Coffee-Table Notes

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,...