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ART REVIEW The Winter Queen *ekw

She was known for her touch-too- revealing decolletage. Even after the death of her husband, Elizabeth of Bohemia, aka the Winter Queen, apparently liked to cut a dash and flaunt a little flesh.

The grand-daughter of Mary Queen of Scots, she started life in Scotland, married the king of Bohemia, had an abundance of children and moved in an itinerant fashion around Europe.

The sumptuous portraits here show that the once most eligible woman in Europe definitely had a good eye for style. In the stunning portrait by Michael van Mierevelt, her bodice is shown bedecked with embroidered oak leaves and roses. Followers of dynastic history and 16th century fashion will have a field day. (Susanna Beaumont)

3 The Winter Queen, National Portrait Gallery (Venue 44) 624 6200, until Sun 4 Oct, Mon—Sat 10am—5pm; Sun 11am—5pm, £3 (£2).

ART REVIEW

Nature Morte

when

Rainy days and Bank Holidays were every kid's nightmare if 'museum' was mentioned. Even the word itself seemed clogged with dust. David Price, though, leads us into a parallel universe somewhere just off-centre of imagination paradise. Here ancient hoovers come customised with angel wings and antlers, while a once handy Dustette is a cherub-like appliance presumably used for sucking up sullied souls.

Drawn from his Price&Price Museum, artist David Price clearly has an eye for junk-shop tat. This effective and engaging pastiche teeters on the edge of kitsch whilst managing to make a more serious point about the distillation of official history into neutered, out of context relics. Most effective is the peepshow frieze of Why Britain 15 At War. A showroom dummy is passed off as Joe Citizen but he has a colour TV for a head, while a

at

Cherubic appliances: David Price's household cleaner

pickled baby peers out of the drinks cabinet like a souvenir from a Lindsay Anderson film. It's a people's histOIy alright. (Neil Cooper)

a Nature Morte (Fringe) The Bongo Club (Venue 143) 440 1140, until Sun 30 Aug, 1-10pm, free.

ARCHITECTURE REVIEW Virtual Environments ’k we

Drawing boards are almost a thing of the past. Technology is now at every designer‘s fingertips. Here you can have a 'virtual' wander around Glasgow and check out individual buildings or scroll back to see the whole city. Dimensions can be totalled up and perspectives inspected. 'Fly-throughs' offer a sneak preview of unrealised buildings and Southampton‘s Magistrates Courthouse is a cool highlight of this techno-fest. The show targets architects and engineers, and essentially it has the feel of a stand at a conference centre - but it is a must for those curious about technology. (William Silk) a Virtual Environments (Fringe) R/AS Gallery (Venue 132) 229 7545, until Fri 28 Aug, Mon-Fri 10am—5pm; Sat 10am—4pm.

ART REVIEW Stanislav Kolibal fifiwfi

The Iron Curtain effectively once cut the Prague artist, Stanislav Kolibal, off from the Western art world. Behind those closed curtains, the Czech/Soviet regime doled out few favours to Kolibal. Deemed radical, he was virtually banned from exhibiting.

In this, Kolibal’s Scottish debut, he shows three especially commissioned sculptures. Tectonic and beautifully clean-cut, they’re like Interrogations into geometry and space, where sharp angularity feeds into Curves. Constructed from MDF or welded Iron, each sculpture IS an assemblage of intriguing shapes of space. Magnify the scale, and the sculptures could be living compartments in some utopIan landscape inhabited by sleek urbanites.

A qur‘ guide'to the face in the

ortrait

Who is he? A bloke with a mask

Who‘s that when he's at home? Probably a bloke without a mask. Not into full-time dressing up then? Doubt it. It's more to do with evolution.

Charles Darwin and all that species business? Yes, but more the descent of man. ‘The mask appears as a recurring motif and alludes to a range of connected themes; primitivism in society; the interdependence of past . . .‘ So runs just a

taster of the accompanying blurb.

Man as beast then? That‘s the line. Behind every decent new man there is an old

man monster trying to get out.

All very relevant to the tate 90$ Definitely, but we knew it all along. There was just an attempt at a cover-up job called 'domestication of the male species‘ in the

early 905.

Where can I catch these fine species of men in masks? In a show by Tom Jenner, appropriately called Degeneration at Edinburgh College of Art, the man behind the men in the masks and the man behind the camera.

Give me a fitting line from Darwin ‘We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities . . . still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origins.’

Will the worm turn. so to speak? Doubt it, though Darwin did pen another popular tome entitled The Formation Of Vegetable Mould Through The Action Of

Worms. (Susanna Beaumont)

e Regeneration, Tom Jenner, Edinburgh College of Art, (Venue 73) 221 6032,

until Sun 30 Aug, daily 10am-5pm.

Elsewhere, there are earlier wall pieces by the Czech septuagenarian. Teasing at space and form, Kolibal 'unpicks' at the time-honoured process of art-making. Pieces of wood are cut at and left raw as if to show the fragile underbelly of the art of construction after all, art is one big construct. (Susanna Beaumont)

m Stanislav Kolibal, Edinburgh College of Art (Venue 73) 221 6032, until 30 Aug, daily 10am—5pm.

ART REVIEW Sliding Doors he? If only real life could be more like the movres glamorous, plain-sailing and with a guaranteed happy-ever—after. Exploring some components of filmmaking and myth, eight artists question our response to what we see on the big screen.

As if taking a fast car ride through mountains, Su Grierson's Journey

Between Analogue And Digital presents a series of blurred images remInIscent of the filmic device used to suggest the thrill of the chase. David Scott looks at the way film is packaged to entice us to part with our pennies, while in Screen 1, 2, 3, Janet MCCrorie captures the engrossed isolation of the film-goer. Like a set of production stills from a thriller, Evie Miloszewska's Nightmare (Dreamcatcher) evokes the flight/fright element of a girl trying to escape her own nightmare.

Full of interesting takes on the Industry, there are a few Titanic-like gems nestling among the 'straight-to- video' pieces. (Claire Prentice)

% Sliding Forms, Cameo Cinema, 228 4141, until 13 Sep, daily 1—11pm (hours extended during Film Festival).

STAR RATINGS *tttt Ullllll‘flntlilt‘ tttt wry HUT/(l

\'t.,r?li uttlIrIII Below average

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13-20 Aug 1998 TIIE usr 91