7 January 2019
Work starts in East Princes Street Gardens as transformation of the Scottish National Gallery continues

• New fly-through animation reveals the new gallery experience being created.
• Work gets underway to create new accessible path, new landscaping and wider steps in East Princes Street Gardens.
• Gardens entrance to the Scottish National Gallery to temporarily close until spring 2019.
• The Scottish Café & Restaurant and main Gallery shop to temporarily close until spring 2019.
• Galleries to officially join the Council’s community toilet scheme as an accessible toilet on the Mound precinct will be removed.

January 2019 will bring the next steps in the redevelopment of the Scottish National Gallery (SNG) in Edinburgh with work starting in East Princes Street Gardens and continuing inside the Galleries.

The vision for the project, which got underway in October 2018, has been revealed in a new fly through animation which has been released to coincide with this stage of work.

The £22m project, which will create a new home for the world’s greatest collection of Scottish art, began in October 2018. It will transform former office, storage and display spaces into a new set of galleries that, for the first time, will be entered directly from the adjacent East Princes Street Gardens. They will showcase the National Galleries of Scotland’s amazingly rich collection of historic Scottish art, which contains masterpieces by Henry Raeburn, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Scottish Colourists as well as giving direct access to the rest of the SNG’s international collection. The project is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Scottish Government.

As part of the work in this phase of the development, which is due to last until spring 2019, public access in and around East Princes Street Gardens and the Mound precinct will change. During this period the Gardens entrance to the SNG will be closed; visitors will instead use the entrances on The Mound.

From mid-January, work starts on the new landscaping which includes the widening of existing steps and the construction of a new accessible path in the Gardens, which will help those with mobility impairments, wheelchairs and prams. The Galleries’ plans, which were approved after a lengthy consultation with City of Edinburgh Council (CEC) and other bodies, address the long-standing inadequacy of accessible routes in this area; without this new path, the East Gardens would remain accessible only via steep gradients or stairs.

As part of the works an accessible toilet on the Mound precinct will be removed, and the NGS will join the CEC’s community toilet scheme. Our nearby accessible toilet facilities are open to the public without having to visit the Gallery itself.

During this phase of work we will also be planting 22 new trees in East Princes Street Gardens with species chosen to complement existing trees in the wider gardens. These trees will be between 4.5 metres and 6 metres in height. They will replace 52 trees removed in autumn 2018 to enable the reshaping of an embankment that is necessary for the new accessible path.

The new trees are depicted in the new animated fly through, and landscape architects and other professional organisations supporting the project have advised and verified on their depiction, including their size and species. NGS is also in discussion with the CEC and Edinburgh and Lothians Greenspace Trust about the planting of additional trees in other locations in the city.

The main Gallery shop and The Scottish Café & Restaurant will also temporarily close until spring 2019. Alternative facilities – including a souvenir shop inside the Gallery and the shop on Princes Street will be available as normal - as well as a new Espresso café opening at the SNG entrance on the Mound in early 2019.

Also due to start in this phase is the installation of a much larger lift and stairwell at the south end of the SNG, which will connect with the new gallery spaces and radically improve the way the whole building is accessed by visitors. While construction work continues on the stairwell, there will be some temporary disruption with no lift access to some rooms where we show 18th, 19th and early 20th Century Art, including Scottish Art, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

Speaking today, Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “It has been very exciting over the autumn to see work on this transformational project get started, and as we move out of winter and into spring we’re looking forward to some of our first milestones becoming a reality. Landscaping will start shortly and by the spring our new accessible route into Princes Street Gardens will be complete and our restaurant and enlarged shop will reopen to welcome the public. Unavoidably there will be some disruption around the site over the coming weeks, and we are grateful for the public’s patience while we create these improvements to the galleries and the surrounding space. We want the Scottish National Gallery to be a place for everyone to enjoy. We have two years to go before opening, but we hope that as this year progresses people will already begin to feel the great benefits of the work we are doing here.”

Dr Tricia Allerston, Co-Director, Scottish National Gallery Project, added: “We draw around 2.5 million visitors each year to our Edinburgh-based galleries, and our ambitious plans for the Scottish National Gallery will ensure we continue to meet the needs and expectations of all. With this once-in-a-lifetime project, we will transform the way we show the world’s greatest collection of historic Scottish art, both in the new, light-filled, state-of-the-art display spaces and in the innovative way we will be showcasing the work of Scottish artists alongside our wider international collection.’

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

The vision for the SNG project has been driven by the National Galleries’ ambition to ensure that the widest number of people can enjoy our art and activities. The displays in the new galleries will be directly informed by extensive research into the needs of existing and potential audiences.

