Richard Long, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Richard Long: Walking and Marking
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
30 June – 21 October 2007

A major exhibition of work by one of the great figures of contemporary British art is the highlight of the 2007 summer programme at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Richard Long’s innovative, beautiful, thought-provoking and influential work, which expresses man’s relationship with the landscape, has gained him a world-wide reputation. Spanning his entire career, and selected by the artist, Walking and Marking demonstrates how Richard Long has extended his artistic practice over forty years, bringing together examples of all of his signature methods and procedures. This will be the artist’s first major retrospective exhibition in the UK since 1991.

Based on the walks that he has made since the mid-1960s, Richard Long’s work takes the form of photographs, maps, drawings and sculptures - generally lines or circles - constructed from the places that Long passes along the way. Mud, a material that has a powerful resonance in his work, and which he has used in a number of ways for much of his career, is a major theme of the exhibition. The artist will remake three of his large-scale mud wall drawings in situ, and the display also features his mud-dipped works on paper and mud-splash drawings. For the exhibition, Long has also make a large cross-shaped sculpture in Cornish slate, to be sited in the gardens at the rear of the Gallery.

Born in Bristol in 1945, Richard Long studied at St Martin’s College of Art, in London, from 1966-68. While still a student he began making simple but precise walks that were formal or ritualised (rather than simply being a means of getting from one place to another), photographing the traces that he left behind (such as flattened grass, or stones laid at regular intervals). Interested in using nature and the landscape as his subject matter, but in a manner that departed from traditional representation, he made walking into a form of art. Since the 1960s walking has remained the basis of Long’s work, and he has made walks across the world, often in remote or inaccessible places such as the Himalayas, the Sahara or Patagonia. He has also made frequent walks in Scotland.

On walks made during the 1970s Long began laying rocks or sticks in straight lines or circles. For the artist, these simple, but potent forms have a universal significance and symbolism that is easily and commonly understood. The circle is a primitive, elemental sign, used by man as a means of communing with the earth, the moon or the gods. Paths are traces of mankind’s presence in the environment, and across the world are marked in different ways, with cairns, signposts, miletones, shrines and other sacred or cultural markers. During the 1970s, Richard Long was also making sculpture of natural materials in interior spaces, so the landscape remained the basis of his work. This exhibition includes the seminal Stone Line, 1980, his first work in slate, which is in the collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Richard Long’s circles and lines are made with common, natural materials, easily found to hand, and their placement is spontaneous, made in response to the places in which the artist finds himself. Often they may be seen by no-one but the artist, and are left to be re-absorbed by the environment, their impermanence a simple metaphor for the transience and mutability of nature. Richard Long has continued to use photography to make his activities accessible, but in different ways he also employs maps and texts to convey the idea of his walks. All of these is represented in the exhibition.

Much of Richard Long’s work is concerned making marks, impressions and traces. He equates the stones and other materials he uses with fingerprints, as each is uniquely individual and different. Richard Long has also made work using his own finger- and hand prints, including a number of works made on tree sections, driftwood, and other materials that he has collected. A number of these works are displayed in Edinburgh for the first time.

Richard Long was born near the River Avon, which flows into one of the biggest tidal estuaries in the world. The river and its mud have had a profound effect on his work. Mud is a simple, direct, natural material, like water, stones or dust. It is the product of the continual flow of water over millennia, caused by the pull of the lunar tides; it speaks of the natural world and the passing of time. Using diluted mud as if it was paint, Richard Long carefully splashes it on the walls with his hands, in a way that suggests the activity of man and also the activity of nature. He also dips paper in mud, creating extraordinary natural effects. Richard Long shows that this most mundane of materials can create poetic images. For the Edinburgh show, Richard Long uses mud from the Firth of Forth.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, which reproduces many of the installation works made by Richard Long in the past five years. It will include an interview between Richard Long and the exhibition’s curator, Patrick Elliott, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

A new collection of Richard Long’s statements and interviews, dating from 1971 to 2006 is published to coincide with this exhibition: Richard Long: Selected Statements and Interviews, published by Haunch of Venison, London. Edited by Ben Tufnell, the volume gathers together a number of key texts, many of which have not been widely available for some time.

