Tag Archives: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

British Art Show 8

31 March 2016

This month, we will discuss highlights from the British Art Show 8 exhibition where we will be joined by Mairi Lafferty, Daskalopoulos Curator of Engagement at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

The British Art Show is a touring exhibition taking place every five years that provides a vital overview of the most significant contemporary art produced in the UK. British Art Show 8 has been curated by Anna Colin and Lydia Yee is hosted across three galleries in Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh. This year, it tours the work of over 40 artists to four cities across the UK.

We look forward to seeing you there.

The Sculpture Show

26 January 2012 at 6pm

The Sculpture Show is a major new exhibition which uses the extraordinary collection at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to explore the development of sculpture over the last 110 years.

We will start by exploring a striking late work by American Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt which has been specially installed for the exhibition and has never before been on display in Scotland. Wall Drawing #1136 (2004) covers three walls of a single room, and reaches almost 22 metres in length.

We will also be looking at the work of Glasgow-based sculptor, Nick Evans, who has had access to the national collections as part of a National Galleries/Creative Scotland Fellowship. Recently Evans has been interested in the scholarship and history of the encounter between cultures, what is often called exoticism, the way that artists like Gauguin came across Oceanic art or Picasso’s encounter with African art.

Other works to explore will be an enchanting film, The Way Things Go by Peter Fischli and David Weiss which documents a 100-foot causal chain assembled of everyday objects triggered by fire and pyrotechnics; Ron Mueck’s monumental work A Girl (2006); and Simon Starling’s Le Jardin Suspendu (1998), a scale model of a 1920s French Farman Mosquito plane built using the wood from a balsa tree cut in Ecuador.

Richard Wright: The Stairwells Project and Luke Fowler: What you see is where you’re at (Part 3)

28 October 2010 at 6pm

Our Spin event will be split over the two modern art galleries to see the work of Turner prize winner Richard Wright who was commissioned by The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to make a major wall-painting in one of the public stairwells of the Dean Gallery; and Part 3 of the rehang What you see is where you’re at featuring the work of Luke Fowler.

Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright is best known for painting on walls, where the context and architecture of the space are the content of the work. Believing that ‘there’s already too much stuff in the world’ Wright describes his work as having similar qualities to a musical performance in that it exists in the memory of the creator and the audience, but can’t be owned, sold, or carried around.

The title of the rehang What you see is where you’re at comes from the film on display by award winning Glasgow-based artist Luke Fowler. Fowler’s film documents and explores the Kingsley Hall social experiment carried out in the 60s by the Scottish psychiatrist and writer R. D. Laing and is part of his ongoing investigation into radical thinkers and those responsible for the development of progressive ideas.

We look forward to you joining us in discussion to uncover how the Dean building’s architecture, history and present function have all informed Richard Wright’s work and how the medium of film has provided Luke Fowler with the unique ability to facilitate access to such a sensitive subject. This will also be a chance for us to see some of the new contemporary works on display as part of the re-hang including Robert Therrien and Gilbert and George.

What you see is where you’re at

28 January 2010 at 6pm

Our first event of 2010 is What you see is where you’re at which forms part of a complete re-hang of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations. The re-hang brings together new displays from the permanent collection, which dates from around 1900, alongside commissions from leading Scottish and international contemporary artists in innovative and often unexpected combinations. Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries, has described the re-hang as ‘a new beginning, not about throwing out old art but new ways of experiencing it.’

The artworks are showcased in thematic rooms, dedicated to solo artists or individual works, as well as to artistic movements. Highlights include a large-scale work by Martin Boyce, Electric Trees and Telephone Booth Conversations; a two-room display curated by the artist Callum Innes; a room dedicated to German artist Kitty Kraus and works by Douglas Gordon.

This will be a chance for us to find out the ideas behind a major re-hang in what has been described as ‘the biggest shake-up in over two decades.’

 Joining us in these discussions will be Alice Strang, Senior Curator at the Gallery of Modern Art.

The Islanders: An Introduction by Charles Avery

29 January 2009 at 6pm

To start the year, we will be visiting the Gallery of Modern Art to discuss The Islanders: An Introduction by Charles Avery, a key figure in a new generation of Scottish artists.

For the past four years, Charles Avery has created texts, drawings, installations and sculptures which describe the topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, whose every feature embodies a philosophical proposition, problem or solution. Avery’s mapping of the island focuses on absurd details from mysterious landscapes, such as the Eternal Forest to strange gods and the inhabitants addiction to gin-pickled eggs. The island’s wildlife is also on show represented in the form of large taxidermy sculpture.

‘The Island is not a parallel world, its part of this world, therefore it is a fiction. I use the word fiction very broadly. History is a fiction, art history is fiction. Maybe reality is the biggest fiction of all!’ Charles Avery.