For the first time in a generation, there will be new displays drawn from the Scottish and international collection. This fresh approach will allow us to say much more about Scotland’s art and to highlight the international significance of pioneering figures such as Allan Ramsay, Gavin Hamilton, Sir David Wilkie and Phoebe Anna Traquair.

The scope of the new displays, which will be revealed when the new galleries open in early 2021, will also be broader, encompassing the work of early 20th-century artists such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Stanley Cursiter, Jessie M. King, Phyllis Mary Bone and the Scottish Colourists S J Peploe and F C B Cadell.

The project will create a beautiful new space in the heart of Edinburgh, which will be free for everyone to use and enjoy. A series of large windows, running the length of the new gardens-level façade, will fill the galleries with light and colour, and offer spectacular views over one of the most celebrated cityscapes in the world. Extensive new landscaping in the gardens will radically improve access to this much-loved part of the city, and the project will also create a larger shop, brand-new café and more accessible restaurant.

Specific activities on completion of the project include a dedicated family day one day a week, more volunteers in the galleries to connect visitors with our new offer and new audience-focused interpretation.

The SNG redevelopment has been designed by one of Scotland’s leading architectural practices, Hoskins Architects, which has been widely praised for a number of high-profile designs in the arts and cultural sector.

During construction work we intend to keep disruption in the surrounding area and in the Gallery itself to a minimum, though there will be some room closures. To enable excavation works to the galleries directly beneath, the Playfair Steps, at the rear of the SNG, will be closed for the duration of the building work.

New fly-through animation of the Scottish National Gallery Project is available to view here.

Read more on the Scottish National Gallery Project changes on our website here.

Funding figures from Scottish Government and Heritage Lottery Fund:
Scottish Government: £5.5 million.
Heritage Lottery Fund: £4.94 million.

Fios-naidheachd
21 Dùbhlachd 2018
GAILEARAIDHEAN NÀISEANTA NA H-ALBA A’ CUR PLANA GÀIDHLIG ÙR AIR BHOG

An-diugh cuiridh Gailearaidhean Nàiseanta na h-Alba (NGS) Plana Gàidhlig ùr air bhog, airson na h-ùine 2018-23. Chaidh am plana a leasachadh a rèir riatanasan Achd na Gàidhlig (Alba) 2005. Tha e a’ toirt taic do lìbhrigeadh a’ Phlana Cànain Nàiseanta Ghàidhlig 2018-23, a tha ag amas air ìomhaigh adhartach a thogail airson na Gàidhlig agus air an àireamh de dhaoine a tha ag ionnsachadh agus a’ cleachdadh a’ chànain a mheudachadh. Fhuair plana ùr NGS, a bhios a’ togail air a’ chiad Phlana Gàidhlig a chaidh fhoillseachadh ann an 2013, aonta foirmeil bho Bhòrd na Gàidhlig air 24 Sultain 2018.

Tha Gailearaidhean Nàiseanta na h-Alba mar aon de ghrunn bhuidhnean poblach ann an Alba le Plana Gàidhlig, leithid Thaighean-tasgaidh Nàiseanta na h-Alba, Visit Scotland agus Dualchas Nàdair na h-Alba, a thuilleadh air ùghdarrasan ionadail agus oilthighean.

Tha am plana a chaidh fhoillseachadh an-diugh a’ mìneachadh dealas leantainneach nan Gailearaidhean airson adhartachadh agus taic a thoirt don Ghàidhlig ann a bhith a’ lìbhrigeadh ar dleastanasan agus ar seirbheisean. Am measg nam prìomh dhealasan tha:

• Toirt seachad fiosrachadh do luchd-tadhail sa Ghàidhlig.
• Cumail seachdain gach bliadhna de bhùithtean-obrach airson sgoiltean meadhain-Ghàidhlig.
• Goireasan teagaisg buntainneach eadar-theangachadh don Ghàidhlig.
• Tachartasan Gàidhlig a chur nar Prògram Theaghlaichean.
• Prògram de dh’fheartan Gàidhlig air-loidhne agus susbaint air an làrach-lìn againn a leasachadh.

Thuirt Sir Iain Leighton, Àrd-stiùiriche Ghailearaidhean Nàiseanta na h-Alba: “Tha Gailearaidhean Nàiseanta na h-Alba toilichte am Plana Gàidhlig againn a chur air bhog an-diugh. Anns a’ phlana seo airson 2018-23, tha sinn a’ togail air an adhartas a rinneadh sa chiad phlana againn, agus a’ coimhead airson chothroman ùra gus Gàidhlig adhartachadh agus a chleachdadh anns an obair againn agus nar lèirsinn Ealain do dh’Alba: Brosnachadh don t-Saoghal.

