25 October 2012 at 6pm
The Scottish National Portrait hosts the first major retrospective by Jitka Hanzlová, showing work made over the last two decades by this major contemporary photographer.
Hanzlová was born in the former Czechoslovakia, growing up in Prague before defecting from this Communist regime to Essen in West Germany in 1982. Since then she has sought to explore her experiences through photography.
Hanzlová’s work belongs to the technical tradition of German photography and most frequently depicts the human figure in landscape or cityscape settings. She also references Renaissance portraiture and post-soviet industrial landscapes, in an exploration of belonging and alienation. Emerging from her experience of two different cultures and political systems, her work is a profound meditation on European identity in a post Cold-war world.
Joining us to discuss the work of Jitka Hanlová will be Duncan Forbes, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Galleries of Scotland. We also welcome our new Spin co-ordinator, Grainne Rice.
27 August 2009 at 6pm
Spin is taking part in the Edinburgh Art Festivals Art Late on Thursday 27 August from 6-9pm – a city-wide end of Festival party with gallery openings, tours, music, artists performances and live readings. We will be giving a tour of the highlights of this years festival and is one of three tours taking place on the night.
Art Late begins at 6pm at the Ingleby Gallery with a collaborative performance from musician Wounded Knee and dancer Ianthe Wright. Later, two contrasting tours will set out from the gallery leading people round the Festival offering different experiences of the exhibitions: The Giving Tour and the Blank Canvas Bike Tour.
Our Spin tour, led by Rosie Lesso, will set out from Talbot Rice Gallery at 6pm and is an introduction to exhibitions including Jane and Louise Wilson and Joseph Kosuth (Talbot Rice Gallery); Eva Hesse (Fruitmarket); Rough Cut Nation (Scottish National Portrait Gallery) and Lucy Skaer and Rosalind Nashashibi (doggerfisher).
To sign up for Art Late or to join one of the three tours (please note there are limited places), click on the link below to get your invite:
http://www.edinburghartfestival.com/09-festival-programme/events/art-late/
30 September 2004 at 6pm
After the excesses of Festival time, we will be kicking off the autumn season with a spot of introspection at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG). Keeping Faith is an exhibition of photos by recent ECA graduate Luke Watson.
For his acclaimed degree show at Edinburgh College of Art last year, Luke created a series of portraits of faith leaders from all over Scotland. The striking square format images stood out as perceptive and cleverly composed – with glimpses of the personality of each subject emerging from, and merging with, the institutional trappings of their faith (whether ornate, ritualistic, informal and so on).
Great news then, that James Holloway, Director of the Portrait Gallery has acquired the whole series, along with some newer pieces, for the SNPG permanent collection. We will talk to Luke about the conception behind his project, about his ‘photographic encounter’ with the subjects, the iconic style he has developed from renaissance painting, and the traces of subversive humour and affection that have crept into the pieces.
27 May 2004 at 6pm
This exhibition is a fine example of the National Galleries of Scotland finding new and stimulating ways to work with contemporary artists. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery Director, James Holloway, thinks it crucial, for the longevity and quality of the collection, to commission portraits by the most prominent artists of our day. This enlightened approach offers interesting and topical challenges to Scotland’s most prominent artists. You may have seen the recent portrait of specialists at Dundee’s Oncology Unit by Ken Currie and Wendy McMurdo’s photographs of members of the Roslin Institute, in which case you will know that they are significant pieces of contemporary art in their own right.
For this exhibition, the idea sprang from the artist’s interests rather than the institution’s remit. Moyna Flannigan is one of Scotland’s leading artists. She is a lecturer in Painting at Glasgow School of Art, and is represented by doggerfisher. She is renowned for her strange and surprising fictional portraits, which have been bought by Saatchi and Deutsche Bank as well as the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the City Art Centre in Edinburgh. In the last year or so, Moyna has undertaken a radical shift in scale, and has been painting miniatures – a familiar form in 17th- and 18th-century art and almost entirely absent within modernism. This gave her the desire to look more closely at the miniatures in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery collection (and it is rather fun to revisit that collection again through her eyes).
The miniature is not just a very small portrait, but rather it suggests an intimate form of portraiture – the keepsake, or the lover’s cameo, or even the memento mori. The implied combinations of vanity, age, anxiety, desire and death are so well suited to Flannigan’s style and themes that you get the feeling she was born to paint miniatures. The results are fantastical, intriguing, captivating, not least because their painterly quality rivals Watteau’s rococo brushstrokes for seductive finesse.
This is a great opportunity to ask Moyna about her work, and see the weird collection of faces and characters she has conjured.
