Press office
The main aim of the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office is to achieve positive coverage for the Galleries' art collection, exhibitions and activities in the widest range of media. The press office team works with a range of press, broadcast media and public body contacts in pursuit of constructive and informed public debate about the National Galleries.
The press office is the first point of contact for journalists seeking information. As a result, the team are in regular contact with all departments so as to maintain a constant awareness of current events.
The department holds regular press views for new exhibitions, liaises with journalists to achieve favourable and sometimes exclusive coverage of exhibitions, events or people within the Galleries, commissions and works with film-makers for specific projects and publicises new acquisitions. The press office also provides press releases, images and interviews for exhibitions and events.
Press releases 2018
11 April 2018
Portrait of celebrated broadcaster James Naughtie to enter Scotland’s national collection
Distinguished journalist, author and radio presenter James Naughtie FRSE (b. 1951) will be at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG) this week for the unveiling of the most recent addition to Scotland’s national collection – a specially-commissioned portrait of the respected broadcaster.
Brendan Kelly’s (b. 1970) colourful painting, the first portrait of Naughtie to enter the nation’s art collection, was specially commissioned with the support of the Friends of the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and will go on display at the Gallery from this Wednesday. It was made in the intimate setting of Naughtie’s Edinburgh home.
James Naughtie was born in Aberdeenshire and educated at the University of Aberdeen and then Syracuse University in New York. His career as a journalist began in 1975 at the Aberdeen Press & Journal. He later moved to The Scotsman and then onward to The Washington Post in 1981 as the Laurence Stern Fellow on its national staff. Three years later Naughtie joined The Guardian, becoming its Chief Political Correspondent.
Naughtie moved into radio and television in 1988. From 1994 to 2015 he was one of the main presenters of Radio 4's Today Programme; he is now a Special Correspondent for BBC News, and Books Editor. He has anchored every BBC Radio UK election results programme since 1997 and worked on every US presidential election since 1988. He presented the BBC Proms for many years, and among the series he has written for Radio Four was The New Elizabethans in 2012.
James Naughtie became Chancellor of the University of Stirling in 2008 and last year was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a Trustee of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and of the Great Tapestry of Scotland. He is the author of numerous books, among them The Rivals: The Intimate Story of a Political Marriage (2001), The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency (2007), and two novels, The Madness of July (2014) and Paris Spring (2016).
The painter Brendan Kelly was born in Edinburgh in 1970 and now lives and works in London. He studied at the Slade School for a BA (Hons) in Fine Art. A number of national UK collections hold Kelly’s work, including The National Portrait Gallery in London, where he has two portraits, the UK Parliament where he has a portrait of the former Deputy Prime Minster Nick Clegg, and the Bank of England. His portrait of the current Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, hangs in the Speaker’s State Rooms at the Palace of Westminster. He also has work in the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington DC. In 2006, Kelly was commissioned to go to Afghanistan as a war artist. He has won a number of awards, including BP Portrait Awards and at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, of which he is a member.
James Naughtie FRSE said: “It's intimidating, even scary, to submit to an artist and realise that the result will be part of the national collection. Fortunately, Brendan Kelly has been meticulous, insightful and generous, and we have become friends. His use of colour is dazzling, and I feel privileged not just to be a permanent resident of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery - an honour no-one has a right to expect - but to have been in his hands."
The artist Brendan Kelly said: “Although a lot of people mainly know Jim through his work as a radio broadcaster, he is interested in and involved with many things such as literature, history, politics and music. In the portrait I wanted to capture the sense of his broad interests, as well as his gregarious personality and his lively mind, but these can be difficult to sum up in an image. Somewhat inspired by Matisse and Van Gogh I decided I could best do this by introducing bright, flat colour to the painting which gives a sense of liveliness, positivity and generosity of spirit.”
Christopher Baker, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, said: “This vibrant and skilful portrait of Jim Naughtie is a terrific addition to the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland. Jim is chiefly known as an authoritative and engaging radio voice in the worlds of politics and culture; now thanks to Brendan Kelly’s very thoughtful and carefully crafted work, he can also be seen in a more intimate and private setting. Both the artist and sitter generously made a great commitment to the creation of this fascinating painting, the commission of which was made possible thanks to the Friends of the National Galleries of Scotland.”
—ENDS—
Notes to Editors
The Brendan Kelly portrait of James Naughtie is now on display in the Great Hall of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Brendan Kelly’s website can be found here: www.brendankellyartist.co.uk
9 April 2018
The extraordinary art of Raqib Shaw set for debut Scottish showing at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
RAQIB SHAW:
REINVENTING THE OLD MASTERS
19 May – 28 October 2018
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One)
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3D
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#RaqibShaw
This spring the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) is set to showcase the art of one of the most extraordinary and sought-after artists working anywhere in the world today, the Kashmiri artist Raqib Shaw (b. 1974).
Raqib Shaw: Reinventing the Old Masters will be the very first time the work of Shaw – known for his intricate, opulent and incredibly detailed enamel paintings – has ever been exhibited in Scotland.
Eight large and recent paintings by Shaw will be shown alongside two paintings normally on display at the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) that have long obsessed the artist, Joseph Noel Paton’s (1821-1901) The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, 1849 and Lucas Cranach’s (1472-1553) An Allegory of Melancholy, 1528 (the latter work has been on long loan to the Galleries for more than 20 years). Two years ago, Shaw painted a loose variant of Paton’s extraordinary fairy picture and this year he’s also completed a version based on the Cranach painting.
Raqib Shaw was born in Calcutta in 1974 and raised in the state of Kashmir. He comes from a family of successful merchants involved in the luxury goods market, selling rugs, shawls, jewels and antiques both in India and abroad. From a young age, Shaw found himself working in the family business, and was immersed in the world of jewellery, carpets, fabrics and interior design in his formative years: this had a profound effect on his art.
Shaw first travelled to London in 1993, at the age of 18, where he visited the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. He became absolutely mesmerized by the pictures he saw there, chief among them Hans Holbein the Younger’s (1497-1543) The Ambassadors, 1533. Five years later, Shaw returned to London to become an artist, learning his craft at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design. The National Gallery became a permanent place of study, and he spent hours there studying the work of artists such as Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) and Agnolo Bronzino (1502-72). The detail, craftsmanship and storytelling Shaw found in their work were to become key elements in his art.
By the time Shaw had enrolled on his Master’s course at Saint Martins in 2001, he had already attracted considerable attention. Soon he was widely exhibited across the globe, with exhibitions at some of the world’s leading art institutions, among them London’s Tate Britain (2006) and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (2008). He has lived and worked in London since he first moved, and now paints from a former sausage factory in south London, which he has converted into a multi-storied, floral-laden home and artist’s studio.
Raqib Shaw’s art is quite unlike any other artist’s, past or present. While his imagery may be inspired by the Old Masters, Shaw’s technique constitutes an entirely unique kind of enamel painting. He spends months on preparatory drawings, tracings and photographic studies, then transfers the composition onto prepared wooden panels, establishing an intricate design with acrylic liner, which leaves a slightly raised line. He then carefully paints between the intricate web of lines, one tiny drip at a time, with a mixture of household gloss based paints and Hammerite, a tough enamel paint designed for outdoor metal surfaces. He uses needle-fine syringes and a porcupine quill, with which he manoeuvers the paint. Rhinestones and gems are sometimes added.
The idiosyncrasies of Shaw’s artistic techniques are matched by his subject matter. Our exhibition focusses on his work after Old Master paintings, particularly Renaissance works. A regular visitor to the National Gallery in London over many years, he has selected some of the lesser-known paintings which feature strong architectural features, reconstructed them in enamels on a much larger scale, and inserted his own narratives. Shaw himself, often clutching one of his pet dogs, replaces the main protagonist, to produce an idiosyncratic, colour-saturated reworking of historic subjects such as The Adoration of the Virgin and Child and The Purification of the Temple. The finished works are elaborate, magical and breath-taking in their colour and complexity.
In February last year, Shaw visited Scotland and the Scottish National Gallery for the very first time, to view Paton’s fairy-tale masterpiece The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, 1849. Reproductions of Paton’s famous work had, the year previous, inspired Shaw to paint Self-portrait as the Opium Smoker (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Now those two works will be displayed alongside each other. Both paintings are sprawling, resplendent works of art which elaborately draw upon characters in William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96). Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies, feature in Paton’s painting, whereas in Shaw’s painting is Nick Bottom, an actor turned into a donkey by a fairy. It is a self-portrait in which Shaw has portrayed himself as the donkey, dressed in a richly embroidered kimono and puffing on an opium pipe whilst surrounded by a surreal, hallucinogenic world featuring fairies akin to those in Paton’s painting.
During the visit to see the Paton artwork, Shaw also took the opportunity to view another artwork he had long admired but had never seen in person, Cranach’s An Allegory of Melancholy, which is based on Albrecht Dürer’s (1471-1528) celebrated engraving Melancholia, 1514. Unlike Dürer’s figure, who some argue represents brooding genius, the seated woman in Cranach’s version appears to be enchanted by evil and the cloud in the top left represents the Witches Sabbath and devil worship.
Shaw’s version – identical in size to Cranach’s – sees Shaw himself replace the woman. A Kashmiri landscape is substituted for Cranach’s Saxon hills and Cranach’s cavorting infants have been displaced by a bubble showing a room in his house which was recently damaged by fire, thus turning the painting into a very personal Allegory of Melancholia of his own. The painting was completed just a few weeks ago and is shown here for the first time.
Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: “We are thrilled to be showing Raqib Shaw’s work in Scotland for the first time. The size, complexity, technical accomplishment and audacity of his work are something to behold – some of the pictures have, not surprisingly, taken years to paint. They are absolute visions of delight and awe, and I defy anyone not to lose themselves in the works.”
—ENDS—
NOTES TO EDITORS
Raqib Shaw: Reinventing the Old Masters will be at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 19 May until 28 October 2018.
Raqib Shaw: Reinventing the Old Masters is part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2018.
6 April 2018
Stunning and vibrant works by German Expressionist Emil Nolde in major new show this summer
EMIL NOLDE: COLOUR IS LIFE
14 July – 21 October 2018
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two)
73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS
0131 624 6200
Admission £10 (£8) | Free for Our Friends
#EmilNolde #ColourIsLife
This summer will see a major presentation of stunning and vibrant works by pioneering German Expressionist artist Emil Nolde (1867-1956) at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) in Edinburgh.
This will be the most ambitious exhibition of Nolde’s work in the UK in more than two decades and only the second ever exhibition to be held in Scotland, with over 120 paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints generously loaned by Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. This full-scale retrospective will chart the career of one of Germany’s most accomplished modern artists from 1901 up until 1950, just a few years before his death. Many of the works have rarely been seen outside Germany.
Nolde was one of the first Expressionists and is recognised as one of the pivotal figures of the European avant-garde, renowned for his bold use of colour. Emil Nolde: Colour is Life will encompass a rich and diverse range of work from the artist’s early atmospheric landscapes to the intensely coloured rich oils of his later career; from images of soldiers, which capture the build-up to the First World War to a series of extraordinary religious paintings, with their heady mix of spirituality and eroticism. Other works on show will demonstrate Nolde’s passion for the immense skies, flat, windswept landscapes and storm-tossed seas of his north German homeland, as well as his fascination for the demi-monde of Berlin’s cafés and cabarets, the busy to-and-fro of tugboats in the port of Hamburg and the many people and places he saw on a trip to the South Seas in 1914.
In the early twentieth century, artists of the Expressionist movement placed a greater significance on conveying feelings or ideas than on replicating reality. Though he was briefly affiliated with one of the two main German Expressionist groups, Die Brücke (the Bridge), Nolde worked independently and alone for most of his life, and developed his own expressionist style around 1909-10. Nolde felt strongly about what he painted, identifying with his subjects in every brushstroke, heightening his colours and simplifying his shapes, so that the viewer can also experience his emotional response to the world about him.
Born in the village of Nolde in 1867, Hans Emil Hansen adopted the name of his birthplace as his surname, upon getting married in 1902. His father was a farmer and Nolde often worked the land after school and may have followed in his father’s footsteps had he not trained as a woodcarver, and subsequently as an artist.
From 1904 onwards Nolde usually spent the winter in Berlin and the summer at his home near the German-Danish border. His wife, Ada, was a dancer and it was natural that the artist got to know the world in which she worked: the cabarets, cafés and theatres of the bustling capital. In the winter of 1910-11, Nolde drew and painted a large number of works, depicting the frenetic life of these places, not only the entertainers but the audiences as well.
Nolde wanted to concentrate on the impact that the colourful and lively scenes had on him. This resulted in paintings and watercolours of high-keyed colour, and drawings of dancers in which movement and energy were of paramount importance. The works he produced during this brief period are among the most enthralling and beautiful of his entire career.
In February 1910, while exhibiting his work in Hamburg, Nolde became engrossed with the bustle and movement of the city’s port, the largest and most important in Germany. Captivated, he made a series of paintings, ink and wash drawings and prints in a burst of creative energy. Paintings such as Smoking Steamboats, (1910) capture the maelstrom of natural and man-made forces that make up the port: the wind whips up the water’s surface, clouds and the tug-boat’s smoke and steam into a barely decipherable whole, as Nolde applies thick paint in frenzied strokes of blue, green, yellow and red in response to the scene before him.
Nolde moved to his home in Seebüll in 1926. There he cultivated an extensive garden where he created many of his best-known and best-loved flower and garden, oil paintings. These sensuous paintings attract us in much the same way that flowers do; in creating them Nolde gave full rein to his love of colour, which became the main subject of works like Large Poppies (Red, Red, Red), (1942). One of the finest of all his flower paintings, this was made during the middle of the Second World War, when, having been named a ‘degenerate artist’ by the Nazi regime, he was forbidden to buy paints and canvas. As travelling was also difficult in wartime, his garden would become a great source of inspiration, resulting in some of his finest works.
It is ironic that Nolde should be persecuted in this way by the Nazis. He had joined the Party and had hoped that the government would place artists such as himself at the centre of their cultural policy. Instead, over 1000 of his works were confiscated by the regime and 33 of them (more than any other artist) were included in the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich in 1937, intended as a showcase for what the Nazis saw as the worst excesses of modern art.
Nolde could not openly practice as a professional artist, showing and selling his work. Instead he created some of the finest works of his career – his so-called ‘unpainted pictures’ – watercolours rich in colour and filled with fantastical figures. His complex history as an artist living through turbulent times, supporting the Party but rejected by the regime, makes Nolde’s career as problematic and conflicted as it is celebrated.
Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: “If one were to single out one aspect of Nolde’s work that sets it apart from the art of his contemporaries in Germany, indeed of most German art in general, one would have to choose the extraordinary colour sense. Colours were his language, his music, his way of expressing his deepest emotions. They speak to us in a very visceral way, a direct conduit to Nolde himself.”
In many of Nolde’s paintings it was his extraordinary sense and use of colour that displayed his deep spirituality. Colours took on a life of their own in his works. This range of works brought together are some of the most accomplished by any German Expressionist artist and deserve wider exposure.
Emil Nolde: Colour is Life is organised in collaboration with Nolde Stiftung Seebüll, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Ireland.
—ENDS—
Notes to Editors
Emil Nolde: Colour is Life will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue with text by Keith Hartley, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, priced at £20.
Emil Nolde: Colour is Life will be at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 14 July until 21 October 2018.
Emil Nolde: Colour is Life is part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2018.
21 February 2018
First ever major showing in Scotland of Jenny Saville’s work to spearhead third instalment of Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s contemporary art programme
NOW
JENNY SAVILLE
SARA BARKER
CHRISTINE BORLAND
ROBIN RHODE
MARKUS SCHINWALD
CATHERINE STREET
24 March – 16 September 2018
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One)
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR
Telephone 0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
nationalgalleries.org
#ModernNOW
A major presentation of works by renowned British artist Jenny Saville (b. 1970) is to open at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) in Edinburgh this spring.
Saville is a hugely successful international artist best known for her monumental depictions of the naked female form; unflinching paintings of fleshy, un-idealised bodies, often painted close-up, on a massive scale. Her 21-foot-long triptych Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) reached a wider audience when it appeared on the cover of the 1994 album The Holy Bible by Welsh band the Manic Street Preachers.
Bringing together 17 works from private and public collections across the globe, this will be the first museum exhibition of Saville’s work ever to be held in Scotland, and only her third in the UK. The selection will span 26 years, from iconic early paintings such as Propped (1992) and Trace (1993-4), to recent charcoal and pastel drawings, demonstrating how Saville’s approach to depicting the human body has shifted over the course of her career. Other highlights will include a series of large-scale head paintings, such as Rosetta II (2005-6), made while the artist was based in Italy, and the premier of a major new work, Aleppo (2017-18), that will be hung at the Scottish National Gallery alongside historic works from the collection.
Saville draws upon a wide range of sources in her work, including medical and forensic text books, children’s drawings, graffiti and online images, as well as celebrated paintings and drawings of the past. In more recent years, Saville has created works in which she layers images, often drawing on several different sources. Working between the figurative and abstract, she has chosen to use charcoal and pastel in many of these works, attracted by the transparency they offer. These materials allow Saville to work organically, layering and erasing her media to blend and merge bodily forms and abstract gestures. The resulting works, such as One out of two (symposium) (2016), capture a sense of motion and fluidity. These restless images provide no fixed point, but rather suggest the perception of simultaneous realities.
Saville’s first major Scottish showing is another notable milestone in her acclaimed career, which began in 1992 when the collector Charles Saatchi (b. 1943), champion of the generation that became known as the Young British Artists (YBA), acquired many of the works she’d shown in her Glasgow School of Art graduation display. Her paintings Propped and Trace were shown alongside other paintings such as Plan (1993) in the Saatchi Gallery’s Young British Artists III exhibition in 1994, and also featured in the Royal Academy’s exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists in 1997. Subsequent exhibitions of Saville’s work have taken place worldwide, among them group and solo exhibitions at the Gagosian (UK & USA), Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (Rome, Italy), Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, USA), Modern Art Oxford (Oxford, UK) and the Kunsthaus Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland).
The exhibition of Saville’s work at SNGMA will form the centrepiece of the third instalment of NOW, a three-year programme of contemporary art exhibitions launched at the Gallery in March 2017. NOW reflects the Gallery’s ambition to share contemporary art with a wide audience, highlighting the extraordinary quality and range of work being made by artists associated with Scotland, as well as those from across the globe, placing art created in Scotland in an international context, and demonstrating the crucial exchange between artistic communities around the world.
Alongside the work of Jenny Saville will be new and recent works by five artists who have explored ideas related to the body, performance, process and materials.
These will include a specially conceived installation by the South African artist Robin Rhode (b. 1976), featuring six recent multi-part photographic works in which the artist uses colour theory and geometry through which to explore art as a tool for communication. Rhode, who has won the prestigious Zurich Art Prize 2018, combines a number of disciplines and ideas in his work, including drawing, performance, street art, modernism and the work of Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer famous for his pioneering studies of figures in motion. The works on show here capture Rhode’s interventions at a specific site in Johannesburg, known for its gang culture and violence, where Rhode has made work since 2011. Rhode’s beautiful and sometimes playful photographic images (which depict a performer interacting with, and animating, wall paintings made by the artist) are an insistence of the power of art to create new realities, and have a strong collaborative ethos, driven by the artist’s close engagement with the young people living in the area. As with much of Rhode’s work, these photographic pieces provoke the viewer with playful humour to explore deeper questions about identity and the human condition.
Also on show will be a major recent installation by Scottish artist Christine Borland (b. 1965). Positive Pattern (2016) was originally commissioned by the Institute of Transplantation, Newcastle to honour the courage and generosity of organ donors and their families, who help save and transform the lives of hundreds of people every year. Comprising five abstract sculptures produced in a dense foam this poignant and powerful work renders in three dimensions the interior spaces of carved wooden sculptures by the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903-75), including Wave (1943-44), which is held in the SNGMA’s own permanent collection.
A selection of four painted metal sculptures and wall-based works by Sara Barker (b. 1980) will show the ways in which this Glasgow-based artist layers materials and processes to investigate the act of making. Barker breaks apart the traditional categories of painting, sculpture and drawing, combining these and other techniques such as collage in her practice. Influenced by writers such as Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson, Barker’s evocative works are often concerned with both physical and mental spaces.
