VISUAL ART | Previews & Reviews
PAINTING EDWIN G LUCAS: AN INDIVIDUAL EYE City Art Centre, Edinburgh, until Sun 10 Feb ●●●●●
Visitors to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s A New Era exhibition over the winter might have noticed a single painting by Edwin G Lucas, and wondered why they’d never heard of him. Now, for the first time, a major exhibition brings together work from across his career, and reveals a remarkable Scottish modernist whom art history has almost completely overlooked. Brought up in the Edinburgh suburb of Juniper Green, Lucas’ artistic talent was clear at school but his family dissuaded him from going to art college. He did a law degree and worked all his life in the civil service, but produced a remarkable body of paintings, mainly in the 1930s and 1940s, which experimented with surrealism, abstraction and symbolism, as well as showing himself to be adept at more traditional work.
His paintings are difficult to categorise, and he drew on a
varied repertoire of styles. Some show the influence of Miro and Magritte, others Picasso or Paul Klee. There is figurative work, such as the unsettling but ambitious family group in ‘Terrorism (Together)’, a semi-abstract depiction of the stairwell in his Edinburgh house, allegories such as ‘The Human Situation’, and a glorious painting of Edinburgh’s Caley Station, showing the movement of people through the silhouette of his own head. What almost all of them share is colour. Lucas clearly had a love of colour and a facility for it, which is unusual in Scottish painting. Even his landscapes of Edinburgh and the Pentlands pulsate with vibrant colour. Though he quit painting in the early 1950s to concentrate on family life, returning to it briefly after retirement in the 1980s, this remarkable body of work shows a man courageous enough to plough his own furrow, even though he got little encouragement, and whose lack of a formal art education didn’t hold him back at all. (Susan Mansfield)
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PREMIERES MIKE KELLEY & SANTIAGO SIERRA Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sat 8 Sep–Sun 25 Nov PHOTOGRAPHY GUNNIE MOBERG & MARGARET TAIT: THE DAYS NEVER SEEM THE SAME Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 28 Oct ●●●●●
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Dundee Contemporary Arts are going big this autumn, with the Scottish premieres of two internationally renowned artists: Mike Kelley and Santiago Sierra. Kelley will be showing his Mobile Homestead film trilogy which explores the historic ‘white flight’ movement of people in 1960s Detroit. In a facsimile of his childhood home attached to the back of a trailer, Kelley records a journey from the project’s co-commissioner, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, to Kelley’s original home in the suburbs of the city. Footage is interspersed with interviews that chronicle the lives of those living in the area today, creating a moving portrait of a city in flux. The work will undoubtedly resonate with citizens of Dundee, as their own city undergoes significant cultural regeneration. Santiago Sierra’s work documents a journey too; between the two most extreme points on the earth; the North and South poles. Here the artist plants the black flag (the universal symbol of the anarchist movement) into the ground. There is a subtle link to Dundee in the work here as well, given the city’s own history of polar exploration, while asking much broader questions about the notions of statehood and how it is built and maintained. (Rachael Cloughton)
98 THE LIST 1 Feb–31 Mar 2018 98 THE LIST 1 Sep–31 Oct 2018
Gunnie Moberg and Margaret Tait both had a deep connection to Orkney, and seeing their work together creates a distinctive visual archive which isn’t always related to the islands, but which reflects in each part a kind of shared visual simplicity. One might imagine – although it would be debatable – that each is connected to the relative simplicity of island life. Gunnie Moberg, who died in 2007, was a Swedish
photographer who made her home on Orkney. The pin-sharp monochrome of her early photographs also lends itself to casual mid-80s portraits of figures including Liz Lochhead and Alasdair Gray. Her colour work, meanwhile, encompasses literary figures including Seamus Heaney, Irvine Welsh and Maya Angelou, as well as nature photography of Orkney’s flowers and dramatic images of the islands’ coastline. Margaret Tait – who was born, lived most of her life and died in 1999 on Orkney – was most well-known as a filmmaker and writer, and a nearly two-hour selection of her meditative short films, which use the landscape of Orkney as their backdrop, can be seen in a screening room here. A selection of her photographic work also appears, not on the walls, but in a digital archive of her notebooks which gives an additional fullness to the show. (David Pollock)
INSTALLATION SAMARA SCOTT: BELT AND ROAD Tramway, Glasgow, until Sun 28 Oct ●●●●●
For her largest and most ambitious installation yet, Samara Scott has taken Tramway’s main gallery space and restructured it. Translucent tarpaulin sheets slice through the centre of the room, creating a horizontal plane that lowers the ceiling of this usually light and airy gallery so it becomes almost claustrophobic – an undersea- like enclosure with colourful detritus laid across its rippling surface.
Scott has worked from above, splashing everyday items like make-up, mustard, soil and cleaning products onto the sheets. Audiences view the work from beneath, craning necks as though examining an ornately decorated church ceiling. There’s a religiosity to it, certainly – when the light catches the colourful mixture of objects they perform like stained glass. But it’s also a very earthly portrait of a city too. Scott has taken much of her material from building sites, motorway passes and pavement crevices – the peripheral sites of the city where waste seems to accumulate. Like the city too, the work is in a state of flux; organic materials promise to fuse together, decompose and decay; transforming the installation, and the space itself, continuously over the three month run of the show. (Rachael Cloughton)