list.co.uk/festival Reviews | FESTIVAL VISUAL ART
INSPIRING IMPRESSIONISM: DAUBIGNY, MONET, VAN GOGH Blockbuster show focuses on painter who anticipated impressionist movement ●●●●●
Daubigny is not a name that springs readily to mind in connection with impressionism. For all that his works hang in top museums, they are easy to overlook: well-executed 19th-century landscapes which, in light of what came after, might seem dull.
This show aims to rehabilitate Daubigny’s reputation and celebrate him as an important influence on the impressionists, a creative missing link in the development of modern painting. Here, he hangs with Monet and Van Gogh, the threads of that influence made clear in a stunningly attractive exhibition.
It’s not difficult to see the connections: his innovative
compositions, his love of painting en plein air, his fascination with the effects of light. Van Gogh adored him, spending his last months in the town where Daubigny had lived, adopting his signature ‘double-square’ format for some of his last works. This is not a survey show. The chronology zigzags, as, it
seems, does Daubigny’s style. In each decade he seems to have produced some paintings which were highly detailed and traditional, and others which were remarkably free. However, he probably regarded the most radical of them – such as ‘Moonlight 1875’, which sits perfectly next to Monet’s ‘A Seascape, Shipping by Moonlight’ – as studies, not finished paintings.
Placing him next to Monet and Van Gogh has two effects: it shows how his style anticipated theirs (the last room, which contrasts orchards and poppy fields by all three is truly stunning), but it also shows how impressionism used what it had learned to spring off into a new palette of sunkissed haziness. This show reminds us how Daubigny enabled what came after, but also how it eclipsed him. (Susan Mansfield) ■ Scottish National Gallery, 624 6200, until 2 Oct, £11 (£9).
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DAMIÁN ORTEGA Exploring humankind’s relationship with the natural world ●●●●●
JENNIFER BAILEY: WILL I MAKE A GOOD FATHER, MOTHER, SISTER? Reflection on the demands of modern life ●●●●● HAROON MIRZA: ADAM, EVE, OTHERS AND A UFO Evocative installation transforms gallery ●●●●●
Not so much an exhibition as an intervention, many of the works in this show by Mexican political cartoonist turned artist Damián Ortega were created onsite within the Fruitmarket Gallery, and appear to grow organically from the building. On the lower floor, ‘Broken Sac’ is one large, rough-hewn ball of earthen clay with 125 other smaller orbs around it, the connotation clearly natal. Alongside it is ‘Eroded Valley’, five heaps of red clay bricks painstakingly hewn to show a time-lapse erosion.
Elsewhere, clay is moulded into frozen ‘waves’, into white-painted mock icebergs, into a rain of small chips arranged on string hanging from the ceiling, and – most impudently – into a catalogue of tools, from arrowheads to USB sticks.
The show was literally built in Edinburgh, yet the clay used for these pieces was mined in Oaxaca, Mexico, making the same trip across the Atlantic as Ortega. The viewer may be put in mind of the act of mining, of moulding objects and tools from the clay, of attaching importance and meaning to the objects. It’s a history of creation and migrating ideas, in understatedly simple style. (David Pollock) ■ Fruitmarket Gallery, 225 2383, until 23 Oct, free.
There’s a deeply personal sense of uncertainty at the heart of Jennifer Bailey’s new show. The exhibition, part of Edinburgh Art Festival, hails from Collective’s Satellites Programme, designed to promote emerging artists based in Scotland. This personal uncertainty is explicit in the enquiry
contained in the title, and is made even more so by the print stretched out across an entire wall that takes its lilac colour scheme from an old-time John Bull printing kit. While its patterns resemble the sort of flowchart favoured by management training types, its words refer to the everyday contradictions between work, rest and play; a serious concern for Bailey’s generation, many of whom work two or three jobs to make ends meet.
On another wall, a head and shoulders photograph of Bailey’s sister resembles a byline shot for a magazine or a security pass dangling from a lanyard. Three small ceramic sculptures are miniature expressions of the infinite pressure to clamber up the battered ladder of success. Dissected, collected, archived and rubber-stamped in this way, life and art intersects in an all too real meditation on making it in every way. (Neil Cooper) ■ Collective Gallery, 556 1264, until 4 Sep, free.
It’s easy to see why Haroon Mirza won the Silver Lion at the 54th Venice Biennale: his art, which utilises technology to create imposing, otherworldly installations, is completely unique. Yes, light art has been around a long time, and there’s plenty of interesting work being made in this area, but Mirza does something altogether different with his primal and evocative exploration of the senses.
‘Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO’ features eight
speakers arranged in a circle, as if around a bonfire or sacred object. Unnecessarily long tendril-like wires lead away from the speakers and take a diversion up to the ceiling, hanging down to the central ‘UFO circuit’ to which they are connected. The analogy that art galleries are akin to places of worship has never felt so pertinent. The square room is consumed by the artwork it contains; likewise, the viewer in its presence. The speakers emit violent buzzes and shrieks: sometimes rhythmical, sometimes erratic. Just when you think you’ve fathomed out its logic it goes into free-fall. Mirza says all noise is just noise without context,
without organisation. He brings this truth home with a monstrous but beautiful work. (Laura Campbell) ■ Summerhall, 560 1580, 4 Aug–30 Sep, free.
4–11 Aug 2016 THE LIST FESTIVAL 107
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