The compelling two-screen video work Orient 2011 by Austrian artist Markus Schinwald (b. 1973), created for the artist’s solo presentation for the Austrian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, will be exhibited for the first time in Scotland. In Orient five actors are captured in a modern ruin performing gestures and movements drawn from slapstick and modern dance. The two-part work features an atmospheric soundtrack and narrated texts, spoken off-set by two voices simultaneously, producing a layering of sound and words. The highly evocative film explores the role of physical, bodily gestures in conveying the complex inner workings of the mind.
Edinburgh-based artist Catherine Street will present a new installation of works entitled A hoarding of greenery, a flow of redemption developed during a residency in November 2017, organised in partnership with the arts trust Cove Park and supported by Outset Scotland and the National Galleries of Scotland NOW fund. A hoarding of greenery, a flow of redemption explores the contrast between thinking and sensing and comprises a new single channel video, a text piece, a series of collages and a spoken-word performance, which will be staged by the artist during the run of the exhibition.
Accompanying NOW is a group display drawn from the National Galleries of Scotland collection, including works by Oladele Bamgboye (b. 1963), Miroslav Balka (b. 1958), Alex Dordoy (b. 1985), Alexia Hunter (1948-2014) and Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), which runs from 24 March to 22 May 2018. This will be followed by the Tesco Bank Art Competition for Schools, which opens on Saturday 26 May and runs until 16 September 2018.
The presentation of Jenny Saville’s work is supported by the Jenny Saville Exhibition Circle - our thanks to: Gagosian; George Economou; the Amoli Foundation, Hong Kong; and other donors who wish to remain anonymous.
NOW is being made possible thanks to the support of the National Galleries of Scotland Foundation, Kent and Vicki Logan, Walter Scott and Partners Limited, Robert and Nicky Wilson, and other anonymous donors.
Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: “We are delighted to be showing the very first major exhibition of work by Jenny Saville in Scotland at the SNGMA. Saville’s extraordinarily powerful paintings and drawings form the centrepiece of NOW, the third exhibition in the most ambitious programme of contemporary art ever staged at the National Galleries of Scotland. Alongside her work, we will be showing a number of other artists working in Scotland and internationally, that reflects something of the extraordinary interests and range of art being made today”.
—ENDS—
12 February 2018
Ambitious Galleries project sees Scotland's young people create the Art of the Future
Sponsored by the People’s Postcode Lottery
THE ART OF THE FUTURE
10 February – 29 April 2018
Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Telephone. 0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
nationalgalleries.org
#artofthefutureworld
The results of an ambitious learning project – which posed the question ‘What is the art of the future?’ to young people from across Scotland – will be brought together in a fascinating new display which opens at the Scottish National Gallery (SNG) in Edinburgh this week.
The Art of the Future will present the imaginative responses of 16 groups of young people from communities around the country – from Selkirk to Inverness, Alexandria to Edinburgh – who took part in this experimental ‘mail art project’, in which they were asked to make art from random materials they received by post.
Between July 2017 and January 2018 each of the groups was sent a box containing an art ‘tool-kit’, the contents of which were kept hidden until the moment of opening. The boxes had no agenda or set themes, but were designed to encourage invention.
The objects inside ranged from traditional artists’ materials to masks, a megaphone, banknotes and other everyday items; all were inspired in some way by the artworks in NOW, a series of contemporary art exhibitions currently running at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA).
The Art of the Future exhibition will reveal how the groups taking part reworked the contents of the boxes they received to create insightful drawings, sculptures and performances, which have been captured on video and are presented here on screen. Some of these will make visitors laugh; others will ask the viewer to see things differently. All have come from the participants themselves, and provide a powerful sense of the issues that affect young people in Scotland today, including fears about our divided society, global conflicts, technological dependence, and the invasive pressure of social media. The participants have been spontaneous and candid, ‘telling it like it is’ from their own point of view; the works on show are sometimes challenging, but always heartfelt.
One video in the display will show how a group of young participants in Galashiels staged an interactive performance to coincide with World Mental Health Day on 10 October, highlighting young people’s need for support with mental health issues. Inspired by a cardboard bear mask they found in their box, they came up with the slogan ‘The Bear Cares’, and created a banner on which members of the public were invited to attach differently coloured ribbons to reflect their experience of various mental health conditions. The event took place at the Tomorrow’s People Store in Galashiels and was well supported by the public, who also made donations to two local mental health charities chosen by the participants: OneStepBorders and Penumbra.
The Highland Youth Arts Hub group featured six young female artists, who nailed cardboard models of churches from their box onto noticeboards at local Inverness churches. The models were a reference to Nathan Coley’s installation The Lamp of Sacrifice, which featured in the NOW exhibition at the SNGMA; one was inscribed with the slogan ‘money is the root of all evil’, and a banknote was attached below the inscription, with an implicit challenge to the public to help themselves.
In total, over 100 young people from across Scotland took part in the Art of the Future, which was devised and facilitated by the NGS Learning team. It sought to raise participants’ confidence by giving them the means to articulate their hopes and fears for the future through art, and by establishing a network of peers with whom they could share their concerns and their responses. Participating groups exchanged their boxed artworks with each other at a sharing event at the SNGMA in December 2017. The groups were intrigued to see what the others had created and were encouraged to find that similar concerns were being explored.
All the boxes created on the project will be displayed to a wider audience still through the Art of the Future exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery.
Speaking about the project, Robin Baillie, Senior Outreach Officer at NGS, said: “The boxes were designed to stimulate creativity and imagination and the young people have proved that contemporary art can be a great vehicle to help them make sense of the world around them. We believe this project has stimulated a genuine dialogue among teenagers in Scotland, about what matters to them. Better still, they have been spontaneous and honest in showing us how they see their lives in challenging times.”
The Galashiels’ ‘care bear’ for example, demonstrates how these young artists have created an affecting work of art that speaks to us all, addressing a challenging topic that directly affects young people’s life chances in Scotland today.”
Clara Glovier, Head of Charities, People’s Postcode Lottery, said: “We are delighted that the support of players of People’s Postcode Lottery has enabled the National Galleries of Scotland’s Art of the Future project. To be involved in a creative project which uses art to encourage courageous conversations between young people is very special.”
An additional part of the project involves groups of girls from four Edinburgh schools, who have created the ‘Games of the Future’, which were inspired by sports boxes sent out by NGS. The project will culminate in a performance to be held on Saturday 10 March, when the all four groups will present the games they have invented on the lawn in front of the SNGMA. This event is a partnership with the Action for Children Heritage and Inclusion Project, which is helping to reduce levels of isolation felt by young ethnic women in Edinburgh, and the creation of the games will help the girls achieve the Physical requirements of their Bronze Duke of Edinburgh Awards.
—ENDS—
Notes to Editors
People’s Postcode Lottery
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• For details on which society lottery is running each week, visit www.postcodelottery.co.uk/society
2 February 2018
National Galleries of Scotland becomes the UK’s first public institution to acquire the art of Michael Armitage, thanks to a generous donation
A major painting by Kenyan-born artist Michael Armitage (b. 1984) entitled Nasema Nawe (2016) has been donated to the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) by collectors Harry and Lana David, in memory of Nicola David-Pinedo. This acquisition is not only the first work by the artist to enter Scotland’s national art collection, but the very first Michael Armitage painting to be acquired by a public collection anywhere in the UK.
Visitors can currently view Nasema Nawe at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) as part of the second instalment of NOW, the Galleries’ dynamic series of contemporary art exhibitions. The display, heralded recently as a, “compelling and thoughtful show” by The Scotsman, runs until 18 February 2018.
Michael Armitage, who has received critical acclaim for his recent solo exhibition at the South London Gallery, uses a rich, seductive palette to explore stories drawn from a range of sources, including news channels, internet gossip and his own experience of living and working in East Africa. His works often present commentary on the social structures, turbulent politics, social inequalities and violence in Kenya. Armitage frequently draws on the composition of paintings from Western art history as a reference point; Nasema Nawe was inspired by Paul Gauguin’s painting Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) 1888, held in the Galleries’ collection.
In Nasema Nawe the onlookers in the foreground view a group of women performing baikoko, a form of dance and music that emerged in Kenya and Tanzania, typically performed between women, and often used by mothers to identify a suitable wife for their son. There has been a recent resurgence in the popularity and notoriety of baikoko in contemporary Africa, particularly in Tanzania, due to the Tanzanian pop star Diamond Platnumz, who featured a group of women dancing baikoko in the music video for his 2015 song ‘Nasema Nawe', from which Armitage took the title of this painting. Translated from Swahili, ‘Nasema Nawe’ can be loosely translated as ‘I am talking to you’. Baikoko was banned in public areas in Tanzania in 2015, having been deemed by authorities as dangerous; in his painting, Armitage reflects on the phenomenon of baikoko and the social context in which it is both performed and controlled.
As with all his works, Armitage painted Nasema Nawe with oil paint on Lubugo, a bark cloth from Uganda more commonly used to make sacred or ceremonial coverings. The dark red bark is beaten flat over hours or even weeks, creating a material which, when stretched, bares the traces of its making. Armitage incorporates the resulting holes and indentations into his composition, retaining its unique texture in the final work.
Michael Armitage lives and works between London and Nairobi. He received an undergraduate degree in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2003– 2007) and has a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London (2007–2010).
Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: “We are delighted this important painting by Michael Armitage has now entered the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland, and that we are the first public collection in the UK to own his extraordinary work. His paintings have been on show in NOW over the last few months and have been received incredibly well by the public. We are extremely grateful to Harry and Lana David for their incredible generosity, in gifting this exceptional work to the nation”.
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Notes to Editors
NOW featuring the work of Susan Philipsz, Yto Barrada Michael Armitage, Hiwa K, Sara Rose and Kate Davis will run at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One) until 18 February 2018.
Press releases 2017
8 December 2017 A wonderful tradition and a welcome injection of colour: Turner in January 2018
TURNER IN JANUARY 2018:
THE VAUGHAN BEQUEST
1-31 January 2018
Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Telephone. 0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
2018 will begin at the National Galleries of Scotland, as it does every year, with a wonderful tradition: the opening of Turner in January, an exhibition of the outstanding collection of Turner watercolours bequeathed in 1900 by Henry Vaughan (1809-1899) and supported by players of People’s Postcode Lottery for the sixth year.
The son of a London Quaker hat manufacturer, Vaughan inherited a fortune in 1828 and devoted his life to travel, philanthropy and amassing a rich and varied collection of fine and decorative art. His interests ranged from sculpture, Spanish clocks, ivories and bronzes to medieval stained glass, Old Master drawings and Rembrandt etchings, but he is best known as a collector of nineteenth-century British art, particularly Turner and Constable. Vaughan owned Constable’s The Hay-Wain for twenty years, which he presented to the National Gallery in London in 1886, and fifteen oil sketches by Constable, three superb examples of which are currently on loan to the National Galleries of Scotland from Tate through the exhibition Constable & McTaggart: A Meeting of Two Masterpieces (until 25 March 2018).
Above all, however, Vaughan had a passion for the work of Turner and for every aspect of Turner’s watercolour output, from his early topographical drawings and designs for engraving to his private sketches and brilliantly free, late watercolours. Vaughan’s collection of more than 100 watercolours amounted to a comprehensive overview of Turner’s graphic work and it was described in one of his obituaries as ‘singularly choice and indeed hardly paralleled in this country’. The 38 watercolours bequeathed to the National Galleries of Scotland by Vaughan likewise encapsulate the artist’s entire career, ranging from the subtle and meticulous ‘Monro School’ watercolours of the 1790s, such as Rye, Sussex and Lake Albano, to the spectacular Venetian views of 1840, such as The Piazzetta, Venice and Venice from the Laguna, which capture the drama and explosive skies of late summer Adriatic storms.
As well as having a connoisseur’s eye for quality, Vaughan was also concerned about how his bequest should be displayed. He stipulated that these delicate works should be ‘exhibited to the public all at one time free of charge during the month of January in every year… and no longer time in every year’, to limit their exposure to strong daylight and protect the pigments from fading. His foresight means that the watercolours are notable for their fine condition. The Vaughan Turner display has run throughout the month of January since 1900 and brings a welcome injection of light and colour at the darkest time of the year in Scotland.
This year six of Turner’s watercolour illustrations to the Collected Poems of the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, also from the NGS collection, will be included in the exhibition. These will complement his designs for illustrations to the work of Sir Walter Scott, which form part of the Vaughan Bequest. Turner visited Scott at his home at Abbotsford in August 1831 and made sketches of the house and grounds, on which he based his finished watercolours. Rhymer’s Glen, Abbotsford represents Scott’s favourite spot on the estate for composition and contemplation, while Chiefswood Cottage, Abbotsforddepicts the summer home of Scott’s daughter, Charlotte Sophia and her husband, John Gibson Lockhart. Both vignettes were engraved as illustrations to different volumes of Scott’s Miscellaneous Prose Works. Other illustrations to Scott’s work include the spectacular Loch Coruisk, Skye (1831-4), produced to illustrate the poem The Lord of the Isles, in which swirling clouds bear down on the peaks of the Cuillin mountain range and human figures appear like ants against the might of nature.
During the 1830s Turner received an increasing number of commissions to design vignette illustrations for books. The introduction of engraving on steel in the 1820s made possible the production of engraved book illustrations of enormous detail and refinement. Turner was an acknowledged master of the art, able to capture vast and dramatic landscapes on a miniature scale. His commissions included illustrations for volumes of John Milton, John Bunyan and the contemporary writers Samuel Rogers, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Campbell. Although Turner’s vignettes are now a lesser known aspect of his artistic activity, in his own lifetime they contributed greatly to the spread of his fame. He worked on best-selling publications, such as Samuel Rogers’s Italy in 1830, of which it was said that there was scarcely an educated household that did not possess a copy. To have Turner’s name attached to a publication could add greatly to the likely commercial success of the venture, as Scott’s publisher Robert Cadell attested when he pushed for Turner to be appointed as the illustrator for the new edition of Scott’s Poetical Works in 1831, claiming that ‘with his pencil, I shall insure the subscription of 8,000, without, not 3,000’.
Turner’s illustrations to The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell, executed in 1835-6, cover a broad range of subject matter, from military skirmishes to complex prophesies and scenes of Scottish romance and history. Campbell (1777-1844) was the son of a Glasgow tobacco merchant. He achieved rapid success aged twenty two with his first book The Pleasures of Hope (1799) and travelled widely in Europe, before becoming a lecturer, editor and rector of Glasgow University, as well as a highly regarded poet. The vignette illustrations on display will include Lochiel’s Warning, in which a wizard confronts the Jacobite leader Donald Cameron of Lochiel, attempting to warn him of the horrors of Culloden and its aftermath. Also on show will be one of the most outstanding vignettes in the series, Kosciuszko: The Pleasures of Hope, which depicts with remarkable power the 1794 uprising in Warsaw against Russian rule led by the Polish solider and statesman Tadeusz Kosciuszko (1746-1814).
Christopher Baker, Acting Director of the Scottish National Gallery said: “We welcome in the new year with this spectacular display of Turner’s glowing watercolours, which demonstrate the extraordinary range of his artistic skills throughout his life, as well as the refined taste and great generosity of a distinguished collector - Henry Vaughan. It’s the perfect antidote to the darkness of an Edinburgh January.”
Clara Govier, Head of Charities at People’s Postcode Lottery, said: “We are absolutely delighted to welcome in the New Year along with the National Galleries of Scotland with Turner in January at the Scottish National Gallery. This is the sixth year that players of People’s Postcode Lottery have supported the tradition of showing Turner each January and it really is wonderful to see players’ support helping to provide thousands of visitors with the opportunity to play a part in this wonderful legacy”.
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5 December 2017
REMBRANDT, EMIL NOLDE, JENNY SAVILLE AND TOULOUSE-LAUTREC:
NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND ANNOUNCES HIGHLIGHTS OF 2018 EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
Britain’s love affair with one of history’s greatest artists, the multi-faceted career of the German Expressionist Emil Nolde and the extraordinary ambition of Jenny Saville’s monumental paintings will be among the subjects explored in the National Galleries of Scotland’s programme of major exhibitions for 2018, it was announced today. Other highlights will celebrate Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s mastery of the lithographic poster and the powerful, beautiful portraits of Scottish artist Victoria Crowe.
Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master will be the major summer Festival exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery next year. This exclusive new show, which will only be seen in Edinburgh, will reveal how the taste for Rembrandt’s work in Britain evolved over the past 400 years. From around 1630 it grew into a mania that gripped collectors and art lovers across the country, reaching a fever pitch in the late-eighteenth century. The exhibition will also reveal the profound impact of Rembrandt’s art on the British imagination, by exploring the wide range of native artists whose work has been inspired by the Dutch master right up to the present day.
The exhibition will bring together key works by Rembrandt which remain in British collections, including Belshazzar’s Feast (c.1635) from the National Gallery London, and Girl at a Window (1645) from Dulwich Picture Gallery, as well as star paintings now overseas, such as The Mill (1645/8) from the National Gallery in Washington, which left Britain when it was sold to a US collector for the staggering sum of £100,000 in 1911.
Rembrandt is renowned for the penetrating realism of his self-portraits and there will be some particularly fine examples in this show, including the extraordinary Self-Portrait, aged 51 (on long-term loan to the SNG) and Portrait of the Artist as Young Man (c.1629-31) from the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, which was the first painting by the artist to leave Holland and the first to enter a British collection, when it was presented to Charles I in the early 1630s.
It was Rembrandt’s portraits and landscapes that most attracted British collectors, and which had a particularly powerful impact on British artists. The exhibition will include his only portraits of ‘British’ sitters, Rev Johannes Elison and his wife Maria Bockenolle (both 1634), on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and key landscapes including The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1647) from the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Although they were painted in Amsterdam, the Boston portraits depict a Dutch couple who lived in Norwich, and the paintings were in Britain by 1677. They are one of only three pairs of full-length portraits painted by Rembrandt, and have not been seen in the UK since 1929.
The artist’s genius was equally apparent in his mastery of printmaking and drawing as in his painting; alongside 16 key works in oil (and further oils by his workshop) will be an extensive selection of 13 fine drawings and more than 20 prints, including some of his most celebrated etchings, such as Christ Presented to the People (1655), The Three Trees (1643) and Portrait of Jan Six (1647).
Among the British artists represented in the exhibition will be William Hogarth (1697-1764) and Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), both of whom betray a heavy debt to Rembrandt, seen here in works such as Reynolds’s Self-Portrait when Young (1753-8). Reynolds also wrote extensively about Rembrandt’s work and was an avid collector of it himself (A Man in Armour (1655), which he owned, will be on loan from Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum). Reynolds helped to burn Rembrandt’s fame into the British psyche, and it has endured through to the to the twenty-first century. The exhibition will include a powerful version of A Woman bathing in a Stream (1654) by the renowned British painter Leon Kossoff (b.1926), as well as the work of artists such as John Bellany (1942-2013), Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005), and Frank Auerbach (b.1931).
Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master, which opens on 7 July and runs until 14 October, has been conceived by Dr Tico Seifert, the NGS Senior Curator of Northern European Art, and will have its only showing in Edinburgh. The exhibition is supported by the Friends of the National Galleries of Scotland and Players of the People’s Postcode Lottery.
The large-scale summer exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) in 2018 will be a major survey of the career of the celebrated German Expressionist artist, Emil Nolde (1867-1956). Nolde was one of the greatest colourists of the twentieth century, an artist passionate about his north German home near the Danish border - with its immense skies, flat, windswept landscapes and storm-tossed seas - but equally fascinated by the demi-monde of Berlin’s cafés and cabarets, the busy to and fro of tugboats in the port of Hamburg and the myriad peoples and places he saw on his trip to the South Seas in 1914. Nolde felt strongly about what he painted, identifying with his subjects in every brushstroke he made, heightening his colours and simplifying his shapes, so that viewers could also experience his emotional response to the world about him.
Emil Nolde: Colour is Life, will comprise about 120 paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints, drawn from the incomparable collection of the Emil Nolde Foundation in Seebüll (the artist’s former home in north Germany), and will cover Nolde’s complete career, from his early atmospheric paintings of his homeland right through to the intensely coloured, so-called ‘unpainted pictures’ - works done on small pieces of paper during the Third Reich, when Nolde was branded a ‘degenerate’ artist and forbidden to work as a professional artist. The works on show will also include Nolde’s justly famous flower and garden paintings, and his extraordinary religious paintings, with their strange mixture of spirituality and eroticism.
