Coffee-Table Notes

‘The Royal Scottish Academy,’ as captioned by way of explanation at this group show curated by its former president, Arthur Watson, ‘is made up by artists and architects elected by their peers and is in essence a collective.’ As the caption also points out, George Wyllie, in whose honour the building we are in was created, was considered an anomaly. As a     customs officer and jazz musician turned late blooming sculptor, he was a wild card and joker in the pack who was nevertheless welcomed into the RSA club with open arms.     For all Wyllie’s bunnet and overalls bonhomie that came with his work, it must never he forgotten that his environmental sculptural interventions are some of the greatest public artworks of recent times. He is also  probably the only RSA member to have a purpose built museum created in their honour.   This show was brought together by Watson to celebrate the RSA’s 200th anniversary with something of a greatest hits compendium that j...

The shock of the new stands firm in this exhibition by Simon Phipps, whose long-term documentation of Brutalist architecture has given already dramatic constructions a sense of era defining largesse from what may or may not have been a golden age of town planning.   Throughout the gallery’s two rooms, a panoramic display resembles production stills from the opening credits of a late 1960s/early 1970s TV drama about sharp suited urbanists intent on creating new worlds made out of concrete and glass. In actuality, Phipps has mapped out a space age psychogeography already predicted by Fritz Lang and mythologised by J.G. Ballard as it transformed the post Second World War built environment in monumental fashion.   Here, Phipps presents a travelogue of civic spaces designed for a brave new world beyond the tenement slums of yesterday to the clean line abstractions looking out onto tomorrow. This comes in the solid form of office blocks, car parks and cathedrals, shopping ...

4 stars   Absence is everywhere in Matthew Arthur Williams’ new series of photographs. It’s there – and not there – in the barren grasslands where empty chairs sometimes sit in Williams’ pictures. When he appears – naked, posed, in repose – Williams embraces the solitariness in a display not so much an Eden-like retreat as a contemplation in search of himself.   The heart of this body of work made between 2024 and 2025 comes in Another Allegory, a twenty-one minute film developed during a residency at Cove Park and first seen in Nottingham in August 2025. Here, oblique little fragments of music, image and spoken word occupy the spaces without ever overwhelming them. Shot in hazy home movie style 16mm, the camera lingers on secret spaces that don’t look much in daylight, but after dark, who knows?   Images of chopped down trees alternate with close ups of Williams’ collaborator Blaize Henry playing violin. A bare torsoed young man plays a steel drum. A photograph of one of...

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...

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 Po...

5 stars   Linder’s artistic roots in Manchester’s punk scene have rightly been lionised along with her taboo busting photomontages from that era. As vital and totemic as her early feminist subversions of pornography and women’s magazines remain, this Edinburgh iteration of her fifty year retrospective first presented at the Hayward Gallery in London makes clear that there has been a lot more going on since.   Outside, Linder gets back to nature with cut out shapes peeking from the trees, or else  standing proud in the pond. Inside, each section playfully defines Linder’s cut and paste aesthetic. This is as much the case with the elaborately patterned rug inspired by surrealist artist Ithel Colquhoun made for 2015 dance work Children of the Mantic Stain as it as it is for her 1977 photographs of Manchester drag artists.   More recent works such as The Liverpool Sphinx (2025) and The Pool of Life (2021) are mature examples of Linder’s oeuvre, supreme in confidence...

As the necessary historicisation of Scotland’s pre digital but all too recent artistic past runs on apace, it is vital that collections are put on show to remind year zero types that the world didn’t begin with NFTs and AI, but with hard graft and artistic vision.     So it goes with Story, which fills Edinburgh Printmakers’ downstairs gallery with what is effectively a greatest hits selection that joins the dots between Edinburgh Printmakers’ assorted homes since it was founded in 1967 in Victoria Street as The Printmakers’ Workshop. Seen together, the forty works on show also become something of a rough guide to the high rollers of contemporary Scottish art since then.   Drawn from Edinburgh Printmakers’ permanent collection, the exhibition begins with the muscularity of work by John Bellany, Jock McFadyen, Ken Currie and Peter Howson, as well as pieces from Sam Ainsley and Carol Rhodes. This moves onwards to several generations of art stars, with contributions from the...

