list.co.uk/festival Reviews | FESTIVAL VISUAL ART
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CANALETTO & THE ART OF VENICE The painter who put Venice on the map ●●●●●
This exhibition of works by Canaletto – the largest show Scotland has ever seen – was purchased wholesale by George III from Joseph Smith in 1762. Smith was a major collector of Italian art and a crucial patron for Canaletto, commissioning some of his most significant works, including The Grand Canal Series, which forms the centerpiece for the show. There are 14 paintings altogether, capturing all manner of life lived on and alongside this iconic body of water. Smith hung the works in his palazzo on the Grand Canal, and would impress British tourists on the Grand Tour with them, encouraging new commissions or the sale of prints. Canaletto was less concerned with faithfully recording Venice than with representing how it exists for the awestruck tourist visiting. He was unafraid to move buildings around and manipulate perspectives to create a better composition and a more spectacular image. Smith and Canaletto were major ambassadors for their city; they constructed and distributed breathtaking images of it across the world, inevitably drawing visitors from far and wide. Even today, you can’t help but gaze at these works and wish you were there. (Rachael Cloughton) ■ The Queen’s Gallery, until 21 Oct, £7.20 (£3.60–£6.60).
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IN FOCUS: SCOTTISH PHOTOGRAPHY Compact exhibition from city's collection ●●●●● ART OF GLASS Exploring the creative potential of glass ●●●●●
Hidden away in the City Art Centre basement, this era-spanning collection of Scottish photography from the centre’s collection is by no means comprehensive. It does, however, feature some striking works, not least the late Scots-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter’s large 1989 image of the performance artist Delta Streete as the muse Terpsichore. This photograph leads the exhibition’s publicity, and also pushes the subject of black representation in classic photographic portraiture with as much urgency as it did 29 years ago. The breadth of work here makes up for the modest
exhibition size. There are images of Edinburgh dating back to 1840 by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson; biblical digital collages by Calum Colvin; amusing self-portraits which act as political responses to their surroundings in Nathan Coley’s ‘Waiting on the Scottish Parliament’ and ‘Reading Burns to the Scott Monument’; Joseph McKenzie’s warm-hearted, working class 1960s documentary work; Catherine Yass’ dusky lightbox image of the Red Road flats; and Christine Borland’s ‘The Velocity of Drops’, a watermelon incongruously smashed from a great height amid the Mount Stuart mansion on the Isle of Bute. There isn’t a huge amount to see, but there’s a lot to absorb. (David Pollock) ■ City Art Centre, until 12 May, free.
This exhibition, presented in partnership with the National Centre for Craft & Design, showcases the work of 15 glass artists from all over the UK. Harry Morgan makes solid sculptures which
look monumental and opaque but are partly made from delicate straw-like glass. Jeffrey Sarmiento subverts expectations too: his relief sculpture of an abandoned rubber factory doesn’t look like glass at all.
Some of the artists, like Anna Dickinson, concentrate on pure sculptural forms; others, like Rhian Haf, on the way glass transmits light. Pinkie Maclure makes stained glass in a traditional style but with very contemporary themes. Edinburgh-based Geoffrey Mann takes as his starting point the (possibly apocryphal) story that the wine bottle was invented in Leith. Erin Dickson’s ‘Chinese Whispers’ engaged five different glass artists around the world, each artist sending the next a set of instructions for reinterpreting a historic vessel: the five contrasting results are fascinating. The installation by Belgian-born glass artist Griet Beyaert and digital artist Paul Miller is an immersive environment of sound and coloured light. All these are proof that the possibilities of glass in art are still far from being exhausted. (Susan Mansfield) ■ National Museum of Scotland, until 16 Sep, free.
EMIL NOLDE: COLOUR IS LIFE Major exhibition of works by German expressionist ●●●●●
Sex, God and the transcendent tangle of both are the prime pulses behind this collection of more than 100 paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints by one of Germany’s most significant expressionists, brought together in all their contrary glory. Here, after all, is an artist who put faith in National Socialism in the hope that avant-garde art would become a central tenet of government thinking, but whose abstractions were ridiculed in the Nazis’ notorious 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. Despite this, a primal fervour remained at the heart of
Nolde’s work, before and after being officially black-balled from the art world, in ways that all but burst through the frame. This is the case with the self-deification of ‘Free Spirit’ (1906) as much as the rapture of ‘Ecstasy’ (1929), in which a naked Mary is painted at the point of conceiving Jesus, and the sensory abandonment of ‘Candle Dancers’ (1912). In terms of come-down, ‘Paradise Lost’ (1921) (pictured) finds a terrified-looking Adam and Eve hunched on the ground, side by side, but very much apart as they guiltily regret the night before. For all the brutal grotesquery of Nolde’s Unpainted
Pictures, a series of watercolours made during his artistic exile, his pursuit of intimacy is best captured in ‘Young Couple’ (1913), eight lithographs of the same image in different colours. Seen side by side, they resemble a Jules Feiffer party scene that perfectly encapsulates Nolde’s ever-changing moods. (Neil Cooper) ■ Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern 2), until 21 Oct, £10 (£8).
1–8 Aug 2018 THE LIST FESTIVAL 127