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART 
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh
www.nationalgalleries.org

Francis Bacon, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads 
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 
4 June - 4 September 2005 

A powerful new exhibition of Francis Bacon’s intense and forceful portraiture is the major summer show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2005. Francis Bacon is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the latter half of the twentieth century: this is the first museum exhibition to explore in depth his vivid and striking portraits of friends, lovers and other artists. Jointly conceived and organised by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the British Council, the exhibition comprises over fifty works, including self-portraits and portraits of Francis Bacon’s best-known sitters, on loan from public and private collections throughout the world.

Born in Dublin in 1909, Francis Bacon spent most of his life in London. He began working as a painter in the l930s and from then to his death in l992 the human figure remained the dominant subject of his art. Making portraits that reflected the intensity of his personal relationships was one of Francis Bacon’s abiding artistic preoccupations. This exhibition begins with small single heads from the late l940s, which echo the imagery of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion - the painting which caused a sensation and effectively launched Francis Bacon’s career when it was shown in 1945. There follows a group of large single portraits, some full-length, in which the human figure is depicted as a more integrated whole; and finally – the core of the exhibition – small heads of friends from the artistic and social milieu of London’s Soho – Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne, and Francis Bacon’s lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer.

The subjects in these captivating portraits are painted slightly under life-size and are seen from close to. Beginning in 1962, with Study for Three Heads, in which Francis Bacon’s own head is flanked by images of his lover Peter Lacy, who had recently died, these small canvases – each 14 by 12 inches, a format which Francis Bacon seems to have settled on in 1961 – are often grouped in threes. This format – the triptych – gave Francis Bacon the opportunity to show three different aspects of the same personality or to contrast images of two or more different people (including sometimes, himself). Like private, devotional portraits, these small heads open up a rich vein of intimacy in Francis Bacon’s art, and come as a surprise to those whose knowledge of the artist is restricted to his large-scale triptychs.

For a period in the late-Fifties Francis Bacon’s output of portraits was dominated by the image of Peter Lacy, with whom he enjoyed a tense and often violent relationship but who, it has been claimed, was ‘the one great love of his life’. Peter Lacy is the subject of five portraits in this exhibition, including two showing him asleep, which are remarkable for their tenderness and poignancy. The exhibition also contains a number of full-length portraits from the 1960s, their subjects shown standing, seated or reclining. Looking at these works one can understand what the artist Michael Andrews meant when he praised Francis Bacon’s ‘realism of palpable presence’ – the sitters appear so real that you feel they are in the room with you. Yet, while their blurred features evoke movement and life, they are also, perhaps, suggestive of dissolution and inevitable death.

Striking for their qualities of improvisation and immediacy, Francis Bacons’ portraits were painted from a combination of photographs and memory: ‘I don’t want to practise before [my subjects] the injury that I do them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private by which I think I can record the fact more clearly.’ Increasingly, Francis Bacon himself became the main subject of his art, and the exhibition shows him in a variety of roles and states, from combative and self-assured to spectral and faint near the end of his life.

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads demonstrates Francis Bacon’s attempts to revitalise the art of portraiture, following the crisis in humanist values brought about by the Second World War. The exhibition includes important loans from many public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Hamburg Kunsthalle; Tate, London; and the Thyssen Collection, Madrid, as well as rarely seen loans from private individuals. The exhibition has been selected by Andrea Rose, Director of Visual Arts at the British Council; Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Philip Long, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; and Christoph Heinrich, Chief Curator of Contemporary Art at the Hamburg Kunsthalle. To be shown in Edinburgh during the International Festival, the exhibition will travel to the Hamburg Kunsthalle in the autumn.

A fully illustrated catalogue has been published, containing texts by Martin Hammer (Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author of Bacon and Sutherland, 2005) and Richard Calvocoressi; published by the National Galleries of Scotland in association with the British Council. Special exhibition price: £9.95; normal price: £12.95.

