26 November 2009 at 6pm
The Fruitmarket Gallery celebrates the contemporary resurgence in drawing, featuring eleven young international artists including Jan Albers, Michael Borremans, Marc Brandenburg, Fernando Bryce, Kate Davis and David Haines.
In the Western tradition, drawing was the foundation of art education, the essential discipline underlying all others. In the second half of the 20th century, a more academic approach to art-making threatened the authority of drawing as a pure art form; as a result, many schools cast it out as a throwback to past times. Recently drawing has returned to the mainstream as a cheap and autonomous activity, a democratically available form of image making, uniquely capable of intimate, spontaneous self-revelation.
This exhibition of new work by eleven highly acclaimed young international artists includes small, intricately-crafted pencil drawings; large scale installations in which the ‘drawn’ lines are made from masking tape; and drawings that mutate into animation.
26 February 2009 at 6.15pm
This month we will be visiting The Fruitmarket Gallery to see a solo exhibition of work by Scottish artist Claire Barclay, known for work which takes the form of highly crafted sculptural objects brought together into precisely plotted relationships. Featuring newly commissioned work shown in the context of objects made over the course of her career, the exhibition offers an opportunity to trace the development of the artist’s singular sculptural language.
Barclay encourages us to engage with her work on a profoundly instinctual level. We think we recognise familiar objects, like keys, pots or combs, but all have been shaped in such a way as to prevent any practical use. Tables defy gravity to stand on three legs, while chairs have neither a seat nor a back. Unable to attribute meaning through function, we are led instead on an associative journey triggered by memory and the imagination that draws on the sensory and the subconscious as well as the demands of reason.
Biography: Claire Barclay was born in 1968 in Paisley and currently lives and works in Glasgow. She graduated from the Environmental Art and Sculpture Course at Glasgow School of Art in 1990 and completed an MFA in Glasgow in 1993. In 2003, she represented Scotland at the Venice Bienniale alongside Simon Starling and Jim Lambie. She is represented by doggerfisher, Edinburgh.