The exhibition is a collaboration between the Emil Nolde Foundation, Seebüll, the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, where it will be shown first, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, where it will be shown at Modern Two from 14 July to 21 October 2018. This will only be the second exhibition of Nolde’s work in Scotland (the first was a small show of his watercolours at the NGS in 1968). It will be the largest exhibition in the UK since 1996.
The third instalment of NOW, a three-year series of contemporary art exhibitions currently running at the SNGMA, will open on 24 March 2018, and feature a major career-spanning presentation of works by renowned British artist Jenny Saville (b.1970). Saville graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1992 and has enjoyed worldwide success over the past 25 years. She is best known for her paintings which often depict the naked female form in close-up and on a massive scale. This will be the first museum exhibition of her work ever to be staged in Scotland. It will feature monumental paintings and drawings dating between 1992 and 2017, which demonstrate the scale and ambition of the artist’s practice, and her singular and dynamic approach to composition, gesture, materials and subject matter.
This edition of NOW will also feature the work of five further artists who have addressed themes of the body, performance, process and materiality. These will include the installation of a major new work by Scottish artist Christine Borland (b.1965), recently commissioned by the Institute of Transplantation, Newcastle; a room of painted metal sculptural works by Glasgow-based artist Sara Barker; a photographic series by the South African artist Robin Rhode; a two-channel video by Austrian artist Markus Schinwald; and new works by Edinburgh-based artist Catherine Street.
Victoria Crowe: Beyond Likeness, which opens at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery next spring and runs until November 2018, will bring together a group of outstanding portraits by the distinguished Scottish artist Victoria Crowe (b.1945). Crowe’s approach to portraiture seeks to do more than record the outward appearance of a person, but to represent also something of her sitters’ inner life - the experiences and preoccupations of the individuals depicted, their world of ideas and dreams. This exhibition will not only demonstrate the exceptional skill of a remarkable painter and colourist, but also tell Crowe’s story - both professional and personal – through her art. The portraits selected represent a journey for the artist, and include depictions of outstanding figures from the worlds of the arts and sciences; these include her friend and neighbour the composer Ronald Stevenson; the pioneer medical scientist Dame Janet Vaughan; the poet Kathleen Raine; the actor Graham Crowden; the psychiatrist R D Laing; and Professor Sir Peter Higgs.
Pin-ups: Toulouse Lautrec and the Art of Celebrity will be the first exhibition held at the NGS devoted to the art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), the celebrated French Post-Impressionist artist whose work is synonymous with the bohemian nightlife of Paris in the late-19th Century. The 'city of pleasure’ was famed for its cabarets, dance halls and cafés; most famous of all were the nightspots of the district of Montmartre, where Toulouse-Lautrec lived, worked and socialised, including the now legendary café-cabarets Le Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir. Pin-ups: Toulouse Lautrec and the Art of Celebrity will focus on the artist’s lithographic posters, portfolio prints and illustrations which made stars of Montmartre’s venues and their entertainers - personalities such as Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril and Aristide Bruant. Toulouse-Lautrec’s career coincided with a revolutionary moment in the history of western printmaking – the development of the poster as a means of mass-marketing – and lithography and poster-making were central to his creative process from his first experiments in the medium in 1891 until his death in 1901.
Around 75 works by Toulouse-Lautrec and his contemporaries will be on show, including prints by Pierre Bonnard, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen and Jules Chéret. British artists were equally attracted to the dynamic café culture of Montmartre and the exhibition will also showcase works by artists such as Walter Sickert, Arthur Melville, J D Fergusson and William Nicholson, among others. There will be key loans from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Ashmolean Museum and Aberdeen Art Gallery.
Speaking at the launch today, Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “We are extremely proud of what has been achieved at the National Galleries in recent years with a programme that has true international weight and showcases the very best of art from Scotland. We intend to build on this in 2018 with another world-class offer that reflects the range of our collection from stunning Old Master paintings to cutting edge contemporary art. We are especially pleased to be the only venue in Britain for a major Rembrandt show which will be one of the most ambitious and important exhibitions to be held anywhere in the UK next year.”
For further details of the exhibition programme at the National Galleries of Scotland, please click this link.
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NOW
Jenny Saville
Sara Barker
Christine Borland
Robin Rhode
Markus Schinwald
Catherine Street and others
24 March – 16 September 2018
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One)
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#ScotModern
VICTORIA CROWE: BEYOND LIKENESS
12 May – 18 November 2018
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#VictoriaCrowe
REMBRANDT
BRITAIN’S DISCOVERY OF THE MASTER
7 July – 14 October 2018
Scottish National Gallery
The Mound, Edinburgh EH2 2EL
0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org
Admission from £10.50 | £8.50
On-peak and off-peak tickets available
#Rembrandt
EMIL NOLDE: COLOUR IS LIFE
14 July – 21 October 2018
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two)
73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS
0131 624 6200 | Admission £10 | £8
#EmilNolde #ColourIsLife
PIN UPS:
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC AND THE ART OF CELEBRITY
6 October 2018 – 20 January 2019
Scottish National Gallery
The Mound, Edinburgh EH2 2EL
0131 624 6200 | Admission £10 | £8
#ToulouseLautrec
Emil Nolde: Colour is Life will be at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, from 14 February to 10 June 2018
For information please contact Kate Burvill, Kate Burvill PR kateburvill@googlemail.com
Mob: + 44 (0) 7947 754717 Tel: + 44 (0) 207 226 7824 or
Valerie Keogh, Press & Communications Officer, Press@ngi.ie
Tel + 353 (0) 1 663 3598/ 663 3519/ 661 5133 Mob + 353 (0) 87 9092831
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28 November 2017 Young people in Scotland create The Art of the Future
YOUNG PEOPLE IN SCOTLAND CREATE THE ART OF THE FUTURE FOR THE NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND
10 February - 29 April 2018
Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission FREE
An ambitious new learning project organised by the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and supported by players of People’s Postcode Lottery was launched in Edinburgh this week. The Art of the Future will bring together artworks created by 15 groups of young people from across Scotland, in an exhibition that will be on show at the Scottish National Gallery next February.
The groups were sent boxes containing art supplies, with which to create original artworks: one of the groups is based at Drummond Community High School, Edinburgh, and comprises 8 girls aged 15 -16, from eight different ethnic backgrounds. The content of the boxes are unknown until they are received by a group and can range from paint, sculptural materials and paintbrushes, to masks and a megaphone; objects similar to those used in the works of art on display in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s series of contemporary exhibitions NOW. The group from Drummond Community High School is supported by Action for Children, and it is hoped that the project will help the young people develop confidence in their origin and identity.
The Art of the Future uses contemporary art to link young people in communities throughout Scotland, and to encourage them to create artworks about the issues they face in their own lives. The project aims to work with up to 14 youth groups (over 150 participants) spread throughout the country, targeting areas lacking in cultural provision, particularly in relation to contemporary art. A combination of rural and urban groups will be engaged to create a national coverage.
The Art of the Future uses art to encourage young people across Scotland to have conversations about their future, and to give audiences an insight into the issues that affect young people in Scotland today, including mental health and the invasive pressure of social media. The artworks created will be shared with other groups in the network and young people are encouraged to open up about their hopes and fears for their future. One of the aims of The Art of the Future is to help young people develop self-confidence and self-worth, via the medium of modern and contemporary art.
The groups are facilitated by the NGS Learning team and practicing artists to create original artworks that will also be exhibited to local communities. All the artworks created by the participating groups will be part of a free exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery, The Art of the Future, from 9 February 2018 to 29 April 2018.
Robin Baillie, Senior Outreach Officer at the National Galleries of Scotland, added: “The boxes are designed to stimulate creativity and imagination. We believe that contemporary art can be a great vehicle to develop radical ideas and innovative social solutions. We hope this project stimulates a genuine dialogue among young people in Scotland, about what matters to them. Thank you to players of People’s Postcode Lottery for making this a possibility.”
Clara Glovier, Head of Charities, People’s Postcode Lottery said: “We are delighted that the support of players of People’s Postcode Lottery has enabled the National Galleries of Scotland’s Art of the Future project. To be involved in a creative project which uses art to encourage important conversations between young people is very special, and we are looking forward to seeing the final pieces of art and hearing more about the young people’s experiences at the Art of the Future exhibition.”
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Major sculpture by leading 20th-Century artist acquired by Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
A remarkable glass, perspex and stainless steel sculpture by the Russian artist Naum Gabo (1890-1977) has been acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, thanks to the generosity of the artist’s family. The work has been gifted through the Arts Council’s Cultural Gifts Scheme by Graham Williams on behalf of himself and his wife, the artist’s daughter Nina Williams.
Gabo was born in 1890 in Russia. He studied medicine, then physics and engineering in Munich. At the start of the First World War he moved to Norway, where, inspired by new scientific thinking about time, space and matter, he began to make sculpture out of card, sheet metal and, later, new kinds of transparent plastic. Instead of modelling or carving, he created a completely new kind of sculpture, which is glued or screwed together, and which the viewer can literally see through. He proclaimed: ‘We construct our work as the engineer constructs his bridges, as the mathematician his formula of the orbits’. This approach, which became known as ‘Constructive art’, exercised an enormous influence over the development of modern sculpture.
In 1921, when he was living in Russia, Gabo made preliminary designs for Column, with the idea of making it into a giant public sculpture, towering over the hills near Moscow. Moving to Berlin in 1922, he made the first in a series of small, three-dimensional models, using glass, metal and plastics. Gabo made a number of preliminary models of Column: the earliest, dating from 1920-21, is now in Tate, London. In 1922-23 he made a larger version, just over a metre tall, in glass, painted metal, wood and galalith – an early kind of plastic. He wanted to make a much larger version, but the types of glass available at the time were unsatisfactory, having green edges. Gabo kept the project in mind, waiting for the creation of new materials which would help him to realise his ambition.
Gabo moved to London in 1936, forming close friendships with artists Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. From 1939 to 1946 he lived in St Ives, Cornwall, becoming a key figure in the St Ives art group. He moved to America in 1946, settling in Connecticut, with wife Miriam and daughter Nina. He subsequently took US citizenship. Nina returned to England in 1964.
By the 1960s, Gabo was recognized as one of the most important and innovative artists of the twentieth-century; exhibitions of his work proliferated. In 1970 he had an exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, and the idea of making Column on a larger scale resurfaced. Discussions led to the discovery of a new kind of glass, which was strong and completely transparent and colourless, being made by Pilkington Brothers in England. On seeing it, Gabo wrote: ‘I never dreamt that such a beautiful, crystal-clear sheet of glass can now be produced’.
In 1973 Gabo sent a small model of Column to Denmark, for the new, larger work to be made. The glass came from Pilkington’s and the other parts were made in Denmark to Gabo’s specifications. Two examples of the sculpture were made: one for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and another that Gabo gave to his daughter, Nina, who gave it to her husband Graham. That second example was placed on loan to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2016 and has now been gifted, by Nina’s husband, Graham Williams, through the Cultural Gifts Scheme. It joins two smaller works by Gabo already in the collection: Construction through a Plane (c.1937) and Spiral Theme (1941).
Column is on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), alongside paintings by Pablo Picasso, Lyubov Popova, Fernand Léger and Georges Braque, all dating from the same period, around the early 1920s.
Speaking of the acquisition, Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “We are delighted that this extraordinary and innovative sculpture has joined our collection. It has been on loan here for nearly two years and has been much admired. We aredeeply grateful to Graham and Nina Williams, the artist’s son-in-law and daughter, for their generosity, as well as to the Scottish Government.”
Edward Harley, Chairman of the Acceptance in Lieu Panel said: “Column by Naum Gabo occupies a significant place in the history of modern sculpture. I am delighted that this important work has joined the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s impressive holdings of 20th century art and is the first cultural gift to enter the collection.”
Notes to Editors
The acceptance of this artwork will generate a tax reduction of £255,000. The Cultural Gifts Scheme was launched by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport in March 2013 as an important element of its expanding programme to encourage philanthropy for the arts. The Acceptance in Lieu Panel, chaired by Edward Harley, advises Ministers on all objects offered under the Cultural Gifts Scheme. Scottish Ministers have a decision-making role in allocations where there is a Scottish interest. The Scheme is administered by the Arts Council and enables UK taxpayers to donate important objects to the nation during their lifetime. Items accepted under the Scheme are allocated to public collections and are available for all. In return, donors will receive a reduction in their income tax, capital gains tax or corporation tax liability, based on a set percentage of the value of the object they are donating: 30 per cent for individuals and 20 per cent for companies.
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/tax-incentives/cultural-gifts-scheme
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New exhibition to reveal role of Scottish artists in the development of progressive art from 1900-1950
Press View: Thursday 30 November 2017, 11.30–13:00hrs,
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), EH4 3DS
A New Era: Scottish Modern Art 1900-1950
2 December 2017 – 10 June 2018
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two)
73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS
Admission £10 (£8) | Free for Our Friends
www.nationalgalleries.org | 0131 624 6200
#ANewEra
A major new exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) this winter will reveal the remarkable yet relatively unknown response of Scottish artists to the development of modern art in the first half of the 20th Century.
A New Era: Scottish Modern Art 1900-1950 will examine the most progressive work made by Scottish artists as they absorbed and responded to the great movements of European modern art, including Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstraction.
The exhibition will chart Scottish modernism from its beginnings in the first decade of the century, when JD Fergusson (1874-1961) and SJ Peploe (1871-1935) experienced at first-hand the radical new work produced in Paris by artists such as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Henri Matisse (1869-1954), to the turn of the Fifties, when emerging Scottish artists like Alan Davie (1920-2014), William Gear (1915-1997), Stepehn Gilbert (1910-2007) and Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) were at the forefront of European contemporary art.
More than 100 paintings, sculptures and works on paper by over 50 artists will be on display from 2 December until 10 June next year, drawn from private and public collections from throughout the UK.
Work by some of Scottish art’s biggest names, such as Davie, FCB Cadell (1883-1937) and William Gillies (1898-1973) will shed new light on their achievements and will feature alongside rarely displayed works by more unfamiliar artists including Cecile Walton (1891-1956), Edwin G Lucas (1911-90) and Benjamin Creme (1922-2016).
The Parisian adventure of Fergusson and Peploe (both of whom were working in the city by 1910) had a profound impact on their painting, reflected in works like Fergusson’s Étude de Rhythm (1910) and Peploe’s Tulips and Fruit (1912). The former is a daring, provocative image of figures in motion, viewed from several perspectives at once, which almost certainly depicts the act of sexual intercourse. The bold new technique adopted by Peploe, characterised by a use of vivid colour, proved so shocking when he returned to Edinburgh in 1912 that his dealer refused to show his new paintings.
The explosion of modern art proved to be irresistible however, and other Scottish artists were beginning to experiment with new ideas being generated in Europe. Stanley Cursiter (1887-1976) created a remarkable series of paintings influenced by the work of the Italian Futurists, who aimed to capture the dynamism of the mechanised, industrial world. Cursiter applied this to works including The Sensation of Crossing the Street – West End, Edinburgh (1913), in which he conveyed the bustle of the capital’s city centre with fragmented buildings, trams and people.
Eric Robertson (1887-1941), who served in the First World War, drew upon his horrific experiences to create remarkable paintings such as Shellburst (1919), which conveys the power of explosions he witnessed, the scale of their destruction and the vulnerability of the soldiers caught within their range. In this extraordinarily advanced painting, Robertson combined the rhythmic whirls of the Futurists with the simplified forms favoured by Vorticists, a British group that explored similar themes, creating a powerful image both frightening and controlled.
Although they maintained close links with Scotland, a number of leading Scottish modernists lived in London during the 1920s, among them Agnes Miller Parker (1895-1980), her husband William McCance (1894-1970) and William Johnstone (1897-1981). The simplified, partly mechanised forms that appear in works such as Miller Parker’s The Horse Fair (1928) and McCance’s Heavy Structures in a Landscape Setting (1922) demonstrate how deeply engaged these artists were with developments in Europe. In Scotland, artists including Beatrice Huntington (1889-1988) and William Crozier (1893-1930) were applying the lessons of Cubism to portraiture and the Scottish landscape, as seen in A Muleteer from Andalucia, (c.1923) by Huntington and Edinburgh (from Salisbury Crags), (c.1927) by Crozier.
In the 1930s, a little-known progressive art world developed in Edinburgh, under the influence of figures such as Herbert Read (1893-1968), Professor of Fine Art at Edinburgh University from 1932 until 1934; Hubert Wellington, the Principal of Edinburgh College of Art; and Stanley Cursiter, who was appointed Director of the National Galleries of Scotland in 1930. Read’s ideas about the inspiration to be found beyond France in northern Europe shared common ground with Wellington’s international outlook and Cursiter’s lobbying for a gallery dedicated to modern art, whilst a rejuvenated Society of Scottish Artists mounted a series of exhibitions promoting the work of ground-breaking artists such as Edvard Munch (in 1931) and Paul Klee (in 1934).
The Thirties also saw the completion by Johnstone of his masterpiece A Point in Time (1937), a monumental painting with dark, cavernous spaces and abstract swirls of coloured light that arose out of his, “horror of the disease of war, of anticipation of the future tragedy”. The decade also saw the emergence of a rich seam of Scottish Surrealism, evident in the work of the self-taught Lucas, whose career, forgotten for over 50 years, was resurrected in 2013 when The Shape of the Night (1939) was one of a group of paintings acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland. A New Era is named after the group formed in Edinburgh in 1939 to exhibit the surreal and abstract art of its members, including Gear and Tom Pow (1950-96), both of whom feature in the current exhibition. An important example of Scottish modernism, Tom Gentleman’s (1882-1966) Bullfight in Madrid with Picador Kem of 1921, will also be on display, having been generously presented to the Galleries by the artist’s family.
During the Second World War, Glasgow became the centre of Scotland’s progressive art circles, seeing the arrival of European artists, including Polish painter Jankel Adler (1895-1949), and the establishment of art clubs and other initiatives. Some Scottish artists however moved to England and greatly prospered, such as Robert Colquhoun (1914-62) and Robert MacBryde (1913-66) in London and Margaret Mellis (1914-2009) in St Ives. Mellis became a key figure in the emerging St Ives School, as seen in her Relief Construction in Wood, inspired by her friendships with Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) and Naum Gabo (1890-1977). She was later joined in Cornwall by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004), who emerged as a pioneer of British Abstraction, as seen in Upper Glacier, 1950.
Barns-Graham was part of a new generation of Scottish artists who came to the fore after the war, which included Davie, Paolozzi, Gear and Gilbert. Paolozzi exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1952 while the latter two were the only British members of the cutting-edge CoBrA movement. Gear’s radical abstract painting Autumn Landscape was purchased by the Arts Council from the Festival of Britain Sixty Paintings for ’51 exhibition, causing a furore. By the time the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art opened in Edinburgh in 1960, Scottish artists were at the forefront of European contemporary art.
Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: “A New Era reveals, for the first time, the role of Scottish artists in the development of progressive art during the first half of the twentieth century. It shows the extent to which Scottish artists were inspired by, and prepared to engage with, the European avant-garde, and its impact upon their work. Bringing together over 100 works by over 50 artists, the show offers a fascinating view of art at a time of tumultuous change”.
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Notes to Editors
A New Era: Scottish Modern Art 1900-1950 will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated 120-page exhibition catalogue edited by Alice Strang, Senior Curator, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. It is priced at £19.95 and can be found here.
The exhibition’s opening lecture will be given by Alice Strang on Monday 11 December at the Scottish National Gallery’s Hawthorden Lecture Theatre from 12:45-1:30pm.
The exhibition will be accompanied by Magazines and Manifestos: British Periodicals 1890-1950, a Keiller Library display in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s Modern Two building, from 2 December until 10 June.
PORTRAIT OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS DISCOVERED UNDERNEATH 16TH-CENTURY PAINTING
An unfinished portrait of a woman believed to be Mary, Queen of Scots has been found hidden beneath another 16th-century portrait during a significant research project recently conducted at the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and the Courtauld Institute of Art.
