25 June 2026
This month we’re heading to Collective Gallery for the summer exhibition by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, joined by curator Claire Craig. Commissioned for Folkestone Triennial 2025, and curated by Collective’s Director Sorcha Carey, this important new work will be shown in Scotland for the first time.
Afterlife brings together nearly 200 amulets in a sculptural installation designed in collaboration with Berlin-based architects, Zeller and Moye. Amulets are miniature talismanic objects, typically carved in stone. Appearing across millennia and cultures, they are small enough to be held in the hand or worn, and are generally considered protective.
Afterlife reimagines this tradition. Working with museums around the world, Paterson has recreated amulets from civilisations across the globe (including Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Viking, Islamic, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Celtic, Greco-Roman and Pre-Columbian), using materials sourced from endangered landscapes and fragile ecosystems, to serve as a bridge between past and present.
26 March 2026
This month we make our first visit to Scott Lawrie Gallery where we will be joined by the gallery’s founder Scott. The gallery presented its first UK show during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2024 entitled THIS IS NO SAFE SPACE: Art in Capitalist Realism, inspired by the writings of the late Mark Fisher.
For our Spin visit, we will be visiting the new exhibition The Matthew Collings Holistic Art Experience. Former TV presenter and art critic (This is Modern Art, Channel 4) Matthew Collings has created an immersive installation featuring some 370 drawings covering a vast range of subjects from life, love, politics and death.
26 February 2026
Join us at our February Spin event as we head to Modern One to see ARTIST ROOMS Louise Bourgeois|Helen Chadwick|Robert Mapplethorpe. We’ll be joined by Lucy Askew, Head of Modern & Contemporary Art, who will share her insights along the way.
The displays feature Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick and Robert Mapplethorpe. Each presentation offers a distinctive and diverse approach to ideas of self-expression, identity and the complexity of our inner life. Highlights include Louise Bourgeois’s three-metre-high Spider; Helen Chadwick’s innovative light boxes and a playful sculptural installation and striking self-portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe.
These displays are part of a wider refresh at Modern One, highlighting modern and contemporary works from the national collection.
25 September 2025
After our month off we are back to explore one of the standout exhibitions of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years. Featuring over 200 works, the show includes stunning installations made in response to the iconic Royal Scottish Academy building, as well as drawings, photographs, films, sketchbooks and archival items dating back to the mid-1970s. To provide insight into the work we will be joined by Chief Curator Patrick Elliott.
Goldsworthy is internationally recognised for his work with natural materials such as clay, stones, reeds, branches, leaves, snow and ice. For over 50 years, he has created a unique and highly influential body of work that speaks of our relationship with the land.
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years has been conceived by the artist as a single immersive artwork in response to the space, materials and character of the RSA building. The interrelationship of humans and the working land is a recurrent theme in Goldsworthy’s art and in the exhibition. He often presents the land as a hard, hostile and brutal place. Fences and barriers feature prominently, in the form of rusted barbed wire stretched across a room, and a massive, cracked clay wall. As in nature, beauty and danger co-exist.
29 February 2024
This month we will be joined by Senior Curator Stephanie Straine as we head to Modern One’s new exhibition Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time.
South Korean-born, London-based Do Ho Suh (born 1962, Seoul) is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. This expansive exhibition will explore the foundational role that drawing and paper play in Suh’s artistic practice, focusing on his collaborative methods, experimental techniques, and innovative use of materials.
Suh creates engaging and imaginative artworks that ask questions about home and identity. ‘Home’ is so much more than the place you live. Your own version of home is a fundamental part of who you are, influenced by your day-to-day life and your deepest memories. Do Ho Suh explores some of these fascinating ideas in his first solo exhibition in Scotland, taking over an entire level of Modern One. It will present the artist’s complex and compelling thread drawings – in which cotton thread is embedded in handmade paper – alongside architectural rubbings, paper sculptures, cyanotypes, printmaking and watercolours.
There will also be an immersive installation of Suh’s famed ‘hubs’, life-size sculptures that recreate physical spaces in colourful, translucent fabric. Visitors to the exhibition can enter and move through this innovative reimagining of places meaningful to the artist and his life.
28 November 2024
This month we will be joined by assistant curator Leila Riszko, as she guides us around the new exhibition Bruce McLean: I Want My Crown at Modern One.
This celebratory display of works by internationally renowned Scottish artist Bruce McLean, marks his 80th birthday. Discover McLean’s humorous and lively six-decade long inquiry into sculpture and his criticisms of the art world from within. Through works made across a range of media – including photography, performance, painting, printmaking, film, and ceramics – this display invites you to challenge your thinking about sculpture and expand your ideas of what it can be.
Sharp, witty and satirical, this display will showcase the breadth of McLean’s boundary-pushing work and spotlight him as one of the most important artists of his generation.
26 September 2024
We return to Talbot Rice Gallery for their momentous showing of work by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui where we will be joined by curator James Clegg.
The most significant exploration of El Anatsui’s practice ever staged in the UK, Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta spans five decades of work and will extend to the building’s façade, turning it into an open-air gallery.
The exhibition opens with a monumental new work made specifically for Talbot Rice Gallery. It journeys through a large selection of Anatsui’s iconic large-scale sculptural wall hangings made with reclaimed metal from the bottling industry in Ghana and Nigeria (made between 2002 to 2024). This includes the ‘grandmother’ of these forms, Woman’s Cloth (2002), the first of its kind on loan from the British Museum, and a sleeping chamber in which to quietly observe Royal Slumber (2023).
25 July 2024
This month we will be joined by Chief Curator Lucy Askew as we make our way to Modern Two for Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990.
This touring exhibition is a timely exploration of the work and lived experiences of a post-war generation of women artists that have largely been omitted from art historical narratives. Surfacing the wealth and diversity of work created in the UK during the 1970s and 80s, a period of seismic social and political change, it demonstrates, across a wide variety of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, film and photography, how women’s needs were marginalised within mainstream culture and reveals how these artists used radical ideas and methods to confront issues that will resonate with contemporary audiences – from access to healthcare and class struggles to ecological disaster, racism, and misogyny.
25 April 2024
This month we will be heading to Talbot Rice Gallery for their new exhibition Candice Lin: The Animal Husband, where we will be joined by curator James Clegg.
In her first solo exhibition in Scotland, Candice Lin brings together new and existing work to play with the University of Edinburgh’s former Natural History Museum as a site of corrupted encounters, transgressions and transformations. Queering human and animal relationships, Lin uses a vocabulary of crude, ambiguous and dreamlike imagery to expose the conceits surrounding the scientific categorisation and control of bodies, and its links to the construction of race, gender, animality and humanness.
28 September 2023
This month head to the Talbot Rice Gallery for three new exhibitions on show by artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Hephzibah Israel and Jesse Jones.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s new film commission, 45th Parallel, focuses on the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a unique municipal site that straddles the jurisdictions of Canada and the United States.
Commissioned by Talbot Rice Gallery and produced in collaboration with Fraser Muggeridge studio, மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is a series of twenty individual text works by Hephzibah Israel that poetically explores the nature of translation and what it is to navigate borders.
Jesse Jones’ new film installation The Tower is the second part in a trilogy beginning with Tremble Tremble, which was commissioned for the Irish Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
