29 January 2026
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.
26 June 2025
This month, we’ll be heading to Gorgie to discover Hunted Projects, a unique collaboration that showcases both emerging and established artists.
We will explore the work of New York-based painter Ryan Wallace and will talk to Steven Cox, director of Hunted Projects. Not only is Steven managing the show, but he is also a practitioner himself who is extremely savvy at running an independent gallery.
This promises to be a fascinating chat where we delve into the origins and ethos of Hunted Projects and discover more about the commercial art market.
27 February 2025
This month we delve into the powerful exhibition by Edinburgh-based artist Everlyn Nicodemus. Born in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania in 1954, this major retrospective covers her 40-year career as an artist.
Her work is in part a physical journey across continents and in part a voyage where she explores her narrative intellectually and emotionally as well as that of individuals and their experiences. Through painting, drawing and collage, she addresses racial perceptions, gender and trauma with beautiful eloquence and compassion. Leading us through the exhibition will be the curator Stephanie Straine who worked closely with Everlyn.
This is an incredible story about an artist who had to take a 25-year hiatus from painting due to practicalities but continued to work and was recently rediscovered by a London gallerist. In 2022, she was awarded a commission from the Freelands Foundation to create a new body of works which we will have the opportunity to survey. Everlyn’s work is deservedly receiving high praise from the critics, it is a ‘must see’ show.
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.
27 June 2024
This month we will be heading to Wasps studios at Patriothall in Stockbridge to visit artists Jo Barker, Sara Brennan and Eric Cruickshank.
Some may remember Jo Baker from our Zoom session in January 2022, so it will be great for us to meet Jo in person. Her tapestry designs originate from simple gestural brush strokes in paint or ink with smudges of pastels. She is interested in our hands. In the spontaneous mark made by a simple gesture; traces of an event, a fleeting moment. The marks are then captured in the slow considered construction of tapestry weaving.
Sara Brennan‘s work is an unspoken response to landscape, with routes in a sense of place. Sara uses a refined and reduced approach to colour and form. Her work takes two routes, weaving either from her drawings or reacting and responding in smaller works to yarns as they are placed directly next to each other. The yarns are very specific and often unrepeatable.
Taking landscape as an initial starting point, Eric Cruikshank’s paintings are not about literal representation, instead the focus is on the emotive qualities of place. Using an objective palette tied to the Scottish landscape, colour acts as a vehicle to reveal the picture planes underlying points of reference; with the works being grounded in the everyday, the viewer is encouraged to readdress notions of their surroundings, where the familiar is opened up and made full of possibility.
26 January 2023
We start the new year with a visit to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery for the second iteration of their colleague exhibition, Artists at Work 2. The exhibition was co-curated by artists Aitor Moncho Tudanca, Darren Duddy, Silvia Barlaam and Victoria Gazeley.
Artists at Work 2 is an exhibition of art created by staff who work at the National Galleries of Scotland. Many talented artists work across the organisation and this exhibition celebrates their creativity. Following the popularity of the first Artists at Work exhibition in 2018, the exhibition highlights a wide range of artistic disciplines, from painting, drawing, illustration and photography to sculpture and jewellery making. The artists introduce their own work and share insights into their creative process through varied perspectives.
27 October 2022
This month we will be joined by NGS curators Emma Gillespie and Leila Riszko who will introduce us to Conversations with the Collection – a changing programme of displays which offers a new way to experience the national collection.
Each room bring to light rarely displayed yet fascinating artworks and stories. Works have been selected to create bold juxtapositions and visual similarities between artworks, styles and movements to offer a fresh take on how works of art can be presented and share the stories they tell. The aim is to unearth evocative stories and unexpected connections between artists and encourage a sense of openness and discovery.
Talking points are encouraged and explored by covering a wide mix of techniques, processes and approaches, ranging across sculpture, painting, photography and more. Iconic works by famous artists such as Anish Kapoor, Sarah Lucas, Jackson Pollock, Tracey Emin and Cindy Sherman are on display alongside those by brilliant but lesser-known figures including Carole Gibbons and Catherine Yarrow.
Each display explores a unique theme or topic with the thematic displays placing conversation at their heart in a bid to inspire conversations with the collection.
26 May 2022
This month we will be making our way to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to see Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life, where we will be joined by curator Leila Riszko.
Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life is a major retrospective, spanning the artist’s entire career charting the development of her practice, her engagement with political and societal change, and the events in her personal life which shaped her work. It features more than 120 works, lent from public and private collections, including renowned sculptures as well as rarely seen drawings and paintings.
The exhibition displays some of Hepworth’s most celebrated sculptures including the modern abstract carving that launched her career, her iconic strung sculptures, and later large-scale bronze and carved sculptures. It will also bring insight to Hepworth’s wide-ranging interests – such as dance, theatre, music, religion, politics, and science – and show how they infused her artistic practice.
Art & Life has been curated by Eleanor Clayton and organised by The Hepworth Wakefield in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland, and Tate St Ives.
31 March 2022
This month we are visiting New Arrivals: from Salvador Dalí to Jenny Saville at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Joining us for the evening will be Emma Gillespie. Emma has worked in a number of roles at the National Galleries of Scotland since 2014 and was appointed Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2019.
New Arrivals presents a fascinating showcase of the most recent acquisitions at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Featuring over 100 works of art, many of which are being shown here for the first time since they entered the collection, and spanning 110 years of art-making, the show offers a stunning range of modern and contemporary work including painting, sculptures, films and more.
Exhibition highlights include pieces by many historical and contemporary greats: Marc Chagall (the first painting by him to join a public collection in Scotland), Damien Hirst, Wangechi Mutu, Pablo Picasso, Bridget Riley, Jenny Saville, and Alberta Whittle, amongst many others. The show also spotlights a number of significant additions to National Galleries of Scotland’s world-renowned Surrealist collection, notably several works by female Surrealists, including Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning.
27 February 2020
For our February session, we will be discussing the major retrospective exhibition, Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance, where we will be joined by the curator of the exhibition, Alice Strang.
Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance is a survey of the Portuguese artist’s work that brings politics to the fore. This major exhibition is the first ever retrospective of Paula Rego’s work to be held in Scotland. Rego is one of the most important artists living in Britain today. Born in Lisbon in 1935, she is celebrated for her intense and courageous paintings, drawings and prints. The exhibition spans over 50 years of her international career, from the 1960s to the 2010s. It features more than 80 works, lent from public and private collections. Rego is admired for her courageous exploration of moral challenges to humanity, such as political tyranny, gender discrimination, abortion, female genital mutilation and the death of civilians in war. Other works in the exhibition begin with her Portuguese roots and lived experiences, or respond to current affairs and stories from literature, cinema, folklore, mythology and art history.