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART  
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh
www.nationalgalleries.org

Andy Warhol, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
12 February – 2 May 2005

A powerful exhibition of work by Andy Warhol have its only UK showing at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. One of the giants of twentieth-century art, Andy Warhol created some of the most memorable images of the postwar era, transforming publicity photographs of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley into icons of popular culture. Though ‘image’ is at the heart of his work, Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits is, surprisingly, the first museum exhibition to be devoted to the artist’s presentation and manipulation of his own likeness. This eagerly awaited show brings together eighty of Andy Warhol’s self-portraits, from his earliest paintings and drawings in the 1940s, right through to hollow-cheeked images made in 1986, shortly before his death.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) began his career as a successful commercial artist, working in advertising in the 1950s. He also began to work as an independent ‘fine’ artist, and became a leading figure of American Pop Art, which emerged in New York in the early 1960s. A central concern in his work was the increasing power of the popular media - advertising, film and television - in shaping the way we view the world, and particularly in encouraging the cult of celebrity. He took as his subjects adverts for some of the most ubiquitous American products: Coca Cola, Pepsi, Del Monte tinned fruit, Campbell’s soup. To these he soon added the celebrities of the day: Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe. Andy Warhol took some of the best-known photographic images of these people, turned them into silkscreens and made paintings and prints that made them even more famous. One could argue that it was only after Warhol had made his brightly and differently coloured close-ups of Marilyn Monroe’s smiling head, that she became truly an icon of the age.

At the same time that he was exploiting images of people that were already famous, Andy Warhol was also carefully crafting and branding his own image. Andy Warhol was so successful in nurturing the image that the public had of him – cool, deadpan, vacant, enigmatic – that he was soon almost as well known as the stars he painted, and everyone wanted to know what lay behind that shuttered façade. Andy Warhol’s reply was ‘Nothing; what you see is what you get.’ This exhibition try to show how Andy Warhol constructed this façade in all its manifestations – in paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, film, even wallpaper – and in all its technicolour variety. It also suggest one of the things this façade was trying to block out – a fear of death.

The exhibition begins with drawings that Andy Warhol did as a boy growing up in Pittsburgh, and includes drawings from his early years in New York, in the 1950s. There is also a group of paintings from 1963-64 that Andy Warhol made using photographs taken in a photomat booth – fulfilling, quite literally, his desire that making art should be a machine-like process. In 1967 Andy Warhol produced the now classic series of paintings of himself, hand resting on his chin, looking quizzically out at us. These are represented in the exhibition with works borrowed from Switzerland, Germany, France, the USA and Tate in London.

In 1968 Andy Warhol was shot (and nearly killed) by Valerie Solanas, a writer who had appeared in some of his films. The experience deepened the artist’s already obsessive fear of death, which is reflected in his work of the late 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition features a series of paintings, made at this time, which show Andy Warhol ‘playing’ with the concept of death, balancing a skull on his head or shoulder and being ‘strangled’ by the hands of an otherwise unseen assailant. Also included is a room of little-known works from 1981, when Andy Warhol made a remarkable, poignant series of drawings and prints of his profile and its cast shadow. The climax to the show will be a group of self-portraits made in 1986 – the year before he died – which show him with his face lined and gaunt, wearing a fright wig. In these paintings – some of which are covered with camouflage patterns – Warhol stares out as us like a disembodied death’s head, as if he knew what lay ahead for him.

Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits is being mounted in collaboration with the Sprengel Museum, Hanover and the Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Works on loan are drawn from major international institutions, such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, as well as from a number of significant private collections. Edinburgh is the exhibition’s only UK venue. The exhibition is also be the first major show of Andy Warhol’s work in Scotland.

Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Robert Rosenblum (Professor of Modern European art at New York University, one of the foremost Warhol scholars), Dietmar Elger (of the Sprengel Museum, Hannover), Roland Wäspe (of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen) and Keith Hartley (of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art). The catalogue has been published by Hatje Cantz in soft and hard-back with bilingual English and German texts, and is priced £16.99.