The ghostly image of a woman, which shows compelling similarities to other, near-contemporary depictions of the queen, was revealed by X-ray photography during an examination of a portrait of Sir John Maitland, 1st Lord Maitland of Thirlestane, which is attributed to Adrian Vanson (died c.1604-1610).
The portrait was one of a number of works by the portrait painters Adrian Vanson and Adam de Colone, two Netherlandish artists who worked in Scotland at the end of the 16th century and beginning of the 17th century, to be examined by conservator Dr Caroline Rae, the Courtauld Institute of Art’s Caroline Villers Research Fellow, who recently undertook a collaborative research project in conjunction with NGS. The discovery took place while Dr Rae was examining works from the NGS collection during her research; Vanson’s portrait of Sir John Maitland (1589), the Lord Chancellor of Scotland, is part of the National Trust collection and usually hangs at the Trust’s 17th century historic property Ham House, near London. The results of this collaborative research project, which set out to explore the respective artistic techniques of Vanson and de Colone, will be revealed in a new display which opens at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this week.
Dr Rae discovered the concealed portrait while conducting a technical examination using X-radiography (X-ray), a technique that can penetrate through paint layers but which is stopped by pigments containing heavy metals such as lead white (a white pigment that was commonly used throughout Europe at the time). The X-radiograph revealed the presence of lead white depicting a woman’s face and the outline of her dress and hat beneath the upper layers of paint.
Dr Rae was able to trace the outline of a woman, whose appearance indicates she is likely to be Mary, Queen of Scots, based on distinct similarities to other depictions of the controversial queen made during her lifetime, and in particular during her later years. The face of the sitter for instance shows a strong resemblance to two miniatures by the famous English miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619), kept in the Royal Collection and the V&A Museum collection. Other clues, like the sitter’s pose with her head tilted to the side and her hand at her waist with her fingers positioned as if holding something, the wired cap and square-necked gown, also accord with other portraits of Mary, including a work hanging at Blair Castle, Perthshire.
Mary Stuart, often called Mary, Queen of Scots was a controversial figure. Forced to abdicate the throne in 1567 due to the suggestion she was implicated in her husband’s murder, then imprisoned by Elizabeth I from 1568, Mary was executed in England in 1587 – two years before the inscribed date on the overlying portrait of Sir John Maitland. Mary’s recent execution may be a reason why her portrait was covered over or abandoned by the artist.
Despite the fascination with which Mary, Queen of Scots was regarded both during her own lifetime and subsequently, there are relatively few authentic portraits of her, and in particular few images from her life in Scotland.
Dr Caroline Rae said: “Technical examination of works of art, in conjunction with art historical and documentary research, forms the pillars of technical art history. Using technical art history, it is possible to illuminate artists’ materials and techniques for the first time in centuries, to discern copies and forgeries and to explore questions of authorship and workshop practice. The discovery of this hidden portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots is an exciting revelation, not only as it adds to our knowledge of 16th century Marian portraiture and patterns of commission at the time, but as it aids in illuminating our understanding of Adrian Vanson, a Netherlandish émigré artist who came to Jacobean Scotland to seek a new life and quickly ascended to the status of Crown painter.”
David Taylor, Curator of Pictures and Sculpture at the National Trust, commented: “Vanson’s portrait of Sir John Maitland is an important picture in the National Trust collection, and the remarkable discovery of the unfinished portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots adds an exciting hidden dimension to it. It shows that portraits of the queen were being copied and presumably displayed in Scotland around the time of her execution, a highly contentious and potentially dangerous thing to be seen doing.”
Christopher Baker, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, added: “This fascinating discovery has been made thanks to an innovative collaboration undertaken by the National Galleries of Scotland, the Courtauld Institute of Art and the National Trust. The shadowy presence of the Queen beneath a painting of Scotland’s Lord Chancellor could not have been detected without Dr Rae’s technical expertise. The analysis of this intriguing picture forms a key part of a broader project, which we hope will raise awareness of such important research for many visitors to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.”
ENDS
Notes to Editors:
Art and Analysis: Two Netherlandish Painters working in Jacobean Scotland
28 October 2017 – 26 January 2020
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
1 Queen Street
Edinburgh EH2 1JD
Telephone 0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#ArtandAnalysis
Focusing on the two 17th-century artists Adrian Vanson and Adam de Colone, this display will present a group of paintings from the NGS collection which have been examined by Dr Caroline Rae using cutting-edge technology.
The research for this exhibition was supported by the Caroline Villers Fellowship (October 2016-June 2017). Art and Analysis will showcase the results of Dr Caroline Rae’s research and her findings on both artists, the materials and techniques used to create the portraits and the analytical techniques employed in her investigations, including X-radiography, infrared reflectography and dendrochronology.
About Ham House and the National Trust:
The portrait of Sir John Maitland is displayed in Ham House, the Thames-side palace that belonged to Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart, and Duchess of Lauderdale, whose second husband was Maitland’s grandson, John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale. The picture probably came to Ham when John Maitland married Elizabeth Murray in 1672.
Sir John Maitland was Keeper of the Privy Seal in Scotland, Secretary of State to James VI and Lord Chancellor, and when the portrait was painted he was the second most powerful person in Scotland, after the king. He was brother of the more-famous William Maitland of Lethington who was Mary Queen of Scots’ Secretary of State.
Ham House is now owned by the National Trust and is one of London’s treasure houses and gardens. With a substantial collection of 17th century paintings, furniture and textiles, it reveals what life looked like during the reigns of Charles I and II.
An outstanding, rare watercolour by the world-renowned artist and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) has been acquired for the nation at auction. The new acquisition will go on show at the Scottish National Gallery (SNG) for the first time this autumn.
The Road Through the Rocks, a beautiful view of a southern French landscape painted between 1926 and 1927, was purchased at the Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull for £65,000. It will feature in a display at the Gallery which runs from 20 October to mid-January 2018, coinciding with the 150th anniversary celebrations of the acclaimed artist’s birth.
The striking watercolour will be displayed alongside Mont Alba, the Galleries’ only other Mackintosh watercolour and three Mackintosh watercolours on long loan to the Galleries, including Palalda, Pyrénées-Orientales, an intricate view of a picturesque hill village.
Mackintosh is internationally renowned as one of the most original and creative architect-designers of the 1890s and early 1900s, but in his own lifetime he did not achieve such widespread acclaim.
His career as an architect declined during the First World War and in years immediately afterwards. In 1923 he and his wife, the artist Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864-1933) decided to move to the south of France and concentrate on watercolour painting. Over the next four years Mackintosh produced a series of some 40 watercolours, depicting the mountains, farms, hill towns, ports and flora of the Pyrénées-Orientales and the coast of Roussillon, in the far south west of France. With their brilliant light and colour, meticulous execution and powerful design, these watercolours convey Mackintosh’s extraordinary eye for nature’s patterns and the structure of organic forms. Utterly distinctive in style, they also demonstrate the originality of his vision and his complete command of the watercolour medium.
Mackintosh had drawn and painted from the outset of his career; he won first prize at a student exhibition at Glasgow School of Art (GSoA) in 1891. Sketching buildings and making showpiece perspective drawings was a vital part of his practice as an architect and he also painted richly detailed and observed botanical drawings. He made a small number of landscape watercolours in Suffolk in 1914 and on holiday in Dorset in 1920, but the French watercolours represent his first sustained landscape and watercolour painting campaign. As a group they bring together his passionate interest in nature, in buildings and in painting and represent an extraordinary creative development late in his career.
The Mackintoshes clearly fell in love with the Roussillon countryside; Margaret wrote after a visit to London in 1924 that, “we came on here – to this lovely rose-coloured land and we were glad to be back again in its warmth and sun”. They initially stayed in the mountain spa town of Amélie-les-Bains, later travelling to the fishing village of Collioure and its near neighbour, the busy working port of Port Vendres. By 1925 they had established a routine of summering in the mountains and spending the rest of the year on the coast at Port Vendres.
Although they initially rented studios, these were later given up and Mackintosh worked outdoors. Carrying the minimum of equipment and dependent on fine weather, he would scramble across the rocky hillsides in search of the best vantage points, often having to take shelter from the fierce coastal winds of the area. He worked slowly, sometimes spending weeks on a drawing; he wrote, “I go very slow because I have so many problems to solve”. He was ambitious for his paintings, constantly striving for improvement, writing that, “I find that each of my drawings has something in them but none of them have everything. This must be remedied”.
The Road Through the Rocks depicts Fort Mailly, an eighteenth century fort built to guard the entrance to the harbour at Port Vendres. Mackintosh was fascinated by the fort, with its slab-like walls lying just above the rocky coastline, and painted it at least four times from different viewpoints, exploring its setting and relationship to the landscape. This is probably the earliest of the four views of Fort Mailly; the undulating hills and sinuous, serrated rock formations contrast with the angular bulk of the fort and the flat calm of the sea. The road referred to in the title is shown deep in shadow, cutting through the rocky headland to the right of the fortress. As ever Mackintosh omits any human presence from the scene; the angular forms of the rocks and the play of intense light and shadow create a feeling of organic movement and dynamism in what is otherwise a landscape of crystalline stillness.
The Road Through the Rocks was exhibited at the Mackintosh Memorial Exhibition in Glasgow in 1933 and was later in the collection of Professor Thomas Howarth, an eminent Mackintosh scholar and collector. The National Galleries’ acquisition of The Road Through the Rocks was partly funded by the James Cowan Smith Bequest Fund. Cowan Smith bequeathed £55,000 to the Scottish National Gallery in 1919, with the intention that the interest on this money be used to purchase works of art. Over the last century the Cowan Smith Fund has enabled the purchase of such masterpieces as John Constable’s The Vale of Dedham, John Singer Sargent’s Lady Agnew of Lochnaw and Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin’s A Vase of Flowers, among others.
Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “Mackintosh is one of the greatest of all Scotland’s artists and architects and this is a very refined and beautifully composed watercolour which demonstrates his sophisticated engagement with European landscapes. It is especially pleasing that it has been possible to secure such a rare work in good condition for the national collection in time for all the celebrations that will mark the 150th anniversary of his birth.”
For more information or images, please contact the National Galleries of Scotland press office on: 0131 624 6247 | 6314 | 6332 | 6491 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.
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10 October 2017 — Edinburgh graduate's prize-winning art to go on show in Scotland for the first time
BP PORTRAIT AWARD
16 December 2017 – 11 March 2018
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
Free admission | 0131 624 6200
#BPPortrait
An Edinburgh College of Art graduate’s prize-winning entry in a prestigious, worldwide portrait competition will go on show in Scotland for the first time this winter. The 2017 BP Portrait Award exhibition, which opens at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery on 18 December, will feature 53 stand-out works selected from 2,580 entries, by artists from 87 countries, including Breech! by Benjamin Sullivan which took this year's first prize.
BP Portrait Award is one of the most important platforms for new and established portrait painters alike. Its first prize of £30,000 makes it one of the largest global arts competitions.
The 2017 first prize winner of BP Portrait Award is Benjamin Sullivan (b. 1977), whose painting Breech! is a tender depiction of his wife Virginia breastfeeding their eight-month-old daughter. It took Sullivan less than five weeks to create the intimate painting, which reflects on the worrisome time the parents faced during Edith’s birth, and celebrates their love for their new child.
The prize judges, including broadcaster Kirsty Wark and artist Michael Landy, were particularly struck by the warmth and emotion present in Sullivan's composition, which evokes Madonna and Child paintings through the ages and the depth of the maternal bond. The artist was presented with a £30,000 prize and a commission, at the National Portrait Gallery Trustees’ discretion, worth £5,000.
Grimsby-born, Suffolk-based Sullivan holds a BA (Hons) in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art. Sullivan was previously awarded the third prize for Hugo in 2016, a portrait of the poet Hugo Williams. Sullivan’s work has been selected for display 12 times for BP Portrait Award, in 2002 and every year from 2006 to 2015.
The French artist Thomas Ehretsmann (b. 1974) won the second prize of £10,000 for Double Portrait, a painting of his wife Caroline. Ehretsmann was inspired by a walk the couple was taking in a park and the way the light shone on Caroline’s face, which he said reminded him of the work of French naturalist painters. In order to infuse the ephemeral moment with something more timeless, the artist used multiple layers of semi-transparent acrylic paint, a technique which he often employs in his work. The title suggests the passage from one state of being to another, and hints at Caroline’s pregnancy.
Born in Mulhouse, France, Ehretsmann gained a degree in illustration from the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, Strasbourg. His work as an illustrator has been featured in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Elle Magazine. His portrait Vacuum 2 was selected for the BP Portrait Award 2016 exhibition.
The third prize of £8,000 went to Antony Williams (b. 1964) for Emma. The painting is named after the sitter, Emma Bruce, who modelled for Williams almost continuously for over a decade, during which the relationship between the two developed into friendship. Although Emma is shown naked, her crossed arms prevent the viewer from seeing her directly; Williams wanted to portray both her vulnerability and determination.
Williams studied at Farnham College and Portsmouth University. An established portrait artist, his work has been seen in solo exhibitions in London and Madrid and included in the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Exhibitions and previously in BP Portrait Award exhibitions in 1995, 1998, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2014 and 2015.
The £7,000 BP Young Artist Award, which goes to a selected entrant aged between 18 and 30, was won by New Zealander Henry Christian-Slane (b. 1990) for Gabi, a portrait of his wife. Christian-Slane studied graphic design at Auckland University of Technology; this is the first time the artist and illustrator has been selected for the BP Portrait Award exhibition.
Also on display in the exhibition is the work of Lithuanian artist Laura Guoke, the winner of the BP Travel Award 2016, a £6,000 annual prize enabling artists to work in a different environment. Guoke travelled to refugee camps in Ritsona, Greece where she sketched, photographed and filmed some of the most vulnerable refugees from Syria, as well as the volunteers helping them. Guoke’s powerful, large-scale portrait shows migrants as individuals with names and faces, and conveys their unique stories.
Casper White won the BP Travel Award 2017 for his proposal to portray music fans in clubs and concert venues in Berlin and Mallorca. White aims to represent an often youth-related subculture that is not traditionally recorded in portrait paintings. White’s work will be displayed in BP Portrait Award in 2018.
2017 marks the Portrait Award’s 38th year at the National Portrait Gallery, London and the 28th year of sponsorship by BP. This extremely popular annual exhibition which always proves to be a great success when shown in Scotland aims to encourage artists over the age of 18 to focus upon and develop the skills of portraiture in their work.
Other works on show in BP Portrait Award range from informal depictions of friends and family, to revealing images of famous faces, with a broad variety of styles and approaches to contemporary painted portraiture. As well as first prize-winner Sullivan, Scottish-based artists include Fiona Graham-Mackay, Ross McAuley and Angela Repping.
Scots-born Fiona Graham-Mackay was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to paint the British writer, poet and broadcaster Lemn Sissay. Graham-Mackay is known for her portraits of the British royal family; her portrait of Sir Andrew Motion was included in the BP Portrait Award 2016.
Canadian artist Ross McAuley, now based in Glasgow, has had works featured in group exhibitions in Toronto, Glasgow and London including the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, 2017. His brightly coloured painting Self-Portrait with Pear shows the artist wearing a vintage sports jacket.
Dutch artist Angela Repping gained a BA (Hons) in fine art from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and lives in Scotland. Her work has been seen in exhibitions at the Royal Glasgow Institute, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Paisley Art Institute. Her work Profile is a portrait of her friend Kim.
Christopher Baker, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, commented: “We are delighted to welcome back to Edinburgh and the National Galleries of Scotland the BP Portrait Award. It encompasses a wealth of artistic talent and demonstrates in such an inspiring way the vitality and variety of contemporary painted portraiture. The exhibition and programmes around it will I am sure once again prove to be immensely popular.”
4 October 2017
THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN SET FOR LANDMARK SCOTTISH TOUR
#MonarchoftheGlen
One of the most celebrated paintings in the world – the iconic Monarch of the Glen by Sir Edwin Landseer – will embark on a landmark tour around Scotland this week, following its acquisition for the nation earlier this year.
Landseer’s masterpiece, which was painted in 1851, famously depicts a proud stag imperiously surveying a Highlands landscape, and is recognised the world over as an image closely associated with Scotland.
Following a four-month fundraising campaign, the painting was acquired in March by the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS), with overwhelming support from the public, from The National Lottery, Art Fund, private trusts and foundations, Scottish Government acquisition grant funding and by a part gift by previous owners Diageo Scotland Ltd.
After a summer of attracting admiring crowds in Edinburgh, The Monarch of the Glen will now tour to four major venues around Scotland, beginning with Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, where it will be on display from 6 October until 18 November. It is NGS’s ambition to share its collection and work in partnership with communities across Scotland; over the course of the tour, which has been supported with additional funding from The National Lottery and the Scottish Government, the painting will also be shown at Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Paisley Museum and Art Gallery and Kirkcudbright Galleries.
Commenting, Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland said: “Thanks to the generosity of The National Lottery and the Scottish Government we are able to take this fantastic picture across the country to be enjoyed by as many people as possible. We want this tour of The Monarch of the Glen to be seen as a huge thank you for the overwhelming support that we received during the fundraising campaign and as a celebration that this amazing work of art now belongs to all the people of Scotland. We hope that it will be admired and debated by audiences across the country."
Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs, added: “This tour is an exciting opportunity for people of all ages and backgrounds across Scotland to access and enjoy this iconic painting in their own communities. I am confident this will further inspire many to seek out new opportunities to engage in culture and the arts. I am pleased the Scottish Government was able to support both the acquisition of the painting and its tour with a total of £175,000 funding and I look forward to seeing the Monarch of the Glen continue to attract visitors from far and wide in the years to come.”
Ian Murray, Chief Executive of High Life Highland who manage and operate Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, added: “We are very pleased to be working in partnership with the National Galleries of Scotland to support bringing this iconic painting to Inverness. The Monarch of the Glen is an immediately recognisable image to people in Scotland and across the world and we are delighted that residents and visitors to the Highlands have a chance to see the painting when it comes to Inverness this week."
Landseer (1802-73) was intoxicated by the Scottish Highlands. He first visited the country in 1824 and was overwhelmed and inspired by the experience of the landscape and its people; he returned annually in late summer and the autumn on sketching expeditions, developing a particular affinity with the novelist Sir Walter Scott and his work. The resulting paintings range from intimate and remarkably fresh landscape studies, painted on the spot, to his most famous large-scale picture, The Monarch of the Glen. They played a key role in formulating the deeply attractive and romantic image of the Highlands, which still resonates today.
The Monarch of the Glen was originally intended as part a series of three works to be displayed in the House of Lords, but the scheme was never realised and the painting was sold to a private collector soon after its completion. From the moment it was first exhibited in 1851 at the Royal Academy in London it proved immensely popular, and the admiration has continued right up to the present day. It was widely reproduced in the nineteenth century, especially through steel engravings, and in 1916 it was purchased by Sir Thomas Dewar. From that point it was regularly employed as a marketing image, first by Pears Soap and then by John Dewar & Sons Distillery and Glenfiddich. Subsequently it was also appropriated by Nestlé and Baxter’s Soup. Through its widespread use in commercial advertising and in popular culture, the picture has become instantly recognizable yet it remains an extremely powerful work of art and a rich source of debate about issues of history and identity.
For further information please contact:
Michael Gormley, Press Manager, National Galleries of Scotland.
Tel: 0131 624 6247. Email: mgormley@nationalgalleries.org
Harris Brine, Press Officer, National Galleries of Scotland.
Tel: 0131 624 6332. Email: hbrine@nationalgalleries.org
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Notes to Editors:
Tour Details:
Inverness Museum & Art Gallery
6 October - 18 November 2017
Perth Museum and Art Gallery
25 November 2017 - 14 January 2018
Paisley Museum and Art Gallery
20 January – 11 March 2018
Kirkcudbright Galleries
25 March – 12 May 2018
Caption Information:
Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-73)
The Monarch of the Glen, c.1851
Oil on canvas, 163.8 x 169 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Purchased by the National Galleries of Scotland as a part gift from Diageo Scotland Ltd, with contributions from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Dunard Fund, the Art Fund, the William Jacob Bequest, the Tam O’ Shanter Trust, the Turtleton Trust, and the K. T. Wiedemann Foundation, Inc. and through public appeal 2017.
