Tag Archives: good and evil

THE SCOTTISH ENDARKENMENT: Art and Unreason | 1945 to the Present.

26 May 2016

For this month’s event we will be visiting Dovecot Gallery, where curators Andrew Patrizio and Bill Hare will meet us to discuss their exhibition THE SCOTTISH ENDARKENMENT: Art and Unreason | 1945 to the Present.

This is a thematic group show that explores the darker side of Scottish art. Standing in contrast to the Scottish Enlightenment, this exhibition proposes a ‘Scottish Endarkenment’, suggesting that artists working in the post-war era have taken more inspiration from the darkness than the light. The show engages with a broad range of challenging topics: ever-escalating communal and international conflicts, social inequalities and consumer materialism, threatened gender identities, filial traumas and sexual prejudices. These issues are also related to the tensions which seethe within the Scottish psyche – moral struggles between good and evil, Self and the Other, Jekyll and Hyde. On show is work from over forty Scottish modern and contemporary artists from Joan Eardley and Eduardo Paolozzi to Christine Borland, David Shrigley, Katie Paterson and Kevin Harman.

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.