LIST.CO.UK/FESTIVAL REVIEWS FESTIVAL VISUAL ART
JOCK McFADYEN: THE ABILITY TO CLING Retrospective of paintings and sculptures ●●●●● PHENOTYPE GENOTYPE (PHG) Treasure trove of avant garde works ●●●●●
‘The ability to cling fastidiously to an image is a pointer to the mark of a true artist,’ runs the slogan which gives this exhibition its title on one of the Paisley-born McFadyen’s earlier schematic works. Over the small but revealing display of work shown here, the slogan becomes almost a mission state- ment. The bulk of the paintings on display are landscapes of a striking depth and resonance, with McFadyen seemingly as entranced by the grime of modernist architecture as he is an array of new and previously unrecognised views on the everyday. His use of colour and tone is bold and dazzlingly
realist, adding an almost photographic aesthetic sharpness to images like the deserted Aldgate East tube station, an oddly pink-painted wall of council flats or a cable hung between two office blocks, the title ‘Cable Street’ suggesting historical con- text which is absent from the crisp banality of the painting. The show also features a small number of paintings and sculptures, which reflect an almost Howson-esque ability for grimy portraiture, reflecting a variety to McFadyen’s work that is crying out for a larger-scale retrospective. (David Pollock) ■ Bourne Fine Art, 557 4050, until 15 Sep, free.
There is no more perfect show to illustrate where Summerhall has come from than this vast display of avant-garde detritus culled from the even vaster archive of the Edinburgh-based Heart Fine Art set- up. From John and Yoko to Gilbert and George to Jake and Dinos Chapman, everybody’s here in an eminently tactile but tantalisingly untouchable display of all the abstract art-stars that made the 20th cen- tury. Books, badges, manifestos, pamphlets, calling cards, provocations, an inevitable first edition of Guy Debord’s La Société du spectacle, a Warhol print and a Fluxus game by George Brecht are all in the frame in this gloriously jumbled-up and refreshingly non-digital display of parallel universe memorabilia, curated by Paul Robertson (pictured). Seen together, it’s as obsessive a collection as the
artists it gathers for a fantasy salon that the Swiss cheese of the original Cabaret Voltaire Dadaist boys club in Zurich could only wet-dream of. If seeing the words ‘KILL THE POP ART!’ is contrary given the context, the legend ‘Fuck Joseph Beuys’ is just asking for trouble in a cabinet of curiosities that pre- sents a crucial alternative art history. (Neil Cooper) ■ Summerhall, 560 1590, until 27 Sep, free.
JOHN BELLANY AT 70 Showcase of familiar images from the Port Seton artist ●●●●●
John Bellany at 70 precedes the major retrospective of the Scottish painter’s work due to be held by the National Galleries of Scotland later this year, and showcases some of his more vibrant, powerful images and compositions that are now familiar fare. Two rooms at the Open Eye, as well as the gallery’s main entrance hall, are filled with the brightly
coloured, recognisable imagery through which Bellany captures the conflict and contradictions of the human condition: strange, distorted faces of women, their bodies displayed, provocative and bare-breasted, next to sinister, half-human creatures, while seascapes contain barely-there phallic symbolism, each painting portraying at once beauty and ugliness; vice and virtue; joy and sorrow; life and death.
Bellany’s deeply religious upbringing in Port Seton, as the son of a fisherman, is hinted at not
only in his subject matter – the paintings that fill one wall in the exhibition, for example, ‘Bass Rock Fable’, flanked by ‘Eyemouth Harbour’ and ‘Gable Ends, Port Seton’ – but also through allusions in his work to spirituality, mythology, superstition and fate, such as the recurring symbol of playing cards, as well as awe at nature and its relationship to man’s mortality. Each of Bellany’s paintings is connected strongly to humanity, and specifically Bellany’s own life, and John Bellany at 70 demon- strates one aspect of this well, without becoming overly repetitive. The exhibition concentrates mainly on Bellany’s work from the 1990s onwards, omitting the darker,
more obviously sombre paintings of the 1960s and 70s that were informed in part by his visit to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1967, and which would, perhaps, have placed the shown work into context. However, in limited space the exhibition emphasises the strong sense of location, iden- tity and being that Bellamy captures so well – the inclusion of watercolours, pencil drawings and etchings informing the larger body of oil paintings. (Rhona Taylor) ■ Open Eye Gallery, 558 9872, until 4 Sep (not Sun), free.
GARAGE Off-piste compendium of grassroots art ●●●●●
In a residential dribe-in, a portable TV sits on a rug on the floor, a bouquet of flowers laid down before it. On-screen a collage of scenes from a 1980s TV compendium of schlocky horror play out in Rebecca Key and Melodien’s ‘Sevant! Sevant! Vol 1: Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense’. On the walls around it and in two other garages either side, pages of text-book guides to motherhood are pinned up and subverted by Ailie Rutherford’s over- laid drawings of suckling pigs and jets of milk shoot- ing from nipples, or else cotton reels criss-cross each other as they run from a clump of coloured straws plugged into the wall by Jo Arksey. With a dozen or so artists’ works crammed into
the three spaces alongside some back garden and front cellar installations, GARAGE is an ingeniously busy temporary occupation of places used for pri- vate hoarding or else plain old car parking. It’s also a wonderfully off-piste example of a thriving grass- roots that exists on our own doorstep to potter about in. (Neil Cooper) ■ Garage, North West Northumberland Street Lane, 07917 668 044, 25 & 26 Aug, or by appointment.
23 Aug–20 Sep 2012 THE LIST 141