Background to the acquisition:
In November 2016 it was announced that NGS had entered into a partnership agreement with Diageo, owners of The Monarch of the Glen. Under the arrangement, Diageo agreed to gift half the estimated market value of the painting to allow NGS the opportunity to acquire the work for £4 million. After securing support from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Art Fund, NGS launched a public fundraising campaign to help raise the final amount. Support for the public campaign came from around the world with donations received from Anchorage, Queensland, Los Angeles and Hong Kong and from across the UK from Thurso to Bath totalling over a quarter of a million pounds. An additional £100,000 from the NGS acquisition fund from Scottish Government and donations from private trusts and foundations enabled the £4 million target to be reached.
Breakdown of Funding for the acquisition:
Heritage Lottery Fund £2.65m
Art Fund £350,000
Private Trusts and Foundations £634,000
Public Campaign £266,000
NGS Acquisition Fund (Scottish Government) £100,000
TOTAL £4 million
Breakdown of Funding for the tour
Heritage Lottery Fund £100,000
Scottish Government £75,000
Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF)
Thanks to National Lottery players, we invest money to help people across the UK explore, enjoy and protect the heritage they care about - from the archaeology under our feet to the historic parks and buildings we love, from precious memories and collections to rare wildlife. www.hlf.org.uk. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use #NationalLottery and #HLFsupported. For further information, please contact Katie Owen, HLF Press Office, on tel: 020 7591 6036/07973 613820
About Art Fund
Art Fund is the national fundraising charity for art. In the past five years alone Art Fund has given £34 million to help museums and galleries acquire works of art for their collections. It also helps museums share their collections with wider audiences by supporting a range of tours and exhibitions, and makes additional grants to support the training and professional development of curators. Art Fund is independently funded, with the core of its income provided by 123,000 members who receive the National Art Pass and enjoy free entry to over 240 museums, galleries and historic places across the UK, as well as 50% off entry to major exhibitions and subscription to Art Quarterly magazine. In addition to grant-giving, Art Fund’s support for museums includes Art Fund Museum of the Year (won by the V&A, London, in 2016) and a range of digital platforms.
Find out more about Art Fund and the National Art Pass at www.artfund.org
For further information please contact Liz Flanagan, eflanagan@artfund.org / 0207 225 4804
AGES OF WONDER:
SCOTLAND’S ART 1540 TO NOW –
(Collected by the Royal Scottish Academy)
4 November 2017 – 7 January 2018
Royal Scottish Academy, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
royalscottishacademy.org | nationalgalleries.org
#AgesOfWonder
A partnership between the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) and National Galleries of Scotland (NGS); in collaboration with the universities of St. Andrews, Edinburgh and Dundee.
Click here to read the Ages of Wonder exhibition press release which has been issued by the RSA.
The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) have collaborated to organise a major new exhibition, which opens in Edinburgh this autumn. Ages of Wonder: Scotland’s Art 1540 to Now will be the largest exhibition of the RSA’s hugely significant collection ever mounted and the first to occupy the entire RSA building.
The RSA is an independently funded institution founded in 1826, and is led by artists and architects to promote and support the creation, understanding and enjoyment of contemporary art. It was instrumental in the establishment of a Scottish national art collection in 1859, with the opening of the Scottish National Gallery (SNG).
In 1910, the RSA transferred significant works to the SNG’s collection in exchange for exhibiting rights within what is now known as the RSA Building, which is part of the SNG complex in the heart of Edinburgh.
Ages of Wonder will, for the first time in over 100 years, reunite these paintings and sculptures with the RSA collection, bringing together a selection of over 450 works by more than 270 artists and architects that will highlight the significant part played by RSA in Scottish cultural over the past two centuries. Around 60 outstanding works from NGS will feature in the exhibition.
The artworks on show will cover a period of nearly five centuries, from 1540 until the present day - from the The Adoration of the Kings by Jacopo Bassano (c.1510–1592) right through to Callum Innes’s Exposed Painting Lamp Black, submitted as the artist’s Diploma Work in 2015 after his election as an Academician, and a number of new commissions. Among the exhibition’s highlights will be a spectacular recreation of a Victorian gallery hang, which in RSA Gallery 3 will see over 90 works hung as they would have in the 19th Century, from dado rail to ceiling.
Ages of Wonder will also feature a range of special events, including a series of life drawing classes led by prominent contemporary artists such as John Byrne (b.1940), and live etching classes which will utilise a beautifully preserved 19th-century printing press which belonged to the distinguished etcher E S Lumsden (1883-1948).
One room will focus on Sir James Guthrie (1859-1930) and the 1910 transfer, featuring major works from both the RSA and NGS, by Guthrie and other artists such as William Dyce (1806-64) and Joseph Noel Paton (1821-1901), and a specially commissioned sculpture of Guthrie by Kenny Hunter (b.1962). There will also be a room of outstanding portraits of RSA Presidents and artists, showcasing key works by David Allan (1744-96), Elizabeth Blackadder (b.1934) and Alberto Morrocco (1917-98).
John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “The NGS and the RSA have a shared history and together we occupy a central place in the past, present and future of the arts in Scotland. We now work very closely together and we are delighted to have partnered with the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) to help deliver what is set to be a historic show. Visitors to the exhibition can soon enjoy some exceptional works by artists both past and present, with items from the national collection complementing the rich and important holdings of the RSA.”
For further information on Ages of Wonder please contact: Andrew Goring on 0131 624 6556 or andrewgoring@royalscottishacademy.org
For further information & images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland press office on: 0131 624 6247 | 6314 | 6332 | 6491 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.
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NOW
SUSAN PHILIPSZ
YTO BARRADA
MICHAEL ARMITAGE
HIWA K
SARAH ROSE
KATE DAVIS
28 October 2017 – 18 February 2018
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART (Modern One)
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR
Telephone 0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#ModernNOW
A series of new and recent sound installations, photographs and paintings by the Turner Prize-winning Scottish artist Susan Philipsz will be the centrepiece of a major exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh this autumn. Five rooms by Philipsz will feature in the second instalment of NOW, a dynamic programme of contemporary art exhibitions which has taken over the entire ground floor of the Gallery’s Modern One building for the next three years.
NOW reflects the Gallery’s ambition to share contemporary art with a wide audience, highlighting the extraordinary quality and range of work being made by artists associated with Scotland, as well as those from across the globe, placing art created in Scotland in an international context, and demonstrating the crucial exchange between artistic communities around the world.
In NOW Susan Philipsz’s work will be shown alongside paintings by Kenyan-British artist Michael Armitage, a newly commissioned installation featuring sound and sculpture by Glasgow-based artist Sarah Rose, photographs by French artist Yto Barrada, a video installation by Iraqi-Kurdish artist Hiwa K, and a display pairing nineteenth century dolls with drawings by Glasgow-based artist Kate Davis.
Susan Philipsz was born in Glasgow in 1965 and is renowned for her installations which explore how sound can trigger memory and heighten perception. She won the Turner Prize in 2010, which was the first time a sound work was nominated. Her work often features rearrangements of popular folk songs and melodies, which are played in both gallery and public spaces and frequently explore the themes of loss, longing, hope, and mourning.
The development of radio has long since been a source of inspiration for Philipsz, as illustrated by a group of large-scale black and white photographic prints, each of which depicts sections of the salvaged remains of radio inventor Guglielmo Marconi’s floating laboratory, the Elettra. Built in 1904 at Edinburgh’s Leith Docks, the Elettra had an illustrious life before being sunk during the Second World War.
Also on show will be Philipsz’s evocative work Seven Tears (2016) which comprises seven synchronised record players, each playing a single note taken from the melancholic Baroque lament Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans (1604), by English composer John Dowland (1563-1626). By separating and isolating individual tones from the original song, Philipsz makes it less recognisable, and creates an installation infused with haunting beauty. Each note was produced on a series of glasses filled with water, played with a moistened finger. This will be the work’s first showing in the UK.
Taking their titles from the names of each part of Dowland’s Lachrimae, the artist will also present a series of newly made ‘salt paintings’ which complement Seven Tears. Produced by submerging painted canvases into a bath of salted water and waiting for the liquid to evaporate, the resulting works are richly encrusted with layers of salt crystals, and evoke the tears suggested by Dowland’s music.
You Are Not Alone (2009/2017), another work by Philipsz, will be presented in Scotland for the first time. It takes the form of an FM radio signal transmitted from within Modern One, and made audible within the stairwell of our adjacent sister building Modern Two, situated across Belford Road. The audio is composed of recorded radio interval signals – brief musical sequences played before, or during breaks in radio transmissions. While some interval signals have a special significance, being based on national anthems or traditional national tunes, most are composed of a simple series of abstract notes.
In addition to Philipsz’s installations, NOW will feature work by a range of Scottish and international artists, including a series of photographs by Paris-born Yto Barrada, which focuses on dolls collected during missionary expeditions to North Africa in the 1930s. Barrada photographed sixteen of the small, colourful toys against a stark blue background, elevating the status of these delicate objects by making them appear dramatically enlarged and providing insights into science of ethnography (the study of peoples and their cultures, habits and customs) as it developed in the colonial period.
Toys will also be the focus of four pencil drawings by Kate Davis: the Glasgow-based artist drew dolls made by children living in deprived areas of London in the 1890s, using discarded shoes, bone and fabrics. A large collection of the dolls are now housed in Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood and a selection will be shown alongside Davis’s works and a delicate drawing by nineteenth century French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), whose style inspired Davis. This is the first time Davis’s drawings will be on public display after they were acquired by the Gallery earlier this year.
The Bell Project (2007-2015), a thought-provoking video projection by Iraqi artist Hiwa K, explores the idea of legacy by reversing the historical precedent of bells being melted to produce armaments, and linking a munitions yard in Northern Iraq with a 700-year-old bell-making foundry in Italy. The work features two videos playing simultaneously: the left-hand video shows a group of workers at a munition scrapyard in Iraq as they melt down the mines, bombs, bullets, and military plane parts which litter the country following the three Iran-Iraq wars (1980-1988) and both Gulf Wars (1991, 2003). Although the resulting metal bricks are usually sold as material for further production, Hiwa K had them shipped to a bell factory in Italy where they were used to construct a bell, later exhibited in the 2015 Venice Biennale. The right-hand video details this complex bell-making process.
Originally from New Zealand, Glasgow-based artist Sarah Rose has been commissioned to make a new body of work for NOW. Primarily known for her innovative sculptural and sound work, Rose’s new installation will, like previous exhibitions, respond to the specific qualities of the room where it is shown. Borne from extensive research into forms of communication and the capabilities and limits of materials, the installation will include a range of hand-blown glass forms, a specially conceived voice audio piece, and hanging foam and fibre-based sculptures.
Michael Armitage’s large-scale paintings weave multiple narratives that are drawn from historical and current news media, and his own ongoing recollections of Kenya, the country of his birth. Armitage paints with oil on Lubugo, a traditional bark cloth from Uganda which, unlike the smooth surface of traditional canvas, presents occasional holes and coarse indents. Using a rich colour palette, his paintings depict scenes of the urban and rural landscape, lush vegetation and animal life, as well as a giving an account of the sometimes harsh reality of Kenyan politics and social inequalities, violence and extreme disparities in wealth. One of the works on display, Nasema Nawe (2016), is directly inspired by Paul Gauguin’s Vision after the Sermon (1888), one of the most popular works in the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection.
Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: “NOW is the most ambitious programme of contemporary art to be staged at the National Galleries of Scotland, and we are confident this autumn exhibition will build on the great success of the first. NOW showcases the work of some of the most influential and compelling artists working now, in Scotland and abroad.”
ENDS
Notes to Editors
Susan Philipsz (b.1965)
Yto Barrada (b.1971)
Kate Davis (b.1977)
Hiwa K (b.1975)
Sarah Rose (b.1985)
Michael Armitage (b.1984)
The magic and wonder of childhood will be the subject of a new exhibition of photographs at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG) this autumn. When We Were Young will delve into the rich collection of the National Galleries of Scotland to explore how the lives of children have fascinated photographers from the earliest days of the medium to the present. More than 100 images, which capture children at play, at work, at school and at home will reveal how the experience of being a child, and the ways in which they have been represented, have changed radically in the past 175 years.
The photographs not only reveal the shifting attitudes towards children and their representation, but also show the evolution of the photographic processes from early daguerreotypes to contemporary digital prints.
Opening on 14 October 2017 at the SNPG, When We Were Young is the second in a series of thematic exhibitions being held to inspire a new appreciation for this extraordinary art form.
One of the earliest works in the collection is a daguerreotype of a family photographed by James Howie (1791-1858). Having trained as an artist, Howie was known as a portrait and animal painter; he switched to photography and established the first professional photographic studio in Edinburgh in 1841 (only two years after photography was first introduced). His customers had to climb multiple flights of stairs, then use a ladder to access a skylight leading to the roof of his outdoor studio, where they would then perch several floors above a bustling Princes Street below and were told to “sit as still as death”.
Some photographers’ directions for children were more amenable. Julia Margaret Cameron’s literary and religious evocations of the 1860s brought an imaginative element to the depiction of childhood. In her portrait of Kate and Elizabeth Keown, titled The Red and White Roses, the two sisters are shown close up with one clutching a sprig of flowers, the other has hands clasped as if in prayer. The work was not intended as simply a portrait of the photographer’s neighbours on the Isle of Wight, rather it was a metaphor for youthful beauty and the passage of time. Cameron has posed the girls to create an artistic scene and deliberately records them in soft focus so as to create a dreamlike, ethereal quality in the photograph.
Some of the photographs show young children at work or in a work environment—apprentices at ship yards, fisher girls on the beach, or children working family farms and crofts, such as Larry Herman’s 1974 portrait of John Watson at work on a dairy farm in Ayrshire, and Paul Strand’s portrait of John Angus MacDonald on his family croft on South Uist in 1954. In the work of MacMahon of Aberdeen, the photographic studio captured three young boys at a fish processing plant in the town in order to provide a sense of proportion and scale for the giant cod that was being shipped overseas to Portugal. The picture shows the smallest boy in the middle of the composition, dwarfed by gargantuan fish.
From uniformed school pictures to class outings and lessons, another selection of photographs shows children within an educational context. Among the works on display is a series of images by Edith Tudor-Hart (1908–1973), whose intimate pictures of teachers and pupils from Camphill School, Aberdeen, were originally commissioned for a magazine essay in 1949. Tudor-Hart explored the teaching philosophy of the institution which is displayed in the tenderness of the work that addresses the school’s ethos of providing support and education for children with developmental disabilities, mental health problems and other special needs.
The exhibition also explores the notion of play, a subject synonymous with childhood. From portraits of Victorian children with their dolls and books to explorations of today’s virtual playground, the photographs reveal that while children may have vastly different toys from the past compared with the present day, there is still the desire to escape into a world of make-believe and imagination. Many photographs reveal the street playgrounds of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Roger Mayne’s Children playing on a lorry, Glasgow (1958). Like so many of Mayne’s highly contrasting, black and white photographs, it captures perfectly the children’s vitality and abandon in a simpler time, whereas Wendy McMurdo explores the state of modern play which often is situated both in the real and virtual worlds. Inspired by the recent phenomenon of Pokémon GO, which involved young children searching out computer-generated characters inhabiting physical sites and landscapes, McMurdo photographed a number of children and utilised digital technology to obscure their faces and create a splintered portrait—symbolic of their fractured play between two worlds.
When We Were Young is also a chance to see, for the very first time, new works recently acquired by the Gallery from artists including; Wendy McMurdo, Glasgow-based Margaret Mitchell and leading South African photographer Pieter Hugo. The carefully selected photographs, all from the national collection, celebrate the notion of childhood as recorded by the camera since the 1840s with a delightful and engaging selection and coinciding with the Year of the Young Person in 2018.
“This is the second of our thematic exhibitions drawn from the photography collection here at the National Galleries of Scotland. This fun and engaging display of childhood from all over the world will feature iconic images alongside less well known works, old favourites and new acquisitions—essentially something for everyone, no matter what your age!”
Anne Lyden, International Photography Curator, Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Ends
Notes to editors
Part of Photography Scotland’s 2017 Season of Photography
Part of Photography Scotland’s, Season of Photography 2017, a lively series of exhibitions and events taking place across Scotland from September to November 2017.
Part of Luminate, Scotland’s creative ageing festival Luminate runs a diverse programme of creative events and activities throughout the year, including a nationwide festival of arts and ageing. Luminate's sixth festival takes place 1 - 31 October 2017.
About the Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery When We Were Young: Photographs of Childhood from the National Galleries of Scotland is being shown in the Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery and is part of a continuing series of photographic exhibitions (including Lee Miller & Picasso and Ponte City) in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery, named after the renowned American photographer, is supported by a very generous donation from The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. The gallery is the first purpose-built photography space of its kind in a major museum in Scotland.
PHILL JUPITUS COMES BACK TO THE NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND THIS SUMMER
Sketch Comic
4 – 24 August 2017
NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND
Admission free
0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org
#SketchComic
The celebrated, award-winning stand-up comic, performance poet and broadcast personality Phill Jupitus will return to the National Galleries of Scotland this summer with Sketch Comic. Part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the show highlights his deep love of art and follows on from the success of two hugely popular runs in 2014 and 2015.
From 4 to 24 August, Phill will spend his mornings at the National Galleries of Scotland, sketching some of his favourite works on his iPad and encouraging visitors to watch, join in, and share their own sketches. During those weeks Wednesday mornings will be dedicated to Sketch Comic for Kids! sessions designed for under 12s to come in and sketch with Phill. On Thursday evenings, Phill will host a free special talk about his love of painting and the experience of sketching in the Galleries; special guests, including artists, will join him onstage for each talk.
The National Galleries of Scotland comprises three galleries in Edinburgh and looks after a world-famous collection, ranging from the sixteenth-century to the present day. One of the artworks to be sketched will be the captivating portrait Sir David Murray, 1849 - 1933. Artist by John Pettie (1890), which currently features in the free exhibition Looking Good: The Male Gaze from Van Dyck to Lucian Freud at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Perhaps best known as a team captain on the popular BBC Two pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Phill Jupitus is a multi-talented artist whose repertoire includes poetry, acting, radio DJ and drawing. Phill will use his iPad and the free “Paper” app, which works as a sketchbook and allows artists to capture drawings and illustrations with a stylus, to sketch one work a day at each Gallery.
Sketch Comic will take place from 10am-12pm at the Scottish National Gallery from 4 to 10 August, followed by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery from 11 to 17 August, and a final week at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 18 to 24 August. The lectures will take place at the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre, Scottish National Gallery, from 6.30-8pm on 10, 17 and 24 August. The lectures are free and unticketed. Phill will be joined onstage by ‘mystery guests’ – artists and art specialists – with details will be announced closer to the date.
Sketch Comic was first held in August 2014 and proved hugely popular with gallery visitor of all ages, who joined Phill for sketching sessions across the National Galleries of Scotland, and a joined audience of about 700 spectators over two years for his Thursday evening talks.
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For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s Press Office on 0131 624 6314 / 6332 / 6325 / 6247 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
This summer the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art will be a great destination for children and families, with a wide range of free outdoor activities taking place in the Gallery’s beautiful grounds in the leafy west end of Edinburgh. Following the huge success of our art-themed children’s play areas in recent years – our MC Escher maze and Surrealist play park - this year there will be two new features from 3 July, one at each of our two adjacent sites on Belford Road - Modern One and Modern Two.
At Modern One there will be a series of multi-coloured wendy houses for children to explore, play hide and seek, or just hang out in, inspired by the Nathan Coley’s amazing artwork The Lamp of Sacrifice, which comprises 286 cardboard models of Edinburgh’s churches, mosques, synagogues and meeting places.
At Modern Two, we’ve created a multi-coloured play installation inspired by the theme of buildings and cities, and designed specially for younger children to explore, build and add to. It will feature an interactive wall, with a number of games, including a giant marble run and building blocks.
From 16 July to 13 August there will also be free informal, drop-in activities every day at Modern Two between 2 and 4pm. The ‘Wee Builders Club’ will focus on creative play and building, with freelance artists on hand to help younger visitors (ages 2-5) create buildings and towns of their own. This will be an exciting and fun opportunity for young children and their grown-ups to play creatively and experiment with a wide range of materials.
