26 February 2015
Our February event will be Spin’s first visit to a new visual art space in the city, The Number Shop Gallery and Studios.
Gallery Director, Alistair Grant will take us on a tour of the studios and preview emerging artist Natasha Russell’s exhibition of new work which will open the following night. Russell is an Edinburgh-based painter and illustrator. She is a recent graduate of Edinburgh College of Art and will join us on the night for the discussion.
Natasha is interested in the strange and imbalanced relationships between humans and the rest of nature. Night Smell is a body of recent work in printmaking and drawing exploring night time. Here she has woven together folklore and science, exploring the tug of war between our desire to become more removed from the natural world while peering ever closer.
The Number Shop studios provide artists with a defined personal space, as well as shared floor space in which to work, echoing the art school studio model. Since its opening, the TNS has hosted a program of exhibitions in the Project Space as well as throughout the shared studio spaces.
25 November 2010 at 6pm
This month we will be visiting the Talbot Rice Gallery to discuss the work of Alasdair Gray who describes himself as ‘a self-employed, verbal and pictorial artist.’
Alasdair Gray was born in Glasgow in 1934 and studied Design and Mural Painting at Glasgow School of Art from 1952-57. Since then he has exhibited widely across Scotland, particularly in his home city of Glasgow, where he has also undertaken several mural commissions for many of the city’s churches. He is also a prolific writer, with 18 published books to his name, and a winner of the Whitbread and Guardian book prizes.
Throughout his career, Gray’s work in art and literature has overlapped in form and content. He has worked as a teacher, painter, illustrator, playwright, scene painter, essayist, poet, novelist and muralist among other roles. In his books, word and image are juxtaposed and combined to form epic narratives that have been compared to the work of fellow artist-writers, such as William Blake.
Gray Stuff: Designs for Books and Posters, 1952 – 2010 is an exhibition of original graphic works revealing the development of illustrations used in Gray’s critically acclaimed novels, such as Lanark (1981), Poor Things (1992) and Old Men In Love (2007), and providing a rare opportunity to see the vibrant sketches and motifs which surround and animate the texts.
This is an insightful range of work touching many areas of Gray’s extensive practice, which can be traced back throughout his life. Joining us to explore the relationships between his work as a writer and a visual artist will be Pat Fisher, Director of Talbot Rice Gallery.
22 February 2007 at 6pm
Dark Light is ‘a painting that can literally be stepped into’. Scottish painter Alison Watt, who is currently artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in London, has created a room within a room in the form of a metal cube. Step inside and eloquent paintings of black cloth are revealed.
In previous solo exhibitions, namely Fold at the Fruitmarket Gallery in 1997, Watt presented diptychs of fabric and figure. Three years later in Shift at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, only the fabric and the suggestion of a human form remained. In 2004, she created Still, a composite of four 6ft paintings suspended in the Memorial Chapel of Old St Pauls Church. This personal homage to this extraordinary space was one of the highlights of the Edinburgh Festival of 2004, and is now on permanent display.
As Watt’s paintings have become increasingly engulfing and abstract, Dark Light is the fruits of her ambition to create an installation piece, made as a result of her Creative Scotland Award.
We will be looking at this exciting new work and will also consider the shift from figurative painting to abstraction which is ever prominent in contemporary art, as well as focusing on the relationship between the dealer and the artist.