Tracey Emin: 20 Years

25 September 2008 at 6pm

For this month’s Spin event, we will be visiting the Gallery of Modern Art to see the work of Tracey Emin.

Emin’s art discloses the intimate details of her life across a range of media: drawing, filmmaking, installation, painting, neon, photography, sewn work and sculpture. She exposes herself, her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in a direct and frank manner which is often tragic and at times, humorous.

Emin studied at the Royal College of Art in London from 1987-1989, eventually destroying all her work following a traumatic abortion. She only began working again around 1993, producing confessional letters, and then combining texts with objects and mementos from her youth. These works propelled her to the forefront of the YBA (Young British Artist) scene.

This exhibition looks at the full range of her work, from the rarely seen early work to the iconic My Bed. Joining us in discussion will be Glyn Davis, Lecturer at Glasgow School of Art.

Carol Rhodes

31 January 2008 at 6pm

For our first Spin event of 2008, we will explore the work of Glasgow-based artist, Carol Rhodes. This exhibition of paintings features almost fifteen years of work, exploring her very distinctive approach to landscape.

Carol Rhodes’ paintings resemble oblique aerial photographs. They depict fictional landscapes, depopulated, yet shaped, by human activities of industry, habitation, forestry, landscaping, transport and quarrying. Nearly all of these ‘landscapes’ are seen from a bird’s-eye view and almost all possess a hazy atmosphere.

Joining us in our exploration of these fascinating landscapes will be Edinburgh-based artist Alan Kilpatrick, who currently has a solo show at Art First in London. We will discuss the content and psychological effect of these peculiar, yet familiar images. Rhodes grew up in Bengal in India and at the age of fourteen came to the UK. We will think about Rhodes use of colour and, in particular, how the dry, earthy, muted colours of Indian colours have informed her palette.

Richard Long: Walking and Marking

26 July 2007 at 6pm

This time last year, a gathering of artists, curators, friends and family assembled in Greyfriars Kirk to honour one of Scotland’s most important conceptual artists, Ian Hamilton Findlay. His son, Alec Finlay, related his father’s principals to Heraclitus’ philosophy that you can never step into the same river twice. It could be suggested that this is the impetus of all great Land Artists, including Richard Long, who also refers to this belief throughout his work.

As a graduate from the influential St Martins College of Art in London during the late sixties, Richard Long stood alongside Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George and Roger Ackling, as an artist who would completely alter our perception of art practice.

Whether Long is on a six-day walk through Torridon, kayaking down the Colombia River or working in Warli Tribal Land in Maharahtra, India, he works with the most immediate materials that are available to him to make his art. Using mud, water, sticks and stones, he forms them into elemental shapes such as lines, circles and spirals, to express, in a visually arresting way, his presence within the landscape.

Since Long makes art directly in the landscape, much of his work takes the form of photographs, maps and text pieces, however for the exhibition at the SNGMA, he has created Cornish Slate Cross 2007 in the grounds of the Gallery of Modern Art and mud drawings made from mud from the Firth of Forth.

This is a great opportunity to view 40 years of work in Long’s first retrospective in Britain since 1991.

Off The Wall

26 January 2007 at 6pm

Welcome to a New Year of inspiring Spin events featuring gallery talks, studio visits, Spin-Off trips, art news and invitations to exclusive private views. We would also like to welcome back Suzanne Dunn from maternity leave as our Spin Co-ordinator.

January’s gathering will take place at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art with Off the Wall. As the title suggests, this is an exhibition of floor and ceiling-based works by a host of respected artists including the American hero of minimalism, Sol Le Witt, and some of Scotland’s most valued contemporary artists – Turner Prize nominees Martin Creed, Jim Lambie and Christine Borland, and Nathan Coley.

Off The Wall not only investigates the realm of modern-day sculpture, it also provides an opportunity for the SNGMA to present their more recent acquisitions. We will look the practicalities of site-specific work in collections, for example how realistic is Lambie’s ZOBOP when it must be recreated each time it is installed?

Considering the impact of sculpture or site work in the 20th-century, we will look at the role of the curator and deliberate their contribution as collaborator. We will also explore the issues of purchasing power and what these newly acquired works bring to our nation’s rich collection of visual art.

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads

29 July 2005 at 6pm

For our last members event before the August break, we return to the Gallery of Modern Art for a chance to view the spectacular Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads exhibition which opened in June 2005.

Philip Long, Senior Curator at the Gallery of Modern Art will take us on a personal tour of the first museum exhibition to explore, in depth, Bacon’s vivid and striking portraits of friends, lovers and other artists. With over 50 works on loan from public and private collections from around the world, this is an exhibition not to be missed!