The installation at Modern Two has been supported by players of the People’s Postcode Lottery, through the Postcode Culture Trust.
At Modern One there will also be daily indoor activities on the same dates (16 July – 13 August, 2-4pm). Children will help to create a giant 3-D landscape inspired by the American Pop artist Ed Ruscha (whose work is currently on display at Modern One) and a large construction site mural.
The highlight will be two special, free Family Days on 16 July and 13 August (12–4pm) to open and close our summer programme, when there will be a chance to try out all our activities both outdoors and indoors. Similar Family Days held in recent years included face painting, story-telling and performers.
Thanks to its beautiful sculpture park, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art offers the perfect environment for summer family activities. Car parking is available at both Modern One and Two, and from 3 July to 3 September, the Bothy in the grounds of Modern One will be selling ice-cream, giving children a chance to build their own sundae (or simply enjoy a cone in one of our delicious flavours). Family picnic boxes will be available to take away from the Gallery cafes at Modern One and Two, with food options suitable for children and parents. The Gallery’s spacious grounds have plenty of top spots to enjoy informal alfresco drinks and home-brought picnics.
Stephanie Kerr, Sport, Culture and Inclusion Programmes Advisor for People’s Postcode Lottery, commented: “The outdoor spaces at the Gallery of Modern Art are an amazing place for families. I'm delighted that support from Players of People's Postcode Lottery has helped to create this summer's very exciting and fun play installation, and I'm certain the summer programme of activities will be a big hit with little ones and parents alike.”
ENDS
Notes to Editors
About People’s Postcode Lottery
- People’s Postcode Lottery is a charity lottery. Players play with their postcodes to win cash prizes while raising money for charities and good causes across Great Britain and globally.
- People’s Postcode Lottery is an External Lottery Manager and manages multiple society lotteries promoted by different causes supporting a range of charities. For details on which society lottery is running each week, visit www.postcodelottery.co.uk/society
- Postcode Lottery Limited is regulated by the Gambling Commission under certificate nr 000-000829-N-102511-010 and 000-000829-R-102513-009. Registered office: Titchfield House, 69/85 Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4RR
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- 55p from every £2 ticket goes to good causes and players have raised £91Million for good causes across the country.
- There are five draws a month with prizes every day and each ticket costs £2 – paid monthly in advance by direct debit. For further prize information, visit: www.postcodelottery.co.uk/prizes
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- Players can sign up by Direct Debit, credit card or PayPal online at www.postcodelottery.co.uk, or by calling 0808 10-9-8-7-6-5.
1 June 2017
MONARCH OF THE GLEN GOES ON TOUR ACROSS SCOTLAND
#loveitdeerly
The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) is delighted to announce that The Monarch of the Glen by Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-73) will go on display in four venues across Scotland later this year. The iconic painting which was acquired for the nation in March after a four month fundraising campaign will go on show in Inverness, Perth, Paisley and Kirkcudbright.
The acquisition was made possible thanks to the enormous support from the public, The National Lottery, Art Fund, private trusts and foundations, Scottish Government acquisition grant funding and by a part gift by previous owners Diageo Scotland Ltd. The National Lottery and Scottish Government also gave additional funds to enable the painting to go on tour in Scotland.
The tour will begin in early October 2017 in Inverness and the painting will be on view for around 7 weeks at each venue.
The Monarch of the Glen is one of the most famous images associated with Scotland. Through its widespread use in commercial advertising and in popular culture, the picture has become instantly recognizable yet it remains an extremely powerful work of art and a rich source of debate about issues of history and identity. The tour forms part of the National Galleries on-going commitment to sharing its collection and working in partnership with communities across Scotland.
Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland said: “Thanks to the generosity of The National Lottery and the Scottish Government we are able to take this fantastic picture across the country to be enjoyed by as many people as possible. We want this tour of The Monarch of the Glen to be seen as a huge thank you for the overwhelming support that we received during the fundraising campaign and as a celebration that this amazing work of art now belongs to all the people of Scotland. We hope that it will be admired and debated by wide audiences across the country. ”
Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs, said: “This tour will support people of all ages and backgrounds across Scotland to access and enjoy this iconic painting in their own communities, and will hopefully inspire those who see it to seek out further opportunities to engage in culture and the arts. I am pleased the Scottish Government was able to support both the acquisition of the painting, and its tour."
It was announced in November last year that NGS had entered into a partnership agreement with Diageo. Under the arrangement, Diageo agreed to gift half the estimated market value of the painting to allow NGS the opportunity to acquire the work for £4 million. After securing support from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Art Fund, NGS launched a public fundraising campaign to help raise the final amount. Support for the public campaign came from around the world with donations received from Anchorage, Queensland, Los Angeles and Hong Kong and from across the UK from Thurso to Bath totalling over a quarter of a million pounds. An additional £100,000 from the NGS acquisition fund from Scottish Government and donations from private trusts and foundations enabled the £4 million target to be reached.
Referring to the Monarch of the Glen Tour starting in Inverness, Ian Murray, Chief Executive of High Life Highland who manage and operate Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, said: “We are very pleased to be working in partnership with the National Galleries of Scotland to support bringing this iconic painting to Inverness.The Monarch of the Glen is an immediately recognisable image to people in Scotland and across the world and we are delighted that residents and visitors to the Highlands have a chance to see the painting when it comes to Inverness in October.”
Joyce McKellar, Chief Executive of Renfrewshire Leisure, said: 'We are delighted to work in partnership with National Galleries Scotland to welcome the Monarch of the Glen to Paisley Museum and Art Gallery in early 2018. Following the acquisition of this iconic painting for the nation, this will provide an opportunity for new audiences to see the Monarch of the Glen, and to be able to engage with the debate on what it means for our history and identity.”
Andy Ferguson, Communities Committee Chairman of Dumfries and Galloway Council, said: “It’s a privilege to be able to show this iconic painting in our new Kirkcudbright Galleries and we are grateful to the National Galleries for giving us this fantastic opportunity.”
For further information please contact:
Patricia Convery, Acting Director, Audience Engagement
Tel: 0131 624 6325; 07967 088313
Email: pconvery@nationalgalleries.org
-ENDS-
Notes to Editors:
Tour Details:
Inverness Museum & Art Gallery
6 October - 19 November 2017
Perth Museum and Art Gallery
25 November 2017 - 14 January 2018
Paisley Museum and Art Gallery
20 January – 11 March 2018
Kirkcudbright Galleries
25 March – 12 May 2018
Breakdown of Funding for the acquisition:
Heritage Lottery Fund £2.65m
Art Fund £350,000
Private Trusts and Foundations £634,000
Public Campaign £266,000
NGS Acquisition Fund (Scottish Government) £100,000
TOTAL £4 million
Breakdown of funding for the tour
Heritage Lottery Fund £100,000
Scottish Government £75,000
Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF)
Thanks to National Lottery players, we invest money to help people across the UK explore, enjoy and protect the heritage they care about - from the archaeology under our feet to the historic parks and buildings we love, from precious memories and collections to rare wildlife. www.hlf.org.uk. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use #NationalLottery and #HLFsupported. For further information, please contact Katie Owen, HLF Press Office, on tel: 020 7591 6036/07973 613820
About Art Fund
Art Fund is the national fundraising charity for art. In the past five years alone Art Fund has given £34 million to help museums and galleries acquire works of art for their collections. It also helps museums share their collections with wider audiences by supporting a range of tours and exhibitions, and makes additional grants to support the training and professional development of curators. Art Fund is independently funded, with the core of its income provided by 123,000 members who receive the National Art Pass and enjoy free entry to over 240 museums, galleries and historic places across the UK, as well as 50% off entry to major exhibitions and subscription to Art Quarterly magazine. In addition to grant-giving, Art Fund’s support for museums includes Art Fund Museum of the Year (won by the V&A, London, in 2016) and a range of digital platforms.
Find out more about Art Fund and the National Art Pass at www.artfund.org
For further information please contact Madeline Adeane, Press Relations Manager, madeane@artfund.org / 0207 225 4804
CELEBRATING SCOTLAND’S ART: THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY PROJECT
Celebrating Scotland’s Art: The Scottish National Gallery Project is an ambitious project to transform the presentation of the world’s greatest collection of Scottish Art for twenty-first-century audiences. Back in March, the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) announced that some aspects of the construction were more complex and expensive than originally anticipated.
A revised scheme for Celebrating Scotland’s Art has now been approved by NGS Trustees. The original vision and aims of the Project remain in place including the key objectives to raise the profile of Scottish Art and greatly enhance its presentation, as well as deliver optimal circulation within the Scottish National Gallery and transform the visitor experience.
In order for the Project to remain close to the original £16.8 million budget some aspects of the plan have been modified. The main difference is that we will no longer extend into East Princes Street Gardens. The original proposal to build out by an additional five metres would have increased further the available display space: the new galleries will still represent a doubling of the existing space to be dedicated to Scottish art in this area of the building. However, removing this aspect of the construction reduces the cost significantly and also lessens the risks involved in what was an extremely complex engineering problem, extending the building above the main-line railway tunnels.
The Trustees have also decided that there should be a reconsideration of how the collection is displayed within the Scottish National Gallery as a whole, to ensure that Scottish art is presented alongside the international displays. This will mean a completely new presentation of the Scottish National Gallery and an entirely different visitor experience to the site.
Sir John Leighton, Director-General, National Galleries of Scotland commented: “NGS looks after an amazing collection of Scottish art and our aim is to provide these works of art with the world-class showcase that they deserve. As with any venture, this project has its fair share of challenges but we are delighted that we can now move forward with plans that maintain our ambition to completely transform the presentation of Scottish art and the experience of visitors to the Scottish National Gallery.”
Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs Fiona Hyslop, said: “I welcome the steps National Galleries Scotland has taken to ensure this ambitious project can be delivered in line with the development’s original aims. Celebrating Scotland’s Art will significantly enhance the visitor experience at this already top-rated attraction, encourage even more people to access and enjoy its iconic collections, and raise the international profile of Scottish Art.”
All of the other elements of the original Project will go ahead as planned including the creation of attractive new Galleries at the Gardens level, new circulation routes within the site and new landscaping within East Princes Street Gardens to facilitate entry into Princes Street Gardens as a whole and the Scottish National Gallery’s Gardens level entrance.
These changes mean that further design work will need to be carried out and new statutory approvals may also be required. The estimated completion date for the project has shifted therefore from 2019 to 2020. The aim is to keep as close as possible to the original budget although there will be cost and expenditure implications from the longer programme and extra design and project requirements. The exact costs will be determined once the new tender process has been completed.
For further information please contact the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org or 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332.
-ENDS-
Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs Fiona Hyslop announced today the appointment of Benny Higgins to succeed Ben Thomson as the new Chair of the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) Board. The Cabinet Secretary said:
“I am pleased to welcome Benny Higgins as the new Chair of the Board of Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland. Having served as a member of the NGS Board for three years now, he has been a real asset to the organisation, bringing in a wealth of experience and business acumen.
Building on the legacy of the current Chair Ben Thomson, under whose leadership NGS has flourished as an organisation of international reputation, I am confident that he will pursue the Board’s good work and ensure that the NGS will continue to inspire a wider national and international audience through its innovative programme of exhibitions and activities.”
Benny Higgins
Benny Higgins is Chief Executive of Tesco Bank and Group Strategy Director for Tesco PLC. He is also a member of the Tesco Executive Committee.
He began his career at Standard Life in 1983 where he joined as an actuarial student and became a member of the Standard Life Group Executive in 1996. In 1997, he moved to the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) to become Chief Executive of Retail Banking during which time he led the successful integration of NatWest Retail Banking, one of the largest mergers ever undertaken in UK banking. He became Chief Executive Officer of the Retail Business of HBOS plc. in 2006, before joining Tesco Bank as Chief Executive in 2008.
Benny holds a First Class Honours degree in Mathematics from the University of Glasgow and became a Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries in 1986. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers in Scotland, a member of the Scottish Government Financial Services Advisory Board (FiSAB) and a member of the Financial Capability Board. He is also a Non-Executive Director of the Buccleuch Estates, a Trustee of the Edinburgh International Culture Summit and a Prince’s Trust Ambassador.
Appointment
This appointment which is regulated by the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland will run for four years from from 1 July 2017 to 30 June 2021.
The appointment which is part-time is non-remunerated for a time commitment of 3-4 days per month.
Ministerial appointments
Benny Higgins currently does not hold any other Public Appointments.
Political activity
All appointments are made on merit and political activity plays no part in the selection process.
In accordance with the original Nolan recommendations, there is a requirement for appointees’ political activity within the last five years (if there is any to be declared) to be made public.
Benny Higgins has had no political activity in the last 5 years.
Background
National Galleries of Scotland is one of Scotland’s most popular cultural destinations, and in 2015 it welcomed more than 2 million visitors to its Galleries. It ranks within the top thirty most visited museums anywhere in the world. Further information is available at https://www.nationalgalleries.org/.
The organisation is governed by a Board of Trustees which is accountable to the public through Ministers and the Scottish Parliament for the discharging of the functions as defined in the National Heritage (Scotland) Act 1906 (as amended in 1985).
New Graham Fagen and Douglas Gordon exhibitions at Scottish National Portrait Gallery to explore the complexities of Scotland’s national poet
The complex reputation of Scotland’s greatest cultural icon will be explored by two of the country’s most prominent artists in new exhibitions which open at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this summer. Graham Fagen, who represented Scotland at the 2015 Venice Biennale, the world’s largest showcase for contemporary art, will join the multi-award-winning artist Douglas Gordon in showing work inspired by the life and legacy of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns.
From 20 May until 29 October Fagen will be showing The Slave’s Lament, a four-screen audio-visual installation that was premiered in his Venice show, which is based on a pivotal moment in Burns’s life and inspired by the poignant beauty of his poem of the same name.
Burns wrote The Slave’s Lament from the perspective of an African man forced into slavery and exile in Virginia, who despairs of his fate and longs for his homeland of Senegal. The poet’s empathy with the oppressed is evident in the poem’s haunting lines, and the struggle against injustice is a powerful theme in his wider work. Against this background, Fagen’s installation touches upon fateful circumstances in the poet’s own life, which could have changed things immeasurably. In 1786, six years before the poem’s publication, Burns found himself in dire financial straits and, having received an offer of employment through a friend, came close to taking up a position as an overseer on a Jamaican sugar plantation. It was only the timely publication and instant success of his first volume of poems that prevented him from making that journey.
Growing up in the west of Scotland, as Fagen did (he was born in Glasgow in 1966), there was no escaping the poetry of Burns. He is also fascinated by the significance of popular music in people’s lives, as a force that reflects and defines personal and collective experience and identity.
Fagen often works with collaborators from a range of different disciplines, and for The Slave’s Lament, he approached Scottish composer Sally Beamish to write a score for Burns’s evocative lyrics. Her beautiful music, for violin, cello and double bass, is played by members of the Scottish Ensemble and sung by reggae artist Ghetto Priest, while production and guitar are provided by Adrian Sherwood and Skip McDonald, who helped to found the legendary dub record label On-U Sound. Their performances are captured on the four screens that comprise this thought-provoking installation, which presents a fascinating meditation on an alternative trajectory in Burns’s life, and its unknowable impact on his work, his legacy, his reputation and world literature.
Douglas Gordon: Black Burns, which will be the artist’s first major work shown at the SNPG, will be on show from 29 July to 29 October. Gordon’s career has been marked by major honours (he is the only Scot, aside from Sean Connery to be awarded the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest civil honour awarded by the French Government), and by exhibitions in museums and galleries across the world. His work often takes as its subject something familiar (the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho is one famous example) and explores the ways in which memories and expectations surrounding it can be thrown off-balance by subtle interventions in the way it is presented and displayed.
Gordon’s installationwill be a response to the full-length marble portrait of Burns created by John Flaxman in 1824 for Thomas Hamilton’s Burns Monument, to the south of Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, which now occupies pride of place in the heart of the Gallery designed to enshrine Scotland’s greatest figures.
Flaxman’s exceptionally fine and subtle sculpture confers heroic status upon the poet, and celebrates a set of universal virtues that have been ascribed to him, but does not perhaps address the more complex and nuanced nature of the man himself, whom the English poet, Lord Byron, saw as consisting of seemingly conflicting qualities: ‘tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and groveling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay.’
This duality, or tension between opposing impulses, is a major fascination of Douglas Gordon, whose work has often drawn inspiration from Scottish literature to explore a split in the wider Scottish psyche.
Douglas Gordon: Black Burns will aim to render Flaxman’s totemic sculpture of Scotland’s national hero at once more human, more vulnerable and more exposed.
Christopher Baker, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, said: “These two remarkable and complementary projects will provide a powerful response to the inspiring and complex legacy of Robert Burns and his writing for the many visitors to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery over the Summer. Both exhibitions are free and I am confident will have a very wide appeal indeed. We are immensely grateful to the outstanding artists Douglas Gordon and Graham Fagen for their commitment and allowing us to showcase their thought-provoking work in this way.”
Both exhibitions will be part of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2017, which this year runs from 27 July to 27 August.
For further information please contact the National Galleries Press Office on 0131 624 6325/6247 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.
—ENDS—
GRAHAM FAGEN: THE SLAVE’S LAMENT
20 May – 29 October 2017
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#GrahamFagen
Press view: Thursday 18 May 2017, 11:30 – 13:00h
DOUGLAS GORDON: BLACK BURNS
29 July – 29 October 2017
Scottish National Portrait Gallery,
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#DouglasGordon
Press view: (TBC) Wednesday 26 July 2017, 11:30 – 13:00h
A PERFECT CHEMISTRY: PHOTOGRAPHS BY HILL & ADAMSON
27 May – 1 October 2017
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
Admission: £10 (£8) | 0131 624 6200
#HillAndAdamson
Exhibition sponsored by EY
This summer the Scottish National Portrait Gallery will explore the captivating images produced by the unique partnership of Scottish photographic pioneers David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848). A Perfect Chemistry will comprise over 100 photographic works dating from just four short years in the 1840s, when these two men changed the path of photography and created a remarkable body of work that has had an unparalleled impact on the medium. This will be the first time in 15 years that these treasured photographs will have been the subject of a large exhibition in the UK.
The artistic partnership between the painter Hill and the engineer Adamson was remarkable in many respects: only four years after the invention of photography was announced to the world in 1839, the Scottish pair had not only mastered and improved upon the new medium, but were producing breathtaking works in extraordinary quantities. Their innovative images appear surprisingly fresh even today and their subjects range from intimate portraits to beautiful cityscapes that document the urbanisation of the Scottish capital. A Perfect Chemistry will also feature fascinating images of the Newhaven fisherfolk which form one of the most significant groups within Hill and Adamson’s oeuvre; these outstanding photographs belie the technical challenges faced by the duo and are arguably among the first examples of social documentary images in the history of photography.
The meeting between Hill and Adamson was precipitated by a polarizing religious dispute: on 18 May 1843 a group of ministers walked out of the Church of Scotland’s annual General Assembly in Edinburgh and officially established the Free Church of Scotland. The event rocked the nation and political status quo, sending reverberations around the world. Hill was so moved by the ministers standing up for their beliefs that he decided to commemorate the event in a large-scale painting representing all 400 of them. He turned to Adamson, 19 years his junior, as the first and only professional calotypist in Edinburgh, to photograph the sitters as preliminary sketches for his grand painting.
Hill quickly became smitten by the new art form and within weeks of meeting, the two men entered into a partnership and began making photographs together. Within a matter of months their works were featured in exhibitions and receiving critical acclaim, often being compared to Rembrandt’s etchings due to the strong chiaroscuro (or contrasting dark and light) quality of the prints.
Ironically, Hill had approached photography as a means to expedite his painting yet it took him 23 years to finish his large commemorative canvas: The First General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland; Signing Act of Separation and Deed of Demission (1843-66).The imposing picture was ultimately sold to the Free Church of Scotland and it continues to hang today in their headquarters in Edinburgh.
The success of Hill and Adamson’s partnership relied on professional alchemy as well as personal affinity, with both men working and living in Rock House, a landmark building located on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. Since making calotypes required natural sunlight, the photographers used the house’s south-facing garden as their studio, employing a series of props and several different backgrounds for their outdoor images.
