Tag Archives: Keith Hartley

ARTIST ROOMS

30 April 2009 at 6pm

This month we will be visiting the long-awaited ARTIST ROOMS exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art to see the work of Vija Celmins, Ellen Gallagher, Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Andy Warhol and Francesca Woodman.

ARTIST ROOMS is an extraordinary collection of international contemporary art recently acquired jointly by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate through the donation of over 700 works from Anthony d’Offay which will tour a wide range of museums and galleries across the UK. At the heart of ARTIST ROOMS is the concept of individual rooms devoted to particular artists, so that their work can be seen and appreciated in depth.

Highlights of the exhibition on show at the Gallery of Modern Art include Celmin’s beautiful, delicate images of seas, deserts and the night sky; a complete series of landscape and portrait paintings by the American painter Alex Katz; Francesca Woodman’s intimate, surrealist-influenced photographs; and Damien Hirst’s iconic Away from the Flock – an early example of Hirst’s animals in formaldehyde.

Joining us to discuss the works will be Keith Hartley, Chief Curator at the Gallery of Modern Art. Keith was instrumental in negotiating with Anthony d’Offay to secure this important acquisition so it will be a fascinating insight into how it all came about.

Gerhard Richter

27 November 2008 at 6pm

Gerhard Richter is one of the most influential and important contemporary artists in the world today.

Drawn from a small, select number of private collections, this exhibition provides an unrivalled overview of the artist’s career from 1963 to the present. His paintings, both figurative and abstract, have had a huge impact on several generations of artists, and continue to do so, and has helped to make painting once again a vital means of artistic expression.

Richter’s incredibly complex work oscillates between paintings bordering on photorealism and large, abstract compositions of captivatingly expressive colour and technical perfection. Yet his work is always centred on painting itself, which is asserted in many different ways, confidently holding up its own reality for comparison to the actual world.

Joining us in discussion will be Keith Hartley, Chief Curator of the Gallery of Modern Art and curator of the Gerhard Richter exhibition.

Bank of Scotland totalART Andy Warhol: A Celebration of Life . . . And Death

27 September 2007 at 6pm

This is the second major exhibition of works by Andy Warhol to be staged in Edinburgh within the last two years. While Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits, held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) in 2005, was devoted to only one of Warhol’s intriguing subject matters, Andy Warhol: A Celebration of Life . . . and Death spans four decades and encompasses his eclectic style.

This major retrospective, curated by Keith Hartley, Chief Curator and Acting Director of the SNGMA, is a rare opportunity to meet Warhol through his work in illustration, printmaking, photography, sculpture, painting and film. Unless you are fortunate to visit Warhol’s museum in Pittsburgh, youll find it hard to source such a well curated exhibition.

Whether you admire or loathe the work of Warhol, there is no escaping his influence on twentieth-century western culture.

For this event, we are going to explore the exhibition in a random style with a slight twist to our usual proceedings. Meeting us part of the way will be the art historian and critic, Jean Wainwright, a leading authority on Warhol who recently completed her PhD on Warhols audio recordings.

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.