconds Text (1996).

Born in Glasgow in 1966, Douglas Gordon was among a number of Glasgow-based artists who embraced a more conceptually-orientated art in the 1990s. His deployment of pre-existing material, most notably in his use of Hitchcock’s iconic film in his work 24 Hour Psycho, attracted particular attention. He won the Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1998. Earlier this year, he had a mid-career survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Working in video, film, photography, audio and text-based works, he explores themes of trust, guilt, confession, deception and doubling. Many of his works are based on dichotomies – good and evil, life and death, birth and death, perception and memory and seduction and violence.

This is a great opportunity to see a major exhibition of his work. We will be joined by Keith Hartley, curator of the exhibition and Chief Curator and Deputy to the Director at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Keith, who was the exhibition curator, has been working on the show for a few years and will be able to provide us with a fascinating insight into the works and the man himself.

Stephen Hurrel

16 November 2006 at 6.30pm

For our next SPIN:Glasgow event, were going to go out of the galleries and into the city!

Glasgow has some fantastic pieces of public art in places throughout the city – some you might have noticed, some you might have walked by lots of times without noticing them, some youve wondered about and wanted to find out more.

One of Glasgow’s most prominent artists in this field is Stephen Hurrel. Were really pleased that Stephen has agreed to meet with us for the next SPIN:Glasgow event to talk about one particular piece of his work – The Rings in Glasgow’s Buchanan Galleries. Have a look at Stephens excellent website for an overview of his public art, gallery works and collaborations at www.hurrel-visual-arts.com

After talking with Stephen about his work, we may then visit another public art work by Douglas Gordon (who has just opened a major retrospective of his work at the National Galleries of Scotland). This work, a neon sign, is very important in that its one of the few things that the city of Glasgow owns by this artist, who is widely considered to be Scotlands most prominent contemporary artist.

Please meet at us at 6.30pm outside the entrance to Buchanan Street Galleries (the entrance which looks straight onto Sauchiehall Street).

Test Transmission

19 July 2006 at 6.30pm

Artist Ruth Barker will host an informal discussion about the CCA’s current exhibition, Test Transmission, which explores video artists relationship with television. There will also be a special screening of some work in the CCA cinema.