Toby Paterson Consensus and Collapse
Exhibition 30 January – 28 March 2010
Toby Paterson makes paintings, reliefs and constructions which explore the relationship between abstraction and reality. He has a keen interest in post-war modernist architecture which he deconstructs both materially and politically, developing a practice in which some works are almost understandable as architecture, while others are expressions of purely abstract form.
Paterson was born in Glasgow in 1974, and still lives and works in the city. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, and in 2002 was the winner of the Beck’s Futures art prize. As well as his more gallerybased practice, he makes art for the public realm, and was recently the recipient of several public commissions, notably the completed Powder Blue Orthogonal Pavilion, part of the Portavilion project in London and Poised Array, a work made for the façade of the BBC Scotland Headquarters in Glasgow. Paterson has also been appointed lead artist on the extension to the Docklands Light Railway for the London Olympics in 2012.
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
• Talks and Events recordings
• Webfilm
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication, Toby Paterson Consensus and Collapse
• DVD 15 mins
• Postcards
Exhibition 10 April – 9 May 2010
Air Iomlaid (On Exchange) is an ambitious education project involving 60 primary school pupils from Tollcross Primary School, Edinburgh and Bun-sgoil Shle`te, Skye. Conceived by artist Julie Brook and The Fruitmarket Gallery’s Children and Young People’s Programme Manager Johnny Gailey, following a process devised by Julie Brook, the project has involved the children in an intensive process of art tuition over 18 months. The children have learned to draw and paint outside in their own and each other’s environments, and to work up their immediate responses in individual and collaborative drawings and paintings, poetry, film and animation. This exhibition is a celebration of the project and an opportunity to present the children’s work.
Is e pro`iseact foghlaim glo`ir-mhiannach a tha ann Air Iomlaid a’ toirt a-steach 60 sgoilearan bun-sgoile bho Bhun-sgoil Chrois na Ci`se an Du`n E`ideann agus bho Bhun-sgoil Shle`ite san Eilean Sgi`theanach. Air a tho`iseachadh le neach-ealain Julie Brook agus Manaidsear Pro`gram O`igridh Chloinne is Dhaoine O`ga The Fruitmarket Gallery, Johnny Gailey, an de`idh pro`iseas a dhealbh Julie Brook, tha am pro`iseact seo air a’ chlann a thoirt an sa`s ann am pro`iseas dian de theagasg ealain thairis air 18 mi`osan. Dh’ionnsaich a’ chlann a bhith a’ dealbhadh agus a’ peantadh a-muigh nan a`rainneachd fhe`in agus an a`rainneachd a che`ile, agus a bhith a’ nochdadh na grad-fhreagairtean aca ann an dealbhan, peantadh, ba`rdachd, fiolm is beothachadh fa-leth agus gu co- obrachail. Tha an taisbeanadh seo mar mholadh air a’ phro`iseact agus na chothrom air obair na cloinne a chur air adhart.
Supported by The National Lottery via The Scottish Arts Council’s Inspire Fund with additional funding from Bo`rd na Ga`idhlig, Scottish Natural Heritage, Learning and Teaching Scotland and The Ernest Cook Trust
Le taic bhon Chrannchur Na`iseanta tro Ionmhas Brosnachaidh Comhairle Ealain na h-Alba le taic a bharrachd bho Bo`rd na Ga`idhlig, Dualchas Na`dair na h-Alba, Ionnsachadh is Teagasg na h-Alba agus Urras Ernest Cook
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide (English)
• Exhibition guide (Gaelic)
• Talks and Events recordings
• Webfilm
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication, Air Iomlaid
• DVD 15 mins
• Postcards
Exhibition 22 May – 11 July 2010
Belgian artist and film-maker Johan Grimonprez (born in 1962) is internationally renowned for his complex film and video montages which combine footage from various sources to explore the troubled relationship the modern, multimedia led world has with its own social, cultural, historical and political identity.
Grimonprez first came to prominence in 1997 when dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, a 68-minute long media history of aeroplane hijackings, was shown at Documenta X, Kassel, and took the art world by storm. At the end of 2009, he released Double Take, a feature-length film of odd couples and double-deals that casts Alfred Hitchcock’s work and persona as central to and reflective of a world in flux. The work uses techniques familiar from dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and was similarly well-received.
This exhibition was the first British Gallery showing of Double Take, and presented it together with dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and two much earlier works which draw on research undertaken in a province of Papua New Guinea during the artist’s postgraduate studies in cultural anthropology. These early films, with their emphasis on one culture’s attempted to reconcile its sense of itself with that of another, provided a telling context for the later works.
