Forthcoming Exhibitions
Gabriel Orozco
Edinburgh Art Festival Exhibition
1 August – 19 October 2013
Gabriel Orozco (born Jalapa, Veracruz, 1962) is one of the foremost international artists of our age. Rising to prominence in the early 1990s, he has developed a consistently innovative practice, making work which not only captures the imagination but also powerfully engages with key material and conceptual issues of what it is to make art now. His practice encompasses photography, painting, sculpture and installation, creating some of the most iconic images of recent contemporary artsuch as the modified Citroen DS La DS (1993), the series of photographs of pairs of yellow scooters Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe (1995), and the chequerboard skull Black Kites (1997).
The Fruitmarket Gallery is delighted to be able to present this new exhibition of Orozco’s work. Taking the 2005 painting The Eye of Go as its starting point, the exhibition looks at how the circular geometric motif of this painting – part of a way of thinking for Orozco, a way to organise ideas of structure, organisation and perspective – migrates onto other work, recurring in other paintings, sculptures and photographs. A highlight of the exhibition will be a series of large geometric works on acetate, made in the mid 1990s, yet never before exhibited. Rather than surveying the whole range of Orozco’s practice, the exhibition seeks to cut a conceptual slice through it, to look deeply into the mechanics of the artist’s thinking and working process. Not only will the exhibition propose a different view of Orozco’s major contribution to changes in art in the 90s but bring to the fore the urgent problem of art’s ‘makeability’ now.
The exhibition is curated by art historian and writer on contemporary art Professor Briony Fer, who contributed ‘Constellations in Dust: Notes on the Notebooks’ to the recent Tate/MOMA/Pompidou retrospective catalogue. It will be accompanied by a new publication, written by Briony Fer.
Louise Bourgeois Insomnia
26 October 2013 – 16 February 2014
In early 2004, The Fruitmarket Gallery was proud to present Stitches in Time, a major exhibition of work by Louise Bourgeois, one of the greatest and most influential artists of our time. The exhibition was curated by Frances Morris, Head of Collections (International Art) at Tate Modern, who went on to curate the major retrospective of Bourgeois’s work at Tate Modern in 2007. Now, almost exactly ten years after first showing the work of this extraordinary artist to audiences in Edinburgh, The Fruitmarket Gallery is delighted to be able to present a new exhibition, again curated by Frances Morris, of Bourgeois’s works on paper.
Central to the exhibition are Bourgeois’s Insomnia Drawings, a remarkable suite of 220 drawings and writings made between 1994 and June 1995 specifically to combat the insomnia which Bourgeois once described as regulating her life. Created in the suspended state between sleeping and waking, The Insomnia Drawings contain all the major themes of Bourgeois’s work and reveal the close link between drawing and writing that is such a key part of her practice. The Insomnia Drawings, generously lent to The Fruitmarket Gallery by the Daros Collection in Switzerland, are complemented and extended by works on paper selected by Frances Morris from the Louise Bourgeois Trust.
Focusing on drawing and writing, the exhibition cuts to the heart of the artist’s work, providing both a key to and a celebration of her unique creative energy.
Tania Kovats Oceans
Tania Kovats is a British artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, installation and large-scale time-based projects exploring our experience and understanding of landscape; drawing and paying attention to others’ drawings; writing, grouping and gathering things together. Recent major projects have included Meadow (2007), a transported wildflower meadow; The Museum of the White Horse (2007), a travelling landscape museum; Tree (2009), a permanent installation for the Natural History Museum; British Isles (2004) and All the Islands of All the Oceans (2005), two series of drawings; and The Drawing Book – A Survey of Drawing: The Primary Means of Expression. In May 2012 a new, large-scale sculpture, Rivers, was installed in the landscape of Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh.
The Fruitmarket Gallery is currently preparing a two-part collaboration with Tania Kovats. First, an exhibition which presents an ambitious new work in the context of the artist’s ongoing practice. The new work, All the Seas, is a sculptural presentation of water from all the world’s seas, collected by the artist with the help of a global network of people drawn in by the poetry of the idea of bringing all the waters of the world to one place. Bottles of seawater have been arriving at The Fruitmarket Gallery and at the artist’s studio since late 2012, and the network of connections that the piece represents will grow week by week until late 2013, when the piece itself is made.
The second part of the Gallery’s collaboration with Tania Kovats is a publication, Drawing Water: Drawing as a Mechanism for Exploration, which accompanies the exhibition but is not a catalogue for it. Since publishing The Drawing Book in 2006, Kovats has continued to be attracted to the wealth of drawings of others. She is currently bringing these together in a new publication looking particularly at drawings of exploration and discovery by a wide selection of practitioners, drawings which seek, like All the Seas, to find a way to make sense of the world.
This collaboration between The Fruitmarket Gallery and Tania Kovats itself explores new territory, in a new model for how an institution might work with an artist to make their ideas and enthusiasms available to the public. The exhibition, the new work and the book are independent yet contextualise and amplify each other – the new work is a large scale, participatory sculptural installation and the publication is an intimate vehicle for independent enquiry, but both have to do with gathering and grouping, and with discovering through presenting.
