Exhibition Programme Archive 2005
Simon Patterson
High Noon
Exhibition 26 February – 1 May 2005
Simon Patterson is one of the most consistently inventive of the generation of London-based artists who came to international prominence in the 1990s. A complex manipulation of systems of classification, documentation, description and understanding, his work urges us to reconsider how and why we think we know what we know.
Central to this exhibition is the re-staging in the upper gallery of General Assembly, commissioned for Chisenhale in London in 1994 and unseen in Europe since that year. A pivotal work, General Assembly, with its subtle confusion of sport, politics, language and literary satire, offers an arena in which to consider Patterson’s primary concerns, played out in the wealth of visual material in the rest of the exhibition.
In the lower galleries, key existing works like The Great Bear, the artist’s well known re-working of the London underground map, and The Last Supper Arranged According to the Sweeper Formation (Jesus Christ in Goal), an early wall drawing that plays havoc with two hitherto sacrosanct articles of religious and sporting faith, frame major new projects. Time Piece is a film commissioned for this exhibition, in which Patterson edits new footage of old watches according to the timing of the climactic sequences of the classic Western High Noon. Ur combines the street plan of the Iraqi city of Ur with a wiring diagram, offering a new approach to ancient and contemporary civilisation.
Exhibition organised with Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
Exhibition supported by The Elephant Trust, The Foyle Foundation and Scottish Art Council Lottery Fund
Education supporters Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Scottish Arts Council Lottery Fund
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication
• Limited edition prints, Manned Flight and Timepiece
• DVD 12 mins
• Poster, postcards
An Aside
Selected by Tacita Dean
Exhibition 14 May – 12 July 2005
Eileen Agar, Lothar Baumgarten, Joseph Beuys, Walther Brüx, Fischli & Weiss, Rodney Graham, Raymond Hains, Roni Horn, Sharon Lockhart, Marisa Merz, Paul Nash, Gerhard Richter, Yvan Salomone, Thomas Scheibitz, Thomas Schütte, Kurt Schwitters
An Aside is one in a series of exhibitions selected by artists initiated by the Hayward Gallery. As well as being intriguing and thought-provoking exhibitions, they also shed light on the working methods and primary interests of their selector, in this case British artist Tacita Dean.
Tacita Dean has, for the first time, applied her non-programmatic approach of making work to selecting an exhibition of work by other artists. Throughout the development of this project, chance encounters have led her to create formal and emotional connections between
works and artists to allow the development of unexpected themes and links. The exhibition includes painting and sculpture, slide and film installations and a large number of works on paper by an international and cross-generational group of artists.
A National Touring Exhibition organised by the Hayward Gallery in collaboration with Camden Arts Centre
Exhibition supported by Canadian High Commission, London; The Elephant Trust; Embassy of the United States of America, London; Filmhouse, Edinburgh; The French Embassy, London; Frith Street Gallery, London; Goethe-Institut, London; Goethe-Institut, Glasgow; Italian Cultural Institute, London; Italian Cultural Institute, Edinburgh; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication
• Poster
Cai Guo-Qiang
Life Beneath the Shadow
Exhibition 30 July — 25 September 2005
The Fruitmarket Gallery’s 2005 Edinburgh Festival Exhibition is the most ambitious solo presentation in the UK to date of work by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, known throughout the world for his large-scale, site-specific installations.
Life Beneath the Shadow, an exhibition in several parts, explored Edinburgh’s reputation for ghosts and ghost stories, seeking poetically to conjure spirits and make peace with them, uniting matter and spirit, present and past in an acknowledgement of the fragility of human life.
The exhibition opened with the dramatic explosion of an ominously beautiful black firework rainbow over Edinburgh Castle, marking the start of the 2005 Edinburgh Art Festival. Black Rainbow: Explosion Project for Edinburgh arched three times above Edinburgh’s most famous monument, and was made from over one thousand custom-made pyrotechnic shells designed to be seen in daylight. It was the second in a series of explosion events intended by the artist as a protest against the increased threat of violence under which we all live. The first took place in Valencia on 22 May this year, and a third is scheduled for Beijing in the autumn.
At The Fruitmarket Gallery, the exhibition began with a grove of living plantain trees planted in the downstairs gallery. The leaves of the trees are inscribed with fragments from written accounts of ghost sightings, sourced in association with Scottish writer James Robertson with whom Cai collaborated throughout the development of the exhibition.
Exhibition supported by The Henry Moore Foundation
Black Rainbow was supported by Albion, Edinburgh Art Festival and The Hope Scott Trust
Exhibition partner The National Galleries of Scotland
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication
• Limited edition multiple
• DVD 12 mins
• Poster, postcards
Louise Hopkins
Freedom of Information paintings drawings 1996—2005
Exhibition 8 October – 11 December 2005
This substantial exhibition offers the first chance to see the full range of Louise Hopkins’s work. Bringing together paintings and drawings made over the last ten years, including several commissioned especially for the exhibition, it reveals the dominant themes and ambitions of a practice which encompasses work of both immediate impact and more intimate intensity.
Born in 1965 and trained at Glasgow School of Art, Hopkins is part of the generation of artists working in Scotland that includes Christine Borland, Simon Starling and Clare Barclay, and first came to prominence with an exhibition at Tramway Project Room in 1996. That exhibition included a sequence of paintings on furnishing fabric, a material to which the artist has recently returned.
Hopkins is known for working on pre-printed surfaces, and in this exhibition are works on furnishing fabric, sheet music, maps, comics, lined paper, graph paper, book pages and photographs. In its consistent variety, hers is a practice which seeks to engage with information as it is presented on surfaces in the world around us, and to interrupt and corrupt it. Hopkins slows down and diverts the flow of printed information so that the familiar becomes less familiar and we can never again trust our response to the authenticity of the pre-existing mark.
Exhibition supported by La Colección Jumex, México
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication Essays by Fiona Bradley, Greg Hilty and Ulrich Loock, £14.95
• Limited edition print
• DVD 13 mins
• Poster, postcards
At the same time somewhere else…
Melik Ohanian, Pia Rönicke, Sean Snyder
Exhibition 17 December 2005 – 19 February 2006
At the same time somewhere else… was curated by Judith Schwarzbart as the culmination of her one year position as curator/researcher at The Fruitmarket Gallery and Edinburgh College of Art. The exhibition has developed out of her ongoing interest in different working formats in artistic and curatorial practice.
The exhibition brings together work by three international artists who share a methodology that is increasingly prevalent in contemporary art. The artists have in common a way of working which involves investigating materials and situations already existing in the world, and all three seem to be governed by a specific question or curiosity. Their practice takes the form of research, but a kind of research which is free from academic conventions and methods. They plunder a variety of traditions from conceptual art, documentary film-making and independent cinema to the mass media, examining both the evocative and the informative quality of an image.
All three artists are intrigued by images or stories which convey a connection to global structures and represent a personal or oblique point of view. They also share an interest in places and issues of representation, identity and urban structures. Their work is often an unpredictable journey, which takes surprisingly new directions along the way, while the material they use offers the viewer an opportunity for speculative inquiry.
Based across Europe and addressing various topics, these artists are united by an interest in the complex relationship between our notion of reality and storytelling, where fictive stories sometimes say a lot about reality while it can be hard to discern the truth conveyed by documentary photographs.
Exhibition supported by Danish Arts Council Committee for International Visual Art and IFA Institut für uslandsbeziehungen e.V.
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
Available from the bookshop:
• DVD 13 mins
• Poster
