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John Bellany: A Life in Self-Portraiture

5 stars 

John Bellany is revealed as a seeker in search of himself in this first major overview of the Port Seaton born artist’s work since his death in 2013. You can see it in the early 1960s drawing of the wild haired roaring boy of the new Edinburgh art scene as he stares through the frame, flint-eyed and goatee-bearded. You can see it too in the more resigned figure of Bellany at 70 (2012), all dressed up for the occasion, eyes softer now.

 

Inbetween, more than eighty works see Bellany embark on an unflinching personal odyssey. From the living hell of his triptych, Homage to John Knox (1969) and the disembodied head of his etching, Angry Young Man (1971), some of Bellany’s later 1970s works see him surrounded by monkeys, fish and other creatures.

 

Bellany seems conscious of his own mortality from early on. The deathly pallor of Skull Self Portrait (1969) is mirrored in the face full of medical tubes in Self Portrait in Recovery (1986), and later in Hospital Self Portrait from Sketchbook (2007). By the time of Self Portrait in Chair (2012), the demons seem to have been purged as the painting bookends a vital glimpse into a world where art and life are laid bare in equal measure. 

 

City Art Centre until 28thSeptember.


The List, August 2025

 

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