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART 
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh
www.nationalgalleries.org

Jasper Johns, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh - "Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns Since 1983" Exhibition

Past Things and Present  

Jasper Johns Since 1983

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

10 July – 19 September 2004

A major exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art includes more than 90 works by the iconic American artist JASPER JOHNS: this is their first and only showing at a UK venue and it is Johns’s first exhibition in Britain in almost thirty years. Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns Since 1983 explores the artist’s work of the last two decades through a selection of related paintings, prints and drawings that demonstrate his continually evolving and innovative talent. The exhibition introduces new motifs that present a marked shift in his approach to image-making. 

One of the forerunners of Pop Art, Jasper Johns has exercised a profound influence on western painting of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930, he moved to New York in the early 1950s and quickly earned critical acclaim for his paintings of flags, targets, letters and numbers.

Past Things and Present highlights Jasper Johns’s practice of reworking motifs – which include faces, watches and his mysterious ‘Green Angel’ – in different media. The exhibition will include numerous works related to The Seasons, Jasper Johns’s four-part cycle of images begun in 1985 as well as a series of works which incorporate traced outlines from paintings by Holbein, Grünewald and Picasso.

Jasper Johns has consistently reinvented himself in response to new stimuli and since the early 1980s his imagery has become increasingly autobiographical. His recent work is full of references to his studio and home, to his childhood and to his own work and the work of other artists. In 1984 he stated:

“In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions… I sort of stuck to my guns for a while, but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally, one must simply drop the reserve.”

Past Things and Present is part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s Year of American Art. Throughout 2004–5, the Gallery is showing work by some of the giants of post-war and contemporary American art including Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Cindy Sherman.

The exhibition is organised by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and has toured to Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina. Following its European debut at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, it will travel to Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) in Valencia and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

An illustrated catalogue for the exhibition is available.

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART 

75 Belford Road, Edinburgh 

www.nationalgalleries.org

Cindy Sherman, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Cindy Sherman 
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 
6 December 2003 – 7 March 2004

The first ever solo exhibition of the work of internationally renowned artist Cindy Sherman in Scotland opens at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Organised by the Serpentine Gallery in London, this fascinating show is also Cindy Sherman’s first survey exhibition in the UK for a decade. Around fifty photographs are brought together in Cindy Sherman, spanning thirty years of the artist’s career and including her latest works.

Cindy Sherman (b.1954) is widely recognised as one of the leading artists of our time. Although never interested in making self-portraits, Sherman shapes her own image with a bewildering array of disguises, using make-up techniques, wigs, costumes and prosthetics to create the subjects of her photographs.

Cindy Sherman’s provocative and intriguing portraiture often explores the themes surrounding female identity and stereotype in Western culture. Her work has been hugely influential on a younger generation of photographic and performance artists, raising her to iconic status in contemporary art.

Cindy Sherman first came to prominence in the mid-1970s with her series Untitled Film Stills – black-and-white photographs in which she imitated both the performers and settings of Hollywood B-movies, combining the roles of director, photographer and leading actress. In the 1980s she began to work on a larger scale and in colour, making reference to art history, fashion photography, television, horror movies and pornography. Recently she has created a series of portraits of ‘ordinary’ women with extraordinary character. 

The exhibition also provides an opportunity to view Cindy Sherman’s latest works for the first time in Scotland. Turning her attention to clowns, she examines costume and pretence in its most exaggerated and caricatural form.

Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, says: “We are delighted to be continuing our relationship with the Serpentine Gallery by bringing this exhibition to Scotland, and her first Scottish audience. Cindy Sherman is an outstanding contemporary artist.”

The landmark exhibition is being extended to include a specially produced display of Cindy Sherman’s work at Omni, Greenside Place, Edinburgh. Originally seen in London, the series of ten large billboards were commissioned collaboratively by the Serpentine Gallery and London Underground’s public art programme ‘Platform for Art’. The Billboard Commission comprises specially produced versions of Sherman’s works made between 1983 and 2002 and will be on view at Omni from 7 January to 7 March 2003. 

Cindy Sherman launches a series of exhibitions and displays at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – throughout 2004-5, ‘A Year of American Art’ features work by some of the giants of postwar and contemporary American art, including Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.

A fully illustrated catalogue will be available to accompany the show, published by the Serpentine Gallery and priced at £14.95. 

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART 
Belford Road, Edinburgh
www.nationalgalleries.org