Tag Archives: wall drawing

A Parliament of Lines: Aspects of Contemporary Drawing

28 June 2012 at 6pm

Our July event will take place at the City Art Centre to see a survey of contemporary Scottish drawing showcasing fifteen artists work, all of whom use drawing as an important element in their practice. Artists include: Charles Avery, Moyna Flannigan, Nathalie de Briey, Paul Chiappe, Euan Gray, Alan Johnston, Andrew MacKenzie and David Shrigley.

A Parliament Of Lines gets its name from social anthropologist Tim Ingold’s studies of growth and movement, in particular his observation that ‘everything is a parliament of lines .  . . to study both people and things is to study the lines they are made of.’ The exhibition is built around five broad themes: The Body, Architecture/Landscape, Minimal Abstraction, Reproduction/Photography and Sculptural Investigation.

Curated by artist Euan Gray, most of the work has been created specifically for the show and includes Nathalie de Briey’s watercolour drawings of incinerated objects from the Hiroshima bomb site drawn on delicate paper; Paul Chiappe’s extraordinary miniature reproductions of old-school photographs; Shrigley animation entitled Friends; Andrew MacKenzie’s meticulous layered images of landscapes and trees; Moyna Flannigan’s new suite of six drawings in ink and gouache depicting the story of Adam and Eve;  and a site specific wall drawing by Alan Johnston.

Drawing is not, as it once was, the foundation on which everything else is built. It is just one option among many, but it has certain intrinsic characteristics, which make it attractive to artists with very different preoccupations.

Joining us to explore these different areas of enquiry will be one of the exhibiting artists, Andrew MacKenzie. Andrew is a painter and an MFA graduate from Edinburgh College of Art. He lives and works in the Scottish Borders and has exhibited with The Contemporary Art Society, London, The Talbot Rice Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Leeds and The Paul Khun Gallery in Calgary, Canada.

Gravity’s Rainbow

26 May 2011 at 6pm

This month Spin members are invited to Gravitiy’s Rainbow to see and discuss work by artists David Batchelor, Jonathan Callan, John Chamberlain, Ian Davenport, Yves Klein, Peter Liversidge, Kay Rosen and Ed Ruscha.

Gravity’s Rainbow is, as the title suggests, an exhibition about colour, with a nod to the American writer Thomas Pynchon’s use of ‘borrowed’ colour adjectives as imaginative prompts in his novel of the same name. This is a show in which colour is integral to the work, and may even be its subject, but which always originates elsewhere: ‘Found’ colour – borrowed or stolen from outside the studio. This exhibition includes a diverse range of inspirational work including: a site-specific piece by Tommy Grace and Kate Owens who have  transformed the gallery’s glass frontage by creating a temporary stained-glass window from coloured plastic bags; a wall drawing created by Ian Davenport by deconstructing an old master painting into its colour components and re-assembling it as a series of poured lines; and an sculptural installation by Peter Liversidge presenting found objects and fragments united only by their common hue.

This exhibition will be an opportunity for us to discuss how contemporary artists think about colour and to consider the shifting moment in twentieth-century art when artists began to perceive colour as ‘readymade’ rather than as a vehicle of spiritual or emotional content.

Selective Memory

27 January 2006

January’s gathering takes place at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art with Selective Memory, Scotland’s contribution to the 2005 Venice Biennale. This second version of the exhibition provides new scope for assessment in a very different location, where the installations by our four inexhaustible artists have been re-configured or completely altered.

Whether you are intrigued by Alex Pollard‘s diligently crafted jesmonite ‘beasts’, articulated rulers or wall drawings, Cathy Wilkes’ narrative intervention where material objects are transformed into a lyrical force, or Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan‘s monumental installation that provokes an exploration of symbolic reference, this evening intends to be fuelled with exciting debate.

On hand to discuss these works are our very own Helen Monaghan and Emma Nicolson who organised last year’s Spin-Off trip to the Biennale itself.

There’s a lot of ground to cover, so we’ll be keeping a stringent time check. January’s Spin will be a dynamic session of appraisal, deliberation and discussion.