These portraits made at Rock House represent a real ‘who’s who’ of Edinburgh’s society and illustrate the vibrancy of the capital’s cultural life in the 1840s; eminent sitters ranged from the artist Sir David Allan, toIsabella Burns Begg, the sister of poet Robert Burns, and the inventor of chloroform James Young Simpson. A string of foreign sitters also attested to the international nature of the capital at this time.
Hill’s artistry gave him an eye for composition, evident in an intriguing portrait of Lady Ruthven, whom he posed with her back to the camera to exploit the intricate lace detailing of her shawl against her dress. The image reads as a metaphor for photography itself: the negative and positive image captured on paper. Adamson appeared to push the boundaries of photography—demonstrating skills few possessed at such an early period in the history of the art form. To create calotypes the photographers dealt with a complex process of applying light-sensitive chemical solutions to paper in order to create the images. The steps involved were cumbersome and variable, yet the consistently high quality of the prints indicate they had perfected the process and mastered the fickle chemistry of early photography.
The exhibition also will reveal how Hill and Adamson made clever use of stylistic and practical devices when creating their pictures. Books not only suggested the sitter was educated, but the white pages allowed light to bounce back on the subject (at a time when there were no studio lights), while the actual object would keep the sitters’ fidgety hands occupied for the duration of the exposure. Poses were held anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes depending on the available sunlight, and any fidgeting during that time would result in a blurred image. The resulting photographs nevertheless display remarkable vitality, and in some, carry the sense of spontaneity of a modern snapshot like in the group portrait Edinburgh Ale where the sitters exhibit relaxed poses and faint smiles.
Hill and Adamson also captured the fisherfolk of nearby Newhaven. The men and women of the village were known throughout Edinburgh and beyond for their distinctive costumes, and their reputation for bravery had made them a part of popular culture in the nineteenth century, even featuring as characters in novels by Sir Walter Scott. With the limitations of the medium, the photographers could not capture the boats at sea and interestingly some of their most iconic works from the series, depict the men beside their beached boats or tending to their fishing lines ashore. These shoots were not a casual day out at the shore; in order to record these subjects the two men had to transport all their cumbersome equipment (wooden box cameras, tripods, paper, and support stands) to the site. Such complex requirements didn’t stop Hill and Adamson from travelling around Scotland—Glasgow, Linlithgow and St Andrews — and even as far afield as Durham and York in England. The Newhaven images are rare examples of social documentary photography and a selection of the Newhaven photographs was shown at the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851; an early indication of the importance of the partnership to the history of photography.
The untimely death of Adamson on 14 January 1848, at the age of 26, marked the end of this unparalleled partnership, but their legacy continues. The fact that the photographs continue to delight is indicative of the special chemistry shared by these two Scottish pioneers. The last exhibition of this scale of Hill and Adamson’s fragile works was Facing the Light at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2002.
Christopher Baker, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, commented: “Hill and Adamson’s works are the foundation of the photography collection at the National Galleries of Scotland. Their contribution to the history of photography was profound and enduring and is appreciated all over the world. The National Galleries holds the most comprehensive collection in existence and this very carefully selected exhibition will demonstrate the full range of their achievement. We are delighted to be providing visitors with an opportunity to view such important and inspiring works as part of our long-term commitment to promoting the appreciation of photography.”
Sue Dawe, EY Managing Partner for Edinburgh and Head of Financial Services in Scotland, said: “EY has long been a supporter of the arts and I am delighted that we are able to continue our sponsorship in Scotland with the National Galleries of Scotland. The work showcased in this exhibition demonstrates a legacy of industry and ingenuity for which Scotland is renowned worldwide. On behalf of EY, I am proud to help celebrate the efforts of two creative, Edinburgh-based photographers who were dedicated to their craft and documenting Scotland’s social history.”
A Perfect Chemistry: Photographs by Hill & Adamson is part of the Edinburgh Art Festival.
ENDS
Notes to editors:
About the Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery
A Perfect Chemistry is being shown in the Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery and is part of a continuing series of photography exhibitions (including Document Scotland: The Ties That Bind and The View From Here: Landscape Photography from the National Galleries of Scotland) in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery, named after the renowned American photographer, is supported by a very generous donation from The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. The Gallery is the first purpose-built photography space of its kind in a major museum in Scotland.
About EY
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For Immediate Release: Wednesday 8 March 2017
Celebrating Scotland’s Art is an ambitious project to transform the way that the world’s greatest collection of Scottish art is presented and shared with the widest possible audience at the Scottish National Gallery.
Work on the construction of new Galleries was due to start in March. However, there will now be a delay of several months to the full start on site. For the past 6 months we have been working with our main contractor Interserve on the detailed designs and various tender packages for the building work. It has become clear that some elements around the delivery of the construction work are more complex and potentially more expensive to implement than was originally anticipated.
We therefore have to carry out some value engineering in the coming months in order to streamline some parts of the construction and bring the plans into line with our budget. In practice this means that we will be re-examining some of the specifications and construction methods for aspects of the design to ensure that the project stays within cost.
Until this work on value engineering is complete we will not have a confirmed date for the start of construction but we are hopeful that we can begin work on site later this year. We will continue to work with stakeholders to ensure that there is minimal disruption to The Mound precinct during construction work. In the meantime, the Scottish National Gallery remains open as usual and the highlights of the Scottish collection are on display to the public.
GRAHAM MACINDOE:
COMING CLEAN
8 April – 5 November 2017
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD
Admission free
#GrahamMacIndoe
Powerful self-portraits depicting drug addiction of acclaimed Scottish photographer to be shown by National Galleries of Scotland
A compelling and powerful series of photographs that document an acclaimed Scottish photographer’s devastating descent into drug addiction are to be given an exclusive first public showing this spring at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG).
Graham MacIndoe: Coming Clean will exhibit 25 personal and graphic images taken throughout the six-year period in which heroin and crack cocaine seized hold of successful New York-based photographer Graham MacIndoe (b.1963).
These hugely original photographs intimately record MacIndoe’s downward trajectory from professional photographer with a flourishing career to struggling opiate addict, a journey of anguish and isolation that was to culminate in an arrest for drug possession and a four-month stint in New York’s notorious Riker’s Island prison and five months in an American immigration detention centre before he got clean.
The images both powerfully confront the perilous destructiveness of addiction and explore the genre of self-portraiture in a way unrivalled in the photographic medium.
Graham MacIndoe studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art and received a Masters degree in photography at the Royal College of Art in London, before moving to New York in 1992 where he later pursued a career as a professional photographer. His work began to appear in some of the world’s leading publications, including The New York Times and The Guardian.
MacIndoe’s success led him to take portraits of the most recognisable people in the world, from Hollywood actors and authors to international artists and pop stars. However, he began to use alcohol and drugs in part to mitigate the stress arising from this demanding lifestyle, and also upheaval in his personal life, but his heroin habit gradually overtook everything that once mattered.
MacIndoe has now been clean for seven years, largely thanks to an innovative prison rehab program, what he describes as “a compassionate judge” and the support of his partner Susan Stellin, a reporter with whom he co-wrote Chancers: Addiction, Prison, Recovery, Love: One Couple's Memoir, published by Random House in June 2016.
The recovery has seen MacIndoe prosper again, as a working photographer and as adjunct professor of photography at Parsons The New School in New York City, while he and Stellin were awarded a 2014 Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship for a project about deportation. In addition to being represented in the National Galleries of Scotland collection, his photographs also reside in the collections of The New York Public Library, The British Council, The V&A, The Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida and The National Media Museum, Bradford.
While other photographers have shown the excesses of drug-taking in graphic detail before, the position usually adopted has been one of voyeur; not of subject. In MacIndoe’s case, his images do not show an individual exploited for a mass audience, so the power and control rests firmly with himself, and never before has a photographer captured addiction with such subjective honesty and rigour from the inside. This produced body of work is not only truly ground-breaking in its content, but in fact requires a certain degree of courage in viewing.
Coming Clean’s images are a result of a powerful interdependence between MacIndoe’s strong compulsions, the drive to capture the consequences of his addiction, and of his dexterous ability to do so.
The photographer hoped to avoid glamorising what had become “a solitary existence, the monotonous repetition of an addict's daily life. I turned the camera on myself because I wanted to photograph addiction from the inside – a perspective most people never see".
He admits that, “even in that haziness of addiction I was thinking like a photographer… how these pictures would be perceived”, and throughout this, his photographer’s eye remained keen and strong, even if everything else did not.
In their use of light, composition and ambiance, this eye emanates through Coming Clean’s images. Using basic digital cameras with self-timers, MacIndoe recorded himself while engaging in his personal drug rituals. His skilful use of light and shadow created a series of haunting self-portraits that reveal the squalor and stark reality of addiction.
Almost all the photographs are set within the small and limiting confines of his flat in Brooklyn. There is little connection with or evidence of the outside world and the few views of the city outside recorded from the window only seem to reinforce the isolating and claustrophobic existence. The only figure to appear in the scenes is MacIndoe himself, whose ghost-like presence is often exaggerated through the piercing light. In one portrait he is photographed against a window—turning his back literally and figuratively on the outside world—and the strong backlight has effectively distorted his body so that his head appears to float up and away.
Though no image, perhaps, is as symbolic of Coming Clean as that in which a clearly incapacitated MacIndoe rests his head on a seat, the evidence of a recent heroin injection in his contorted face and blood trickling from his forearm. Not only does MacIndoe, albeit inadvertently, frame the whole shot with his outstretched hand, but in his final action before descending into unconsciousness leaves the viewer with the understanding that amid the chaos, what he had been reaching out for was is the one thing he’d been left with any discernible control over; his camera.
Graham MacIndoe said: “It is a great honour to have the first showing of this body of work at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Although the images were taken during a difficult time, I am grateful to have made it through that period and hope this series shows that recovery is possible even from the depths of serious addiction. I never anticipated that these photographs would find a place in the national collection, so I’m especially excited for the opportunity to exhibit them in the city where I first discovered photography”.
Annie Lyden, International Photography Curator at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, said: “These photographs offer a rare insight into a very real aspect of the human condition. Graham’s honesty and courage in documenting this particular moment of his life allows us to see the rawness and isolation of addiction from the inside. The images are powerful and are at times upsetting, but you will not find a more candid and revealing series of self-portraits than Graham MacIndoe’s Coming Clean photographs.”
—ENDS—
Notes to Editors
Susan Stellin and Graham MacIndoe’s book Chancers: Addiction, Prison, Recovery, Love: One Couple's Memoir was released in June 2016 on Random House. More information on the book can be found here.
Graham MacIndoe’s website can be found here while Susan Stellin’s website can be located here.
MacIndoe and Stellin will be giving a talk during the TEDxStanford 2017 on Sunday April 23 2017. More information can be found here.
HELP SAVE THE STAG
#loveitdeerly
Following significant support from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Art Fund, the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) launched a public fundraising campaign today to raise the remaining sum required to secure the acquisition of The Monarch of the Glen, c.1851 by Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–73).
A partnership between NGS and the painting’s current owner, global drinks company Diageo, was agreed in November last year. Under the arrangement, Diageo will gift half the estimated market value of the painting to allow NGS the opportunity to acquire the work for £4 million. This will allow the painting to remain on public view in Scotland where it can be enjoyed by the millions of visitors who come to the Galleries every year. NGS was given four months to raise the funds required so the deadline is now a month away, on 17 March.
The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has agreed to support the campaign with a generous donation (£2.75 million), with Art Fund also gifting a significant sum (£350,000). Along with other donations and pledges, this means that the NGS has already raised £3.25m towards the final target.
Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland said: “There has been a great response to the news that we have a fantastic opportunity to acquire this iconic image for Scotland. We are absolutely delighted by the incredible support from the HLF and Art Fund and have already received numerous donations and pledges from private individuals. However, we still have some way to go to reach our £4 million target and with only one month left until the deadline we are keen to reach out to the public to help ensure that The Monarch of the Glen can stay in Scotland to be enjoyed for generations to come.”
Ros Kerslake, Chief Executive, HLF said: “The Monarch of the Glen is an evocative painting which has earned global recognition. With the help of National Lottery players, we are playing our part in securing it a permanent home at the National Galleries of Scotland. We very much hope the fundraising campaign will be successful and enable many more people to enjoy this beautiful and historic painting.”
Dr. Stephen Deuchar, Director, Art Fund said: “This technically superb picture is as interesting and provocative today as it was when first exhibited. I hope the public will support the NGS's campaign, to which Art Fund has contributed £350,000, to put this famous work into public ownership.”
Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs said: “I congratulate the National Galleries of Scotland on securing significant sums from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Art Fund to support their acquisition of the iconic Monarch of the Glen painting. I wish them every success with their campaign to raise the remaining funding to ensure the painting can remain in public display in Scotland so that visitors from across Scotland and around the world can continue to enjoy it.”
The Monarch of the Glen is one of the most famous paintings of the nineteenth century. It has taken on many different meanings and can be considered a work of great technical accomplishment, a celebration of natural wonders, a romantic evocation of Scotland, a powerful marketing image and a potent symbol of changing and sometimes conflicting interpretations of Scottish culture and history. It has been in private and corporate collections since it was painted in 1851.
For further information please contact:
Patricia Convery, Acting Director, Audience Engagement
Tel: 0131 624 6325; 07967 088313
Email: pconvery@nationalgalleries.org.
-ENDS-
Notes to Editors:
The Monarch of the Glen and the NGS
The Monarch of the Glen is one of the most famous paintings of the nineteenth century and an iconic image which for many encapsulates the grandeur and majesty of Scotland’s Highlands and wildlife. It is an outstanding example of animal painting by the greatest Victorian artist to produce such work, but has also taken on a symbolic status in the popular imagination as a romantic emblem of Scotland and the natural wonders the country encapsulates. The ideal home for such an important and resonant picture is the Scottish National Gallery in the heart of Edinburgh, where it can be enjoyed and admired by millions of visitors in the context of the nation’s unrivalled collection of Scottish, British and European art.
The painting
The Monarch of the Glen was painted c.1851 by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, who was then at the height of his powers as an artist. Its impact is considerably enhanced by its fine condition and large size: it is painted in oil on canvas and is 163.8 x 169 cm. A monumental stag imperiously surveys the rugged landscape; gorse and bracken are in the foreground and dramatic cliff faces and escarpments form the backdrop. The composition is unified by swirling mist which rises up from the glen and merges with the billowing clouds that mask the mountain tops. The stag is superbly defined, with every detail precisely established, from the texture of its fur to the moisture around its nostrils. He is a so-called ‘royal’ or twelve point stag – a reference to the number of tines on his antlers.
The painting was initially conceived as part of a series of three works which would have been displayed in the House of Lords, but this was deemed to be inappropriate and so it was soon sold to a private collector. From the moment it was first exhibited in 1851 at the Royal Academy it proved immensely popular. In the Royal Academy catalogue it was associated with a poem called Legends of Glenorchy. There is debate over whether this helps identify the site; Glen Quoich has also been proposed.
The artist
Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–73) was among the most highly regarded painters of the nineteenth century; he was particularly renowned for the technical skill and empathy with which he depicted animals. His father taught him to etch and he studied at the Royal Academy Schools (being elected an Academician in 1831). In 1824 he first visited Scotland and was overwhelmed and inspired by the experience of the landscape and the people; he returned annually in late summer and the autumn on sketching exhibitions, developing a particular affinity with Sir Walter Scott and his work. The resulting paintings range from intimate and remarkably fresh plein air landscape studies, to his most famous large-scale picture, The Monarch of the Glen. They played a key role in formulating the deeply attractive and romantic image of the Highlands, which still resonates today.
He loved the splendour of the landscape, the sense of space and solitude that could be experienced and the spectacle of animals in the wild (especially deer, which he had studied from the 1830s). Landseer enjoyed aristocratic patronage and worked extensively for Queen Victoria; consequently a number of his works remain in the Royal Collection (he was knighted in 1850). In 1865 he refused to become president of the Royal Academy due to ill health. He was a very refined technician, who excelled at creating meticulous drawings and bravura oil sketches which informed his larger, highly finished and publically exhibited paintings.
Global recognition
The Monarch of the Glen has taken on a life and reputation which transcends the original circumstances of its creation. It was widely reproduced in the nineteenth century, especially through steel engravings. In 1916 it was purchased by Sir Thomas Dewar. From that point it was regularly employed as a marketing image, first by Pears Soap and then by John Dewar & Sons Distillery and Glenfiddich. Subsequently it was also appropriated by Nestlé and Baxter’s Soup. The title was employed for the comic drama series set in the Highlands The Monarch of the Glen (2000–2005). In the artistic sphere it was also used by Sir Peter Blake and more recently in 2012 by Peter Saville and the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh for the large tapestry After, After, After Monarch of the Glen.
The Monarch of the Glen: exhibitions at NGS
The painting has been a key loan to two important exhibitions organised by the National Galleries of Scotland: The Discovery of Scotland (1978) and The Monarch of the Glen: Landseer in the Highlands (2005). It was the cover image for the catalogue of the latter show, which was guest-curated by the distinguished Landseer scholar Richard Ormond. He wrote ‘The image of the The Monarch of the Glen is so iconic that it is difficult to look at the painting with a fresh eye but it is, in fact, a work of wonderful accomplishment.’
Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF)
Thanks to National Lottery players, we invest money to help people across the UK explore, enjoy and protect the heritage they care about - from the archaeology under our feet to the historic parks and buildings we love, from precious memories and collections to rare wildlife. www.hlf.org.uk. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use #HLFsupported. For further information, please contact Katie Owen, HLF Press Office, on tel: 020 7591 6036/07973 613820
About Art Fund
Art Fund is the national fundraising charity for art. In the past five years alone Art Fund has given £34 million to help museums and galleries acquire works of art for their collections. It also helps museums share their collections with wider audiences by supporting a range of tours and exhibitions, and makes additional grants to support the training and professional development of curators. Art Fund is independently funded, with the core of its income provided by 123,000 members who receive the National Art Pass and enjoy free entry to over 240 museums, galleries and historic places across the UK, as well as 50% off entry to major exhibitions and subscription to Art Quarterly magazine. In addition to grant-giving, Art Fund’s support for museums includes Art Fund Museum of the Year (won by the V&A, London, in 2016) and a range of digital platforms.
Find out more about Art Fund and the National Art Pass at www.artfund.org
For further information please contact Madeline Adeane, Press Relations Manager, madeane@artfund.org / 0207 225 4804
Photo-call: 11:30-13:00h, Thursday 6 April 2017
CONSTABLE & McTAGGART
8 April 2017 – 25 March 2018
Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh EH2 2EL
Admission free | 0131 624 6200
#Constable
One of the greatest masterpieces of British art will go on display in Scotland for the first time in over 15 years this spring. The monumental oil painting Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, painted in 1831 by the great English Romantic painter John Constable (1776-1837), will be shown alongside one of the most powerful and celebrated of all Scottish landscape paintings: The Storm (1890), by William McTaggart (1835-1910).
This display is part of Aspire, a partnership programme touring Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, exhibited 1831, across the UK. Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, was secured for the British public through the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Manton Foundation, Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation) and Tate Members. Aspire is a five-year partnership project between five partner institutions supported by Art Fund, and by National Lottery players through the Heritage Lottery Fund. The tour is designed to share this remarkable painting with as wide an audience as possible and draws upon powerful connections to works in each of the five participating venues.
At 1.5m high and nearly 2m wide, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows is one of a series of monumental ‘six-footer’ canvases painted by the iconic artist – arguably the greatest of them all. Painted three years after the death of his beloved wife Maria, the spectacular painting is laden with personal meaning and is the work he regarded with the greatest pride, referring to it as the ‘Great Salisbury’.
The artist and his wife had visited Salisbury during their honeymoon, and it became a place of solace for Constable after Maria’s death. The painting depicts a turbulent landscape of raging, stormy clouds which reflect Constable’s state of mind: his grief at the death of Maria, as well as his concerns regarding contemporary political and social changes which he felt threatened the future of the Anglican Church and rural life. Yet a magnificent rainbow spanning the composition seems to offer a note of hope, promising that the storm will pass.
Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1831 but met with a mixed critical reception and never found a buyer. Constable’s use of white highlights and his dramatic treatment of the sky were particularly controversial. The work remained in the artist’s studio, where he continued to retouch it, until his death six years later.
