25 June 2026
This month we’re heading to Collective Gallery for the summer exhibition by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, joined by curator Claire Craig. Commissioned for Folkestone Triennial 2025, and curated by Collective’s Director Sorcha Carey, this important new work will be shown in Scotland for the first time.
Afterlife brings together nearly 200 amulets in a sculptural installation designed in collaboration with Berlin-based architects, Zeller and Moye. Amulets are miniature talismanic objects, typically carved in stone. Appearing across millennia and cultures, they are small enough to be held in the hand or worn, and are generally considered protective.
Afterlife reimagines this tradition. Working with museums around the world, Paterson has recreated amulets from civilisations across the globe (including Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Viking, Islamic, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Celtic, Greco-Roman and Pre-Columbian), using materials sourced from endangered landscapes and fragile ecosystems, to serve as a bridge between past and present.
26 February 2026
Join us at our February Spin event as we head to Modern One to see ARTIST ROOMS Louise Bourgeois|Helen Chadwick|Robert Mapplethorpe. We’ll be joined by Lucy Askew, Head of Modern & Contemporary Art, who will share her insights along the way.
The displays feature Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick and Robert Mapplethorpe. Each presentation offers a distinctive and diverse approach to ideas of self-expression, identity and the complexity of our inner life. Highlights include Louise Bourgeois’s three-metre-high Spider; Helen Chadwick’s innovative light boxes and a playful sculptural installation and striking self-portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe.
These displays are part of a wider refresh at Modern One, highlighting modern and contemporary works from the national collection.
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.
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.
26 September 2024
We return to Talbot Rice Gallery for their momentous showing of work by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui where we will be joined by curator James Clegg.
The most significant exploration of El Anatsui’s practice ever staged in the UK, Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta spans five decades of work and will extend to the building’s façade, turning it into an open-air gallery.
The exhibition opens with a monumental new work made specifically for Talbot Rice Gallery. It journeys through a large selection of Anatsui’s iconic large-scale sculptural wall hangings made with reclaimed metal from the bottling industry in Ghana and Nigeria (made between 2002 to 2024). This includes the ‘grandmother’ of these forms, Woman’s Cloth (2002), the first of its kind on loan from the British Museum, and a sleeping chamber in which to quietly observe Royal Slumber (2023).
25 July 2024
This month we will be joined by Chief Curator Lucy Askew as we make our way to Modern Two for Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990.
This touring exhibition is a timely exploration of the work and lived experiences of a post-war generation of women artists that have largely been omitted from art historical narratives. Surfacing the wealth and diversity of work created in the UK during the 1970s and 80s, a period of seismic social and political change, it demonstrates, across a wide variety of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, film and photography, how women’s needs were marginalised within mainstream culture and reveals how these artists used radical ideas and methods to confront issues that will resonate with contemporary audiences – from access to healthcare and class struggles to ecological disaster, racism, and misogyny.
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.
24 November 2022
This month we will be returning to the Talbot Rice Gallery for their new show Qiu Zhijie| Lara Favaretto| Nira Pereg, where we will be joined by curator James Clegg.
In the historic Georgian Gallery, Qiu Zhijie presents his first major UK exhibition, including a body of map-paintings informed by remote sensing technology. In the White Gallery, Lara Favaretto’s Momentary Monument takes the form of a monolithic library that will disperse over the course of the exhibition, and upstairs, Nira Pereg’s film installations document a site shared by both Jewish and Muslim worshippers in the city of Al-Khalil/Hebron, Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The works of these three artists reflect on the idea of the monument. Fictional, momentary and paradoxical, their distinct approaches to the concept of ‘”something that reminds” act against the heavy material monuments that proliferate around the world, to describe a more momentary, imaginary or contested space. Sometimes contradictory, sometimes policed, and always characterised by disappearance, these distinct exhibitions reflect upon the fragility of our communion with the past.
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.
Grayson Perry I Smash Hits
This month join us for this year’s summer blockbuster, Grayson Perry| Smash Hits where we will be joined by the exhibition’s curator, Patrick Elliot.
The biggest ever exhibition of Sir Grayson Perry’s work, covering his 40-year career. Perry has gone from taking pottery evening classes to winning the Turner Prize, presenting television programmes on Channel 4 and writing acclaimed books. Pottery allowed him the opportunity to indulge his fascination with sex, Punk, and counterculture, amongst other things, in the most unlikely and polite of artforms. Today he is one of Britain’s most celebrated artists and cultural figures.
Popular and provocative, Perry makes art that deals with difficult and complex ideas in an accessible and often funny way. He loves taking on big issues that are universally human: masculinity, sexuality, class, religion, politics and more. On view will be subversive pots, brilliantly intricate prints, elaborate sculptures, and huge, captivating tapestries – all imbued with Perry’s sharp wit and social commentary. Working with traditional artforms, Perry addresses the controversial issues of our times.