4 stars   Bad dreams burst through the walls in Portia Zvavahera’s exhibition of paintings, which sees the Zimbabwean artist dig deep into both her psyche and the spiritual forces that drive her. The result in Zvavahera’s first exhibition in Europe is an epic series of works driven by an unholy alliance of fear and love channelled from Zvavahera’s fevered imagination. The rats may be poised to pounce, but through the swirl of colours where they hide, her only mission is to keep her children safe from harm.   This moves from the early devotions of ‘His Presence’ (2013), ‘Labour Ward’ (2012) and ‘Labour Pains’ (2012) in the Fruitmarket’s downstairs gallery, to the more recent night terrors of works made in the last year shown upstairs. This accidentally symbolic ascension charts a journey that is both holy and possessed. With titles like ‘Fighting Energies’ (2024’), ‘Hide There’ (2024) and ‘Lifted Away’ (2024), it is no accident that the title of the exhibition is the Shona word...

A collegiate approach prevails over this group show of six graduates from Collective’s 2024 Satellite Programme of emerging artists. Taking its title from an Irish proverb that loosely translates as ‘people live in each other’s shadows', pass shadow, whisper shade is disparate in approach, with shared themes of personal history throughout. Tellingly, almost all artists make reference to their parents, grandparents or older ancestors.     Emelia Kerr Beale draws inspiration from her father’s now demolished factory with a large scale grid of graphite drawings of ‘clock’ patterns, parts of a mechanical knitting machine and an industrial soundscape by Clara Hancock that sounds like a factory sampled.    Hannan Jones’ looped 16mm based moving image piece, Hiraeth: Pandy Lane (2024) looks to Jones’ grandfather’s attempts to buy a suit in a piece that resembles a 1970s folk horror public information film.    There is folk horror too in GASTROMANCY (2024), Katherin...

Scottish Arts Club, Edinburgh   Four stars   All life is here in this year’s Scottish Portrait Awards, first launched by the Scottish Arts Trust in 2017. Divided across two rooms of thirty fine art works and fifty photography pieces, every face contained within the show tells a story, whether looking directly out from the frame or else turned away, a reluctant subject.    The familiarity of public figures in some images is an obvious appeal. Studies of Michael Rosen in Daniel Fooks’ painting, and novelist James Kelman in Chris Close’s photograph are both broodingly chiselled and well deserved winners in their respective categories. More playful is The Strange Case of Billy’s Banjo, a painting of the late John Byrne in his studio, while Matt Brown’s photo of Young Fathers shows a band who understand fully the value of image.   Beyond the famous, more intriguing everyday narratives come through many of the works on show. There is the monumental torpor of Frederick...

Fruitmarket Gallery 4 stars Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s first solo exhibition in Scotland draws from an archive of his country’s now defunct colonial era railway system prior to liberation in 1957, and transforms its raw material of rusty train tracks, customised leather and formal papers into something that honours those who did the heavy lifting.   Charcoal drawings of men at work are set against a backdrop of papers from the Ghana Industrial Holding Company, resembling murals on repurposed billboards. A series of staged photographs sees a group of men drag a German-built Henschel train along the track. Life size dioramas of those who worked on the railways are lined up like some large-scale team picture. Photographs of the arms of Mahama’s female studio assistants focus on their tattoos, which themselves depict Ghana’s history.  The exhibition’s title is drawn from lyrics to a song by Owl John, the solo project by late Frightened Rabbit vocalist Scott Hutchison, w...

Collective 4 stars   Space is very much the place in this new body of work by Moyna Flannigan housed in the Collective’s City Dome space on the site of the former Royal Observatory. Looking for Pluto is a multi-panelled frieze that sees a gaggle of women with Jackie-magazine eye and Mean Girls attitudes process through history, mobile phones at the ready as they fall in behind a larger monumental figure. As time and space collide, this looks like an animation in waiting culled from some 1970s rad-fem SF comic book. Space Shuffle’s title piece is an array of cut-out shapes balanced on plinths or else hanging from the cosmos held by wires in what looks like fragile film set for some stop-motion fantasia. Images of aeroplanes and horses adorn both works, as they do in the collages from Flannigan’s Cosmic Traces series, in which more solitary figures gaze up at the planets beyond, every one a star.  Collective until 15 September. The List, August 2024 ends  