Constable’s work was a source of profound inspiration for William McTaggart, both on an artistic and personal level, and seeing these two imposing canvases side by side demonstrates the transformative influence of Constable’s work and techniques on the younger artist.
Often dubbed “the Father of Scottish Painting”, McTaggart took the chance to see Constable’s work wherever he could. He would have seen Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows in 1857, when it was exhibited with six other Constables at the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition.
The 1880s provided McTaggart with more opportunities when 118 works by Constable went on show at the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art (later the Royal Museum of Scotland) between 1883 and 1887. McTaggart’s style changed around that time, and it is highly likely that this resulted from his close observation of Constable’s technique through the works on display in Edinburgh. He had first tackled the subject of The Storm on a smaller scale in 1883 but witnessing Constable’s large oil sketches may have influenced his decision to paint thelarger version on show here, which was to become one of his greatest pictures.
McTaggart's energetic brush work and bold colour illustrate the elemental force of the thunderous sky, lashing wind and turbulent sea. A tiny fishing boat struggling at sea and the launching of a rescue boat from the shore poignantly convey man's vulnerability and courage in the face of Nature’s fury. McTaggart's depiction of the approaching storm closely recalls Constable’s ‘Great Salisbury’; like Constable, he varied his brushstrokes, in order to capture the different textures of sky, sea and land.
McTaggart certainly appreciated Constable’s insistence on painting outdoors and studying nature directly in the open air, the importance of skies in composition, of avoiding imitating other people’s work, and the value of wind, light, air, freshness and movement in landscape painting.
Tricia Allerston, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Scottish National Gallery, commented: “We are delighted that Constable’s ‘Great Salisbury’ is coming to Scotland. It is a landmark painting which complements and enriches the permanent displays at the Scottish National Gallery. In addition, and most excitingly, its arrival also gives us an opportunity to explore the impact of one of the most influential artists of the nineteenth century on one of Scotland’s truly important artists.”
ENDS
Notes to editors:
Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, exhibited 1831, was secured for the British public though major grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Manton Foundation, Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation) and Tate Members. Aspire is a five-year partnership project between Tate Britain, National Galleries of Scotland, National Museum Wales, The Salisbury Museum and Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Art Fund, which will enable this work to go on almost constant view at these venues.
Each partner will display the work in the context of their collection, alongside an inspiring programme of activities enabling audiences of all ages to enjoy and learn more about the work of John Constable.
Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF)
Thanks to National Lottery players, we invest money to help people across the UK explore, enjoy and protect the heritage they care about - from the archaeology under our feet to the historic parks and buildings we love, from precious memories and collections to rare wildlife. www.hlf.org.uk. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use #HLFsupported.
Art Fund
Art Fund is the national fundraising charity for art. In the past five years alone the Art Fund has given £34 million to help museums and galleries acquire works of art for their collections. It also helps museums share their collections with wider audiences by supporting a range of tours and exhibitions, including ARTIST ROOMS and the 2013-18 Aspire tour of Tate’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows by John Constable, and makes additional grants to support the training and professional development of curators.
Art Fund is independently funded, with the core of its income provided by 123,000 members who receive the National Art Pass and enjoy free entry to over 240 museums, galleries and historic places across the UK, as well as 50% off entry to major exhibitions and subscription to Art Quarterly magazine. In addition to grantgiving, Art Fund’s support for museums includes Art Fund Museum of the Year (won by the V&A, London, in 2016), and a range of digital platforms.
Find out more about Art Fund and the National Art Pass at www.artfund.org
For further information please contact Madeline Adeane, Press Relations Manager, madeane@artfund.org / 0207 225 4804.
NATHAN COLEY
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PETER HAINING/PETE HOROBIN
MONA HATOUM
LOUISE HOPKINS
TESSA LYNCH
RIVANE NEUENSCHWANDER
TONY SWAI
AND OTHERS…
25 March – 24 September 2017
Scottish National Gallery OF MODERN ART (Modern One)
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR
Telephone. 0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
A dynamic new three-year programme of contemporary art exhibitions is to open at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) in Edinburgh this spring. Between March 2017 and March 2020 the entire ground floor of the Gallery’s Modern One building will be given over to NOW – a series of six major exhibitions, showcasing the work of some of the most compelling and influential artists working today.
This extensive programme reflects the Gallery’s ambition to share contemporary art with a wide audience, and will shine a light on the extraordinary quality and range of work being made by artists working in Scotland today, from those at the beginning of their career to established talents with an international standing. It will also feature the work of artists from across the globe, placing art created in Scotland in an international context, and demonstrating the crucial exchange between artistic communities around the world. The programme will evolve in collaboration with a range of partners in order to reach new audiences and to support the development of new commissions. NOW will highlight the diversity of contemporary artistic practice, and the unique role of artists, who, through their work can offer alternative ways of seeing and understanding the world around us.
At the heart of each exhibition in NOW will be a significant presentation devoted to the work of a single artist, around which group displays and room-sized installations by a range of other artists will be selected to explore common themes and ideas. As well as new commissions and loans from private and public collections, NOW offers the chance to see recently acquired additions to the Gallery’s collection for the first time, and will offer fresh perspectives on familiar, much-loved works.
The opening exhibition, which will be on show from 25 March, will bring together a fascinating and diverse selection of work, including a major three-room exhibition by Glasgow-based, Turner Prize-shortlisted artist Nathan Coley. The exhibition will also include significant works by world-renowned Lebanese-born artist Mona Hatoum and the influential Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander, a recent installation by Glasgow-based artist Tessa Lynch, and a display pairing the work of painters Louise Hopkins and Tony Swain.
Central to the exhibition will be The Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship, Edinburgh 2004 by Nathan Coley, which will be on show for the first time since it underwent a major restoration by the artist in 2016. This iconic installation comprises 286 scaled-down cardboard replicas of every building listed as a place of worship in the 2004 Yellow Pages telephone directory for Edinburgh. Coley is fascinated by the ways in which architecture and urban spaces reflect and impact upon our social relationships, and how they become invested with layers of meaning over time; this installation offers a unique snapshot of the city through its places of religious meeting: churches, cathedrals, synagogues, mosques, Salvation Army halls and temples.
The Lamp of Sacrifice sustained accidental water damage when it was on show in Glasgow in 2015. As part of the process of restoration, a new replica was made for every building, and the original replicas recycled. Revisiting one of the key works of his career after 13 years has been an extraordinary experience for Coley. A new book, to be published in summer 2017 to accompany Coley’s presentation will include a new essay on The Lamp of Sacrifice by the author Ewan Morrison.
Coley’s exhibition will also feature two recent large-scale sculptural works by the artist, being shown in Scotland for the first time as part of NOW – a depiction of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, titled Paul (2015), and Tate Modern on Fire (2017). Both works take the form of an architectural scale model, and in each, the back is left open to reveal a cabinet of curiosities. Located either side of the river Thames in London, these two monumental buildings – one sacred, one secular – are each invested with particular symbolic meaning and are representative of different kinds of institutional power. In Tate Modern on Fire Coley has drawn upon a range of sources, memories and ideas to produce an artwork that reflects the ambiguity, ambition and complexity of his practice.
Over the series of exhibitions, NOW will also bring together pairings of artists’ works to highlight areas of affinity, or divergence in artistic approaches. The first exhibition will pair Louise Hopkins and Tony Swain, who both use found paper as the surface for their paintings. Swain is known for the paintings he makes on newspaper, while Hopkins uses a range of materials, from maps, fabric, mail order catalogue pages and photographs. In very different ways, both artists use the existing imagery on these surfaces as a starting point for their compositions to produce works that suggest landscapes, explore boundaries and create new pictorial spaces.
Also in the first exhibition will be Mona Hatoum’s complete Performance Documents 1980-1987/2013, which presents rarely seen texts, photographs and videos, highlighting the significance of performance and actions in the artist’s early career. Hatoum’s one-off performances often involved radical bodily actions and have a strong relationship to her experiences as a displaced person, forced to flee Lebanon with her parents during the 1970s.
Large-scale oil paintings by two of Scotland’s most established painters will also be paired together in the opening NOW exhibition. Peter Doig’sMilky Way (1990) and Jock McFadyen’s Calton Hill (2014) are both night scenes, but while Doig composes an imaginary scene drawn from memory, McFadyen presents us with a real place, painting a vast, highly textured moon that dwarfs the iconic neo-classical structures that form part of Edinburgh’s famous skyline.
The first instalment of NOW will include two major works by Rivane Neuenschwander. This major international artist is renowned using ephemeral, mundane objects to create elegiac works that reflect on the deeper significance of seemingly trivial actions and the transience of human existence. The installation Harvest (2013-14), which will be shown in the UK for the first time,is a compendium of discarded shopping lists, collected from trolleys and baskets in London supermarkets. Displayed in rows, they form a calendar that reflects upon the daily actions ideas about place, and the passing of time. Also on show will be Neuenschwander’s beautiful film, The Tenant (2010), made in collaboration with Cao Guimaraes, which follows the perilous journey of a simple soap bubble as it moves slowly through an empty apartment.
NOW will highlight the work of a younger generation of artists such as Tessa Lynch, whose installation Wave Machine, which is composed of photographs, floor-based sculptures, and a projected text, was created for a solo presentation at David Dale Gallery in Glasgow in 2016. The first exhibition will also feature the work of the artist known sometimes as Peter Haining, who has created a series of changing identities throughout his career, operating outside the artistic, commercial and political mainstream for more than four decades. A significant part of the artist’s vast archive of documentation, artworks and videos was acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland in 2010, and a selection will be on show here for the first time.
In another first, prize-winning entries in the Tesco Bank Art Competition for Schools will go on display at the SNGMA in June 2017. This annual and much-loved competition, organised by the National Galleries of Scotland’s education department, attracts entries from across the country and showcases the creativity of a new generation of artists.
Speaking about the exhibition, Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: ‘With six exhibitions over three years, NOW is the most ambitious programme of contemporary art to be staged at the National Galleries of Scotland. It will showcase the work of some of the most influential and compelling artists working now, in Scotland and abroad. NOW builds on the huge success of GENERATION, which brought the work of more than 100 artists working in Scotland over the past 25 years to more than 1.3 million visitors across the country. NOW offers new ways of seeing and thinking for everyone curious about the world around them. NOW is an exhibition about now, for people interested in what is happening now, by some of the most interesting artists living and making work now.’
ENDS
Notes to Editors
Nathan Coley (b.1967)
Peter Doig (b.1959)
Peter Haining/Pete Horobin (b.1949)
Mona Hatoum (b.1952)
Louise Hopkins (b.1965)
Tessa Lynch (b.1984)
Rivane Neuenschwander (b.1967)
Jock McFadyen (b.1950)
Tony Swain (b.1967)
CALL & RESPONSE: WOMEN IN SURREALISM
4 – 26 February 2017
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART (Modern Two)
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DS
Telephone. 0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#ScotModern
A selection of artworks and texts created by members of four women’s groups based in Edinburgh and Glasgow will be unveiled in a new display which opens at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) this week. Call & Response: Women in Surrealism, which has been organised in partnership with the Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), will present responses to the work of women artists - such as the famous American photographer Lee Miller and the British artist Eileen Agar - who were at the heart of the Surrealist art movement in the twentieth century, and whose own works from the SNGMA Archive will be displayed alongside that of the women’s groups and of contemporary artist Stephanie Mann.
In a series of workshops held between August and December 2016, members of the groups Sikh Sanjog, Shakti Women’s Aid, Seeing Things and Bonnie Fechters looked at works in the SNGMA’s world-renowned archive of Surrealist and Dada material before going on to write and create artworks of their own, using a range of techniques favoured by the Surrealists.
Surrealism was one of the most radical movements of the twentieth century, which challenged conventions through the exploration of the subconscious mind, the world of dreams and the laws of chance. Emerging from the chaotic creativity of Dada (itself a powerful rejection of traditional values triggered by the horrors of the First World War) its influence on our wider culture remains potent almost a century after it first appeared in Paris in the 1920s.
Although male Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte are well known today, many hugely influential women artists, who were a vital part of the movement’s activities, are frequently overlooked. The Surreal Encounters exhibition held at the SNGMA in summer 2016 provided the opportunity to look at these artists and the project proceeded from discussions around works in the show.
Facilitated by Edinburgh-based artist Stephanie Mann, the Call and Response workshops examined the lives of Lee Miller (1907-1977), Eileen Agar (1899-1991), Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Grace Pailthorpe (1883-1971), Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and Valentine Penrose (1898-1978) through their letters, photographs, books and other objects relating to them which are held in the archive.
Surrealism drew upon theories of psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud - specifically the idea that our memories and most basic instincts are stored in a layer of the human mind he called the unconscious - and sought to explore these through writing and art. Participants in the Call and Response workshops were encouraged to create artworks using a range of Surrealist techniques, among them ‘decalcomania’. This involves pouring ink or paint onto the surface of a piece of paper, pressing onto another sheet, and then using the resulting patterns to suggest unexpected objects, figures or landscapes.
Responses were also encouraged through automatic writing and word games, which are designed to capture the voice ‘unedited’ by conscious thought. The Surrealists relied on these techniques as ways of tapping into our intuitive feelings about the world around us, our hidden emotions and life experiences.
Working with GWL allowed the Gallery to open up the collection and archive to women who were not already familiar with the Gallery’s collection and archive. All works made during the workshops as well as related documentation will enter the Gallery’s archive when the display closes.
The project is part of the Gallery’s Public Engagement Programme and follows on from a collaboration with GWL in 2015-16 on a project around then then current exhibition: Modern Scottish Women: Painter and Sculptors 1885-1965.
Sikh Sanjog seeks to inspire and empower Sikh and other Minority Ethnic women to advance their own life opportunities, through the building of skills, confidence and social inclusion. Shakti Women’s Aid provides support to black minority ethnic (BME) women, children and young people who are experiencing, or who have experienced, domestic abuse. Seeing Things is designed to give women the opportunity to explore cultural events across Glasgow, such as (but not limited to) art, music, theatre or comedy, together with friendly and like-minded women. Bonnie Fechters is an informal group focussed on women’s issues, which organises events to raise funds for women’s causes worldwide, visits to Book Festival and Fringe events and the annual event 'Harpies, Fechters and Quines' event, run in conjunction with City of Edinburgh Library and supported by Glasgow Women’s Library.
Morag Smith, National Lifelong Learning Co-ordinator at Glasgow Women’s Library commented: “One of the Women’s Library’s most important aims is to enable women from different backgrounds to access art and cultural activities. Archives and museums can be intimidating places for many people, but through this collaborative project, the team at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art have opened up the treasures of the Gallery’s archive to a new audience and empowered the women involved to take on a new journey of discovery. We are delighted to have been involved.”
Kirstie Meehan, Archivist at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, added: “We’re delighted to open up the Archive in this way, and encourage creative responses to the letters, photographs and publications in the Gallery’s collection. ‘Call and Response’ shows how engaged the workshop participants were with the project, creating artworks and writings in a truly Surrealist vein. This innovative collaboration with Glasgow Women’s Library demonstrated the power of the archive as a living resource, and the enduring appeal of Surrealism for a contemporary generation.”
This project is part of the SNGMA’s Public Engagement Programme which is funded by the D.Daskalopoulos Collection. Supported by Glasgow Women’s Library.
ENDS
Notes to editors:
For further information about groups and artist participating in Call and Response please visit:
www.womenslibrary.org.uk/discover-our-projects/seeing-things
A major painting by one of the legendary figures of Surrealist art has been acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and will go on public display for the first time this week. The Message of the Forest, which was painted in 1936, is widely acknowledged to be the greatest work by the Czech artist known as Toyen, and is the first of her paintings to enter a UK public collection. It was acquired with support from the Walton Fund and Art Fund.
Born Marie Čermínová in 1902, Toyen was the most celebrated member of the group of Surrealist artists based in Prague, a major centre of Surrealist activity in the 1930s.
In 1923, while seated in a café, the artist declared that henceforth she would be known simply as ‘Toyen’. She didn’t explain her reasons. One idea is that the name derived from the French word ‘Citoyen’ (citizen) and gave her a non-gendered identity; another is that it is a play on the Czech words ‘To je on’, which means ‘It is he’. Throughout her life the artist referred to herself using the masculine form in her native Czech. Famously, she cut her hair short and cross-dressed, often wearing coarse working men’s clothes. Her androgyny and exploration of gender stereotypes have made her a cult figure in recent years.
The Message of the Forest depicts a huge blue bird – seemingly an owl or a bird of prey – which stands against a dark, mysterious, wooded background, the ‘forest’ of the title. One of the bird’s feet has been cut off; the talons of the other foot clutch the severed head of a girl. The bird and forest have been built up with thick, textured paint, contrasting with the pale complexion and more realistic treatment of the head.
The subject embodies a recurring theme in Toyen’s work: that of the power of nature over the human world. Her work repeatedly centres on barren, dream-like landscapes, featuring lone girls, fragmentary female figures and birds. Her interest in these themes originates in illustrations she made for children’s books, but her work soon took on a more bizarre and sinister appearance. Toyen was careful not to ‘explain’ her work, but instead left the viewer to explore the symbolic meaning. Her works seem to respond to dreams and nightmares (she had a keen interest in Sigmund Freud’s writings) and suggest a world of intense anxiety.
From 1925-28 Toyen and her partner, the artist Jan Štyrský, lived in Paris. Returning to Prague, she was a founding member of the Czech Surrealist Group. She was supported in particular by André Breton, the leading figure in the Surrealist movement. Breton visited her in Prague in 1935 and acquired works by her. Through trips to Paris, Toyen became friendly with many of the leading figures in the French Surrealist group, including Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí.
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art houses a world-famous collection of Surrealist art, including celebrated works by Joan Miró, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Alberto Giacometti and others. Much of the collection came from two sources: Gabrielle Keiller and Roland Penrose. Their collections were strong on French-based Surrealism but neither had much work by women Surrealists, who constituted an important part of the Surrealist movement, or anything by the Czech groups.
The Message of the Forest belonged to Roy and Mary Cullen, American collectors who amassed an unrivalled collection of Czech Surrealism. Toyen’s The Message of the Forest was their most treasured possession. Following Roy’s death in 2014, parts of the collection were sold. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art negotiated the purchase of The Message of the Forest in a private sale, via Christie’s, London.
The acquisition was made possible thanks to support from the Walton Fund and the Art Fund. Henry Walton (1924-2012) and Sula Walton (1924-2009) were psychiatrists and art collectors who lived in Edinburgh and were closely involved with the National Galleries of Scotland. They established a charitable fund specifically to support the Gallery of Modern Art in making new acquisitions. The Art Fund also gave a significant sum towards the acquisition.
Simon Groom said: ‘The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is known internationally for its world-class collection of Surrealist art. There are however, three things to note about the collection: firstly we have few works by women Surrealists; secondly we have nothing by the Czech Surrealists; and thirdly much of what we do have dates from around 1936, when the celebrated International Surrealist exhibition was staged in London, and Roland Penrose, its co-organiser, bought many of the works which we now own. The Message of the Forest, Toyen’s most celebrated work, fills a big gap for us and also perfectly complements our existing collection.’
Stephen Deuchar, Director of Art Fund, added: ‘This haunting work is an excellent addition to the SNGMA’s exceptional collection of Surrealist art. There are no other paintings by Toyen or the Czech Surrealists in any other UK public collection, so we are very pleased to be supporting such an important acquisition, for both the museum and its visitors.
Ends
For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on: 0131 624 6247 / 6325 / 6332 / 6314 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
nationalgalleries.org
Notes to Editors
Art Fund
Art Fund is the national fundraising charity for art. In the past five years alone Art Fund has given £34 million to help museums and galleries acquire works of art for their collections. It also helps museums share their collections with wider audiences by supporting a range of tours and exhibitions, and makes additional grants to support the training and professional development of curators. Art Fund is independently funded, with the core of its income provided by 122,000 members who receive the National Art Pass and enjoy free entry to over 240 museums, galleries and historic places across the UK, as well as 50% off entry to major exhibitions and subscription to Art Quarterly magazine. In addition to grant-giving, Art Fund’s support for museums includes Art Fund Museum of the Year (won by the V&A, London, in 2016) and a range of digital platforms.
Find out more about Art Fund and the National Art Pass at www.artfund.org
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