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.
25 April 2019
We pay a return visit to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery to discuss three of the 20th century’s most influential photographers: Francesca Woodman, Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Drawn from the ARTIST ROOMS collection jointly owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate, Self-Evidence brings together a selection of work by the these three American photographers to explore the idea of a self-portrait.
Curated by Annie Lyden, international photography curator at the NGS, the photographs date from the 1960s to the 1980s and cover a period of profound societal change and shifting attitudes towards issues such as women’s rights and homosexuality.
Each of the photographers have explored portraiture in different ways; Woodman’s images are experimental and address an inner mental state. Arbus chose not to represent herself but those around her in her portfolio, A Box of Ten Photographs, 1969-1971. And Mapplethorpe portrays himself in varying guises as well as recording the final ten years of his life.
18 March 2009 at 6.30pm
This months Spin: Glasgow travels to Stirling to see a solo exhibition of work by Graham Fagen.
Born in Glasgow in 1966, Graham Fagen lives and works in Scotland. He studied at Glasgow School of Art and the Kent Institute of Art and Design. Fagen’s work focuses on the means of communication within a culture, and how it is compromised or transformed when taken out of context. Many of his projects have explored the notion of cultural identity and meaning. In 2007, Fagen was commissioned by Glasgow Museums to present downpresser, a major solo exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) for the commemoration of the abolition of slavery. He gained great critical acclaim for Killing Time, his collaborative project with Graham Eatough of Suspect Culture at DCA, Dundee. Fagen has previously exhibited at London’s Imperial War Museum, including Theatre (2000), the ICA and V&A as well as extensively throughhout the world.
somebodyelse is a solo exhibition of portraits by Fagen including a newly commissioned work. The portraits in somebodyelse combine real and imagined figures in order to explore Scotland’s contemporary and historic culture. Works from previous photographic series by Fagen are also on show.