Dovecot Studios 4 stars Home is very much at the heart of Chris Ofili’s monumental tapestry that forms the centrepiece of Dovecot’s summer exhibition. Not only is Ofili’s seven-metre wide mix of classicist myth and contemporary stylings drawn from the Manchester born Turner Prize winner’s adopted Trinidad residence. This first Edinburgh showing of a work commissioned by London livery institution the Clothmakers’ Company is making a prodigal’s return to the space where it was created over almost three years between 2014 and 2017 by a team of five weavers at Dovecot Tapestry Studio. The result across the work’s three panels finds a man and woman in repose in a fantastical island Eden. While the man plays guitar, the woman is fed cocktails from on high as birds sing in the trees. While figures at either end of the painting suggest some kind of intervention, there are references as well to Italian footballer Mario Balotelli as well as the Trinidadian pastime of keeping caged birds. The tap...

Two very different exhibitions inspired by the 1980s inner city landscapes of Edinburgh and New York have been relocated to Glasgow to become highlights of GI 2024. At the Modern Institute’s Bricks Space, five large-scale works by Keith Haring chart the rapid-fire perpetual motion of life underground in all its bustling busyness in the Big, if slightly rotting Apple. Across the river, in the top floor of the former school of 5 Florence Street, photographs by the late Sandra George bring things closer to home by way of a series of black and white documentary portraits of Auld Reekie life on the margins.  Despite being created oceans apart geographically, in sociological and political terms, Haring and George’s respective canons reveal them as frontline near neighbours, who ended up being regarded in vastly different ways. On the one hand, Haring’s street-smart guerrilla interventions were already lionised by the hipster art establishment prior to his early passing in 1990, aged 31. ...

Five stars    When American photographer Milton Rogovin (1909-2011) visited mining communities in Ayrshire, Fife and Midlothian over three weeks in 1982, the images he took of people at work, rest and play captured a time and place just before those communities were upended by the 1984/1985 Miner’s Strike that changed Britain forever.   Forty years on, artist Nicky Bird followed in Rogovin’s footsteps, revisiting the places, the people and their descendents of those originally depicted, marking the changes and memorialising the seismic past that shaped them.   The result in this powerful exhibition puts images by both artists side by side in a way that bridges generations to tell a story that became one of the markers of late twentieth century society. Developed by Bird with the communities depicted, each photograph is captioned with a commentary by those in the thick of the scenes depicted.   From the grubby faced men posing beside the pit or in the living room...

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow Five stars   From Greenham Common to Palestine, Jenny Matthews has long been on the frontline of international protest against warfare. As a founder member in the 1980s of all-woman photographic agency, Format Photographers, and in everything that followed, Matthews’ images have brought to life the women caught in the crossfire of numerous conflicts and atrocities across more than forty years. Two decades on from her book, Women and War (2003), this solo show brings together several bodies of work that immortalise and honour her subjects using the most tender of means to keep them in the frame.   This is as clear in the series of twenty-three quilts lined with images from Matthews’ archive, as much as it is with the thirty-five portraits that use embroidery to mask the faces of Afghan women in Facial Derecognition (2021). It is there too in Torn Apart, an up to the minute series drawn from the crisis in Sudan, and a new series of images from Ga...

Four stars The figure of Eduardo Paolozzi towers over the contemporary art world as much as his seven-metre tall sculpture of ‘Vulcan’ (1998-1999), Roman god of fire, does in its permanent residence in Modern Two’s café named after the artist. The Leith born pop auteur’s presence is similarly embedded into Edinburgh’s cityscape, be it through public sculptures, the locally brewed beer named after him, the football shirt for Leith Athletic, or the magnificent recreation of his studio in Modern Two.   The latter is the perfect conduit for this centenary exhibition, which rolls out sixty works that not only channel the throwaway detritus of Paolozzi’s collages, but show how his ultra moderne designs made their mark beyond the gallery. This is spread across two ground floor rooms, a library and a couple of corridor showcases. The first room, Paris & London, shows off some of his 1950s collages, sculptures, screenprints and experiments with ink. The second room, Pattern & Print,...