19 June 2014
Our June Spin event will be a tour and discussion of Corin Sworn’s solo exhibition at Inverleith House. We will be joined by curator Paul Nesbitt to discuss the artist’s work which has been paired here with botanical specimens from the RBGE collection.
Sworn is a graduate from the Glasgow School of Art’s MFA course and was one of three artists representing Scotland at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Here she presents new work relating to the processes of natural dyeing made after a period of research into the Royal Botanic Garden’s Herbarium collection. The exhibition also includes the first Scottish showing of The Rag Papers, first shown at Chisenhale, London in 2013. Sworn is winner of the 2013-15 Max Mara Art Prize for Women.
31 May 2012 at 6pm
Inverleith House presents a major exhibition by the painter Willie McKeown, who was born in Tyrone, 1962, and was living and working in Edinburgh at the time of his death on October 25, 2011. During this time McKeown developed a body of work that has had a radical and fundamental effect on our understanding of the age-old relationship of art to nature.
The foundation of his work and life was his belief in the primacy of feeling. His paintings took on the guise of objective minimalism and the monochrome, but presented us with so much more; nature as something real, tangible, all around us, to be touched and felt. Through very subtle gradation of tone, a highly refined use of colour, and his enchanting, ‘room’ installations, McKeown created moments of exquisite beauty and bliss. He steered our attention not to the distant sky but to the air around us, to the openness of nature, the feeling of our emergence into light and our proximity to the infinite.
This exhibition brings together a collection of his most recent paintings exhibited for the first time.
30 June 2011 at 6pm
A visit to Edinburgh’s Botanic Garden to see the first museum exhibition in Scotland by the internationally celebrated British sculptor, Thomas Houseago.
Thomas Houseago’s work playfully subverts the expectation of sculpture. Drawing reference to a multitude of styles such as Classicism, Cubism and Futurism, Houseago’s intentionally clumsy forms trade the imperious and enduring qualities of traditional bronze or marble for the humble aesthetic of plaster and various found materials. Lacking the weighty physical stature associated with three dimensional media, Houseago’s ‘monumental’ structures appear almost comically flimsy, reducing the grandiose weight of art history into sympathetic effigies.
This exhibition has been curated to coincide with an exhibition of original drawings used by John Hope, the early and for a long time unrecognised pioneer of botany who, in two short decades, built up the Royal Botanic Garden to be one of the leading institutions of its kind in Europe.
Joining us in discussion to explore the links between Houseago’s bold new works – including the arresting 2.5m-high Untitled Lumpy Figure which will be installed in the gardens – and Hope’s fascinating large-scale botanical images, will be Linsey Young, Assistant Curator of exhibitions at Inverleith House.
30 June 2005 at 6pm
Situated in Edinburgh’s beautiful botanic gardens, Inverleith House is renowned amongst international artists as one of the foremost contemporary art spaces in Britain. It has undergone extensive refurbishment in the last couple of years, which, as some of you will be aware, has prevented us from having an event there until now.
Director Paul Nesbitt (himself a unique hybrid: passionate botanist, crossed with enthusiastic contemporary art curator) will be talking us through the current show, Evergreen, which brings together eighteen of the artists who have had solo shows at Inverleith in the past couple of decades. In a microcosmic demonstration of the format at Inverleith, Paul has juxtaposed minimalism and conceptualism with beautiful botanical drawings, calling on an extraordinary array of international heavyweights and Scottish stars to contribute works. These include Lawrence Weiner, Agnes Martin, Carl Andre, Richard Wright, Douglas Gordon and Callum Innes to name but a few.
Paul is an inspiring and entertaining speaker, so it will be very rewarding to hear about his vision for Inverleith House and his dealings with these artists over the years.
