5 stars
There is something profoundly physical about this living retrospective by Andy Goldsworthy, whose environmental interventions into the natural world over the last half-century have literally changed the landscape. Here, Goldsworthy manages to subvert the RSA’s grand interior, which he bends and shapes to his own needs with something truly monumental.
From the moment you step up the stairs either side of a multi coloured woollen rug, you have wandered up the garden path and not so much entered an environment as an entire world. This has been carved, shaped and manipulated into artistic life by Goldsworthy with all the muscle, guts and hard labour that entails.
One room houses stones from 108 graveyards in Dumfries and Galloway. Another is filled with a giant circular curtain of wooden sticks, which you can step inside. A barbed wire fence is hung between pillars blocking off access as with a private field. Red Wall (2025) is an entire gallery wall plastered with red clay with the cracks showing. Most magnificent of all, Oak Passage (2025) sees two felled trees lay prone side by side, the space between becoming a catwalk to parade along, surrounded by nature.
Upstairs, archive material shows Goldsworthy has never been afraid to get his hands dirty. Photographs capture him posing in the midst of what look like shamanic rituals or durational performance art works. As he throws sticks in the air or fashions stones into shapes, the implied battering of elements is palpable.
This section of Fifty Years is a remarkable excavation of Goldsworthy’s roots and his vivid and unsentimental reimagining of the land. His newer creations too seem to rumble. Combined, they create an epic hymn to hard graft as much as artistic imagination. In Goldsworthy’s hands, the earth moves in mysterious and seismic life.
National Galleries of Scotland exhibition in the Royal Scottish Academy building until 2 November
The List, September 2025
ends
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