All the works in the exhibition are informed by Grimonprez’s insistent, persistent and political enquiry into the power of the moving image. His use of juxtaposition references the television remote control and the ability it gives a viewer to ‘zap’ from one image to the next. As news broadcasts meet advertisements, clips from TV shows and Hollywood films, a new narrative is created in which reality and fiction become blurred, contested ideas. Grimonprez makes familiar images seem novel, at once frightening and humorous, subjective and objective. His work reveals and subverts the role the moving image can play in the construction of our personal and political histories, our fears and aspirations, and the way we look at the world and ourselves.
Exhibition supported by
With Support from of The Flemish Government
• Exhibition guide
• Talks and Events recordings
• Webfilm
Available from the bookshop:
• DVD 15 mins
Exhibition 30 July – 31 October 2010
This exhibition showed new and recent work by Martin Creed, one of Britain’s most highly-regarded and popular artists. Creed’s work captures the public imagination, while also attracting critical acclaim for its generous, accessible approach. He puts ideas out in the world in a variety of materials, not all of them art materials yet not all of them everyday stuff either (while he makes work with readily available, simple things such as planks of wood, stacked chairs or pieces of crumpled paper; he also uses paint, a traditional artist’s material, and professionally trained runners and ballet dancers, neither of which are particularly easy to get hold of). In 2001 he won the Turner Prize with Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, and in 2008 responded to the prestigious Duveen Commission at Tate Britain with the phenomenally popular Work No. 850, in which runners sprinted through the gallery at 30-second intervals.
Consisting of recent and newly-commissioned work, this exhibition focused on stacking and progression in size, height and tone – stacks of planks, chairs, tables, boxes, pieces of lego; series of paintings; and works making use of the musical scale. Creed talks about these works in terms of a picture of growth; showing process, progress and things in movement. A highlight of the exhibition was a new commission in which Creed turned the Gallery’s staircase into a synthesizer, with each step sounding a different note on the scale as the audience walked up or down.
The exhibition’s focus on progression – on going up and down steps – gives a context to a new permanent work of public sculpture the Scotsman Steps. Part of a City of Edinburgh Council and Edinburgh World Heritage renovation of Edinburgh’s Scotsman Steps, this work is commissioned by The Fruitmarket Gallery and supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund for Edinburgh Art Festival. Creed will resurface the Steps with different and contrasting marbles from all over the world, creating a visually spectacular, beautiful and thoughtful response to this historic artery. Due to open to the public at the end of June 2011.
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
• Talks and Events recordings
• Webfilm
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication, Martin Creed Down Over Up
• Limited edition musical postcard
• DVD 15 mins
• Postcards
Exhibition 19 November 2010 – 23 January 2011
Childish Things is The Fruitmarket Gallery’s second collaboration with David Hopkins, Professor of Art History at the University of Glasgow, acknowledged authority on Marcel Duchamp, dada and surrealism, increasingly renowned writer on contemporary art, and curator of the popular 2006 Fruitmarket Gallery exhibition Dada’s Boys: Identity and Play in Contemporary Art.
Like Dada’s Boys before it, Childish Things has its origins in dada and surrealism, but this new exhibition includes no dada or surrealist art. Rather, it looks at a post-dada/surrealist interest in toys as signifiers of what Hopkins terms a ‘dark poetics’ of childhood, bringing together the work of seven senior and historically-significant artists from Britain and the United States. As always in Hopkins’s exhibitions, each work by each artist has been carefully chosen for its relevance to, and illumination of his initial line of enquiry – each piece speaks volumes, of childhood and its related anxieties; and of the power of art to make a context in which to think ideas through.
Childish Things seeks to examine the relationship between art, attitudes to childhood and the iconography of play in a new and metaphorically open-ended way. Its historical focus is highly specific. It examines art produced in a twenty-year period between 1983 and 2003 in Britain and the USA, so that a set of themes can emerge from work which was produced in fairly homogeneous social and artistic conditions. From Jeff Koons’ celebrations of kiddy-kitsch to Mike Kelley’s and Louise Bourgeois’ evocations of more sinister or abusive parent-child relations; Susan Hiller’s anthropologically-inflected exploration of the aggression underpinning the social conditioning of children, as in the Punch and Judy show (An Entertainment) is placed in counterpoint to Paul McCarthy’s monstrous consumerist / sexual hybrids and Robert Gober’s playpen is seen alongside Helen Chadwick’s objects which deal with her early adaptive response to playthings.
The works displayed in the exhibition are major works by artists at the top of their game; they react with each other and with the theme of the exhibition, but are in no way confined, brimming over with meanings too complex to sit easily in anyone’s box. Childish Things celebrates their independent force as much as the way in which they may be brought together.
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
• Talks and Events recordings
• Webfilm
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication, Childish Things
• DVD 15 mins
• Postcards
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