Tony Swain
19 April – 1 July 2012
Irish-born artist Tony Swain trained at Glasgow School of Art and still lives and works in Glasgow. He is known for paintings depicting complex private worlds painted over newspaper pages, the newsprint providing both the physical ground and the conceptual starting point of each painting. Fragments of the newspaper survive, transformed and transfigured by their inclusion in Swain’s painted world.
This exhibition will consist entirely of new work, made specifically for The Fruitmarket Gallery.
Dieter Roth
Edinburgh Art Festival Exhibition
25 July – 14 October 2012
Dieter Roth (1930–1998) was an artist of astonishing breadth and diversity, producing books, graphics, drawings, paintings, sculptures, assemblages, and installation work involving sounds recordings and video. He was also a composer, musician, poet and writer. Art and life for Roth flowed readily into each other, and much of the material for his artistic output came from his everyday life. He made art from perishable, often edible materials close to hand, allowing the decomposition of the materials to become part of the form and meaning of the work – he rejected aesthetics in his approach to creative work, valuing instead chance, experimentation, irony and variability.
The Fruitmarket Gallery is proud to announce a major new exhibition of Roth’s work, organised in collaboration with Björn Roth, the artist’s son and long term collaborator. Focused around his use of his own life as the material for art, the exhibition brings together three major works: A Diary, made for the Swiss Pavilion at the 1982 Venice Biennale, which consists of film he shot of himself over the previous year, shown simultaneously on 35 Super-8 projectors; Flat Waste (1975), a collection of a year’s worth of rubbish less than 5mm thick, archived and presented as an alternative form of diary; and Solo Scenes (1997–98), an installation of 135 television monitors showing footage Roth took of himself during the last year of his life, once he knew he was dying.
Although Dieter Roth died over a decade ago, his work remains current, of interest to artists and audiences alike. His work has a particular connection to Edinburgh: he was part of Richard Demarco’s seminal exhibition Strategy: Get Arts at the 1970 Edinburgh International Festival. This will be the first time his work has been seen in Scotland since. The Fruitmarket Gallery will make a publication on the occasion of the exhibition, celebrating the urgency of Roth’s art and ideas, and re-stating the connection between Roth and Edinburgh.
Galápagos
2 November 2012 – 13 January 2013
Curated by Bergit Arends and Greg Hilty
This exhibition brings together work by twelve artists who have travelled to and spent time in the Galápagos archipelago through a residency programme initiated in 2007. Each artist was invited on the basis of their profound engagement with the opportunity, and each found the experience transformative for their artistic practice and their life.
Collectively they demonstrate considerable variety of approach and discipline within the visual arts, ranging across film-making, video, installation, painting, sculpture, photography, animation, illustration and sound. The artists also brought to the project, and developed during it, considerable skills of communication and interaction with scientists, tourists, and local inhabitants of the Galápagos, allowing them to explore subjects of scientific or social interest consistent with their artistic concerns in depth. The works they have produced individually give compelling form to profound personal visions developed through their experiences on the islands. Shown together, they build a unique dreamscape of a remarkable place, messages for mankind from the stark realities of Galápagos.
Artists include Jyll Bradley, Paulo Catrica, Filipa César, Marcus Coates, Dorothy Cross (with actor Fiona Shaw), Alexis Deacon, Jeremy Deller, Tania Kovats, Kaffe Matthews, Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman & Joe Gerhardt), Alison Turnbull.
In collaboration with Centro de Arte Moderna, Lisbon and The Bluecoat, Liverpool. The Gulbenkian Galápagos Artists’ Residency Programme and Galápagos exhibition were organised by the Galapagos Conservation Trust in partnership with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Additional support has come from the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Natural History Museum.
