Tag Archives: total work of art

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years

25 September 2025

After our month off we are back to explore one of the standout exhibitions of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years. Featuring over 200 works, the show includes stunning installations made in response to the iconic Royal Scottish Academy building, as well as drawings, photographs, films, sketchbooks and archival items dating back to the mid-1970s. To provide insight into the work we will be joined by Chief Curator Patrick Elliott. 

Goldsworthy is internationally recognised for his work with natural materials such as clay, stones, reeds, branches, leaves, snow and ice. For over 50 years, he has created a unique and highly influential body of work that speaks of our relationship with the land.  

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years has been conceived by the artist as a single immersive artwork in response to the space, materials and character of the RSA building. The interrelationship of humans and the working land is a recurrent theme in Goldsworthy’s art and in the exhibition. He often presents the land as a hard, hostile and brutal place. Fences and barriers feature prominently, in the form of rusted barbed wire stretched across a room, and a massive, cracked clay wall. As in nature, beauty and danger co-exist. 

Anton Henning

29 September 2011 at 6pm

This month, we will be visiting the Talbot Rice Gallery to see the first solo exhibition in Scotland of German artist, Anton Henning who has created Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art).

Henning’s bold, individual style, fluent in art historical references, challenges notions of ‘good’ taste. His work pays homage to revered modern artists like Matisse and Picabia, while including subject matter such as ‘chocolate box’ images of birds, sunsets and naked female figures that are often subject to censure. Henning’s approach also draws from the movement of ‘bad painting’ of the late 1970s and 1980s, a movement of artists disregarding restrictive conventions in order to explore alternative possibilities in painting.

Henning’s work for the Talbot Rice Gallery, Interieur No.493, fills the entire space, inviting the audience to not just view it, but at points, walk over it. Even the carpet is part of the art work. Henning uses several different art forms including, furniture, lighting, easel painting, sculpture, window painting, film and drawing.