Tag Archives: trust

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust

26 July 2018

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) was a leading member of the St Ives School of artists and greatly contributed to the development of Modernist British painting in the mid to late 20th century.

A painter, printmaker and draughtsman, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was born in St Andrews in 1912. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1932-37 where she became interested in abstract art. As a result of a travel scholarship, Barns-Graham moved to St Ives in 1940 and met Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo who had an impact on her life and work. A visit to Switzerland in 1948 inspired a series of drawings and paintings of glaciers and from this time onwards, she produced abstract compositions using geometric forms but with their origins in nature.

Despite being part of the original St Ives group, for some 25 years from the late 1950s, her work was only rarely exhibited. The Tate Gallery’s St Ives exhibition in 1985 gave her the confidence to work with renewed vigour and originality and in the latter half of the 1990s, she produced a series of paintings of bold, strong, brush strokes and saturated colours. She worked right up to her death in 2004 at the age of 91.

For our Spin event, we will be meeting Rob Airey, Director of The Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust which was established by the artist in 1987. The Trust looks after a significant collection of paintings, drawings and prints and promotes her work by organising exhibitions, lending works and supporting artists. They also look after her archive of books, photography, drawings and ceramics.

Douglas Gordon: Superhumanatural

30 November 2006 at 6pm

‘I provide the board, the pieces and the dice, but you are the ones that have to play. ‘

Douglas Gordon

We will be visiting the much-anticipated retrospective exhibition by Douglas Gordon, one of Scotland’s most celebrated contemporary artists. And it doesnt disappoint.

The Royal Scottish Academy Building has been transformed beyond recognition with specially constructed blacked-out spaces, TV monitors and installations where the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Superhumanatural is Gordon’s first retrospective exhibition to be held in Scotland and features key works including 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Through a Looking Glass (1999) and 30 Seconds Text (1996).

Born in Glasgow in 1966, Douglas Gordon was among a number of Glasgow-based artists who embraced a more conceptually-orientated art in the 1990s. His deployment of pre-existing material, most notably in his use of Hitchcock’s iconic film in his work 24 Hour Psycho, attracted particular attention. He won the Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1998. Earlier this year, he had a mid-career survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Working in video, film, photography, audio and text-based works, he explores themes of trust, guilt, confession, deception and doubling. Many of his works are based on dichotomies – good and evil, life and death, birth and death, perception and memory and seduction and violence.

This is a great opportunity to see a major exhibition of his work. We will be joined by Keith Hartley, curator of the exhibition and Chief Curator and Deputy to the Director at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Keith, who was the exhibition curator, has been working on the show for a few years and will be able to provide us with a fascinating insight into the works and the man himself.