VISUAL ART | Previews & Reviews

PREVIEW PORTRAITURE JOHN BYRNE: SITTING DUCKS Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 14 Jun–Sun 19 Oct

It was a chance meeting with an Edinburgh councillor on Leith Walk that eventually led to Sitting Ducks, painter and playwright John Byrne’s show of rarely seen work that opens at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this month before touring to Inverness. Having suggested to Byrne that it was about time he had a major show in the capital, the councillor wrote to the National Galleries of Scotland, who agreed, and the wheels were duly set in motion for this exhibition of more than 50 works drawn mainly from private collections dating as far back as the 1960s, many of which have never been seen publicly before.

‘It was just stuff I remembered that people had bought,’ Byrne muses, ‘so I made a list. A lot of it is stuff I’ve not seen since I did it, drawings of my children, things like that.’ There are self-portraits too, including one from the early 1970s ‘which can be dated from the fact that I’m wearing bell- bottomed jeans’.

Not everything on show will be complete, however,

including an eight-foot diptych of Billy Connolly, which has been on loan ‘in perpetuity’ to the People’s Palace in Glasgow, where only one half of the painting could be found. Such a loss sits with the recent rediscovery of sketches for a mural Byrne painted on a gable end in Partick in the 1970s, which were found in a skip next to the old Third Eye Centre in Glasgow. ‘I think they’ll be a bit more careful at the National Gallery,’ Byrne says.

A new publication will accompany Sitting Ducks, along with assorted merchandise. Byrne twinkles at the prospect. ‘They put your face on a plate or a tie or something,’ he chuckles. ‘Which I’m not averse to at all.’ (Neil Cooper)

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PREVIEW INSTALLATION JIM LAMBIE Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Fri 27 Jun–Sun 19 Oct PREVIEW SCULPTURE KATIE PATERSON Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Fri 27 Jun–Sat 27 Sep

REVIEW INSTALLATION LUCY SKAER: LEONORA Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, until Sun 4 Jan, 2015 ●●●●●

The first time Fruitmarket Gallery director Fiona Bradley encountered the work of Glasgow enfant terrible Jim Lambie was in the Transmission Gallery in 1999. She remembers, as many of us do, the iconic multi-coloured floor decoration ZOBOP and Ultralow, a video of the artist smoking his way through a packet of cigarettes in the dark. Now, 15 years later, these pieces will appear in her gallery in Lambie’s retrospective show, part of this year's GENERATION series of exhibitions, alongside a selection of other works, including a new version of Shaved Ice with 33 brightly coloured, mirrored ladders stretching floor to ceiling across the entire ground floor. ‘The exhibition will remind people how

beguiling and easy to engage with Jim’s work is,’ says Bradley, ‘and how much it rewards that engagement. Like all great art it seems simple, but it reaches out to connect with you in complex and often unexpected ways. Several of Jim’s themes and ways of working will be here the importance of music, its artefacts and ephemera; his incredible way with colour; and his ability to change the mood of a space and its inhabitants with what he puts in it.’ (David Pollock)

98 THE LIST 12 Jun–10 Jul 2014

To hear Glasgow-born artist Katie Paterson discuss her works is to suspect that she may be on a different conceptual level from many of her contemporaries, or certainly that she creates art which strives to really say something, to define humanity’s position in the world. ‘My work as a whole considers our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change,’ she points out calmly, ‘attempting to create philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment.’ This GENERATION show, her first solo one in Scotland, illustrates this. It comprises materials relating to Second Moon, in which a fragment of moon rock has been sent on a months-long anti- clockwise orbit of the Earth by airfreight courier, and Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky, which will see a fragment of meteorite launched by ATV (Automated Transfer Vehicle) back outside Earth’s orbit to the International Space Station. Other works include Fossil Necklace, an ornament carved of 170 fossils, the oldest of them 3.5 billion years old. ‘These beads can be equated with a string of molecules,’ says Paterson, ‘carrying a code that tells the tale of life’s journeys and our relationship with nature over billions of years.’ (David Pollock)

In 2006, the Glasgow-based artist Lucy Skaer came across two small drawings by the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. More than the works themselves, she was struck by the fact that the artist, then in her nineties, was still alive and working: the past was a handshake away. On the strength of this, she travelled to Mexico City and turned up (unannounced) on Carrington’s doorstep. The body of work made as a response to that encounter, is now owned by the Hunterian, and is being exhibited as part of GENERATION. The works embody some of Skaer’s key themes: an interest in craft and a fascination with the past wedded to a rigorous conceptual core which resists easy conclusions. The 16mm film made during her encounter with Carrington is just a minute long, concentrating on the old woman’s hands and a few details around her. It’s a fleeting, austere picture. Though her hands gesture, we never hear her voice.

The photographs of the exterior of Carrington’s apartment after her death deepen the sense of shifting meaning. Instead of a portrait of the artist, Skaer offers us a closed door and shuttered windows. The past may seem close, but it is also inaccessible. (Susan Mansfield)