Faodar am Plana Gàidhlig aig Gailearaidhean Nàiseanta na h-Alba fhaicinn air-loidhne aig nationalgalleries.org/about-us/plans-policies. Bidh lethbhreac cruaidh ri fhaotainn ma thèid iarraidh air 0131 624 6473.

—DEIREADH—

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NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND LAUNCHES NEW GAELIC LANGUAGE PLAN

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) will today launch an updated Gaelic Language Plan, covering the period 2018-23. The plan has been developed in line with the requirements of the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005. It supports delivery of the National Gaelic Language Plan 2018-23, which aims to promote a positive image of Gaelic and to increase the number of people learning and using the language. The new NGS plan, which builds on the Galleries’ first Gaelic Language Plan, published in 2013, received formal approval from Bòrd na Gàidhlig on 24 September 2018.

National Galleries of Scotland is one of many Scottish public bodies with a Gaelic Language Plan, including National Museums Scotland, Visit Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage, as well as local authorities and universities.

The plan published today sets out the Galleries’ continued commitment to promote and support the Gaelic language in the delivery of its functions and services. Key commitments include:

• Providing visitor information in Gaelic.
• Continuing to host an annual week of workshops for Gaelic-medium schools.
• Translating relevant teaching resources into Gaelic.
• Including Gaelic events in our Families Programme.
• Developing a programme of online Gaelic features and content on our website.

Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said:  ‘The National Galleries of Scotland is pleased to launch our Gaelic Language Plan today.  In this plan for 2018-23, we are building on the progress made under our first plan, and looking for new opportunities to promote and use Gaelic in the context of our work and our vision of Art for Scotland: Inspiration for the World.

National Galleries of Scotland’s Gaelic Language Plan can be viewed online at nationalgalleries.org/about-us/plans-policies. Hard copies are available on request by phoning 0131 624 6473.

—ENDS—

17 December 2018
Salvador Dalí’s iconic Lobster Telephone acquired by National Galleries of Scotland

Export-stopped: this new addition to the collection has been saved for the nation with assistance from the Henry and Sula Walton Fund and Art Fund

One of the most famous of all twentieth-century sculptures, Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone (1938) has been acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland, and is set to go on display this week at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

This iconic sculpture is one of the most instantly recognisable masterpieces of Surrealism, the art movement that emerged in Paris in the 1920s, which explored the world of dreams and the subconscious mind. It consists of an ordinary, working telephone, upon which rests a plaster lobster, specially made to fit directly over the receiver.

The Surrealists loved the idea of unrelated objects coming together to create a new kind of reality, which subverted the rational and tapped into the subconscious. The bizarre combination of a phone and a lobster is at once absurd, repellent, fascinating and menacing, yet it is nevertheless a fully functioning phone.

Lobster Telephone was made in 1938 for Edward James (1907-1984), Dalí’s main patron in the 1930s. Eleven of the plaster lobster receivers were made to fit to telephones at James’s house in Wimpole Street, central London and at his country house, Monkton, in West Sussex. Four of the lobsters were painted red, and seven were painted white. The Lobster Telephones are now almost all in museum collections around the world: the Tate in London has a red version on a black telephone. 

This white version remained with the Edward James Foundation, in West Sussex. It was recently sold at auction and would have left Britain, but in view of its artistic and historical importance, it was subject to an export license deferral. Issued on behalf of the Secretary of State, this allows UK museums the chance to match the auction price. Thanks to the Henry and Sula Walton Fund, which was established to help the National Galleries acquire major works of modern art, and a grant from Art Fund, the work was saved and goes on show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh for the first time today.

Edward James was born in 1907 at his family’s summer house, Greywalls, in Gullane, near North Berwick in East Lothian. His family was immensely wealthy, owning a vast estate at West Dean, near Chichester in West Sussex. Edward came into his inheritance in his twenties and used much of it to support the arts: he is best known as the patron of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte in the 1930s. He met Dalí in 1934 and the two became close friends. Dalí visited James in London on several occasions and James bought many of the artist’s greatest work, straight off the easel, hanging them at his houses in London and West Sussex.

From the mid-1930s, James had both residences redesigned and given Surrealist makeovers. Dalí designed furnishings including the celebrated Mae West Lips sofas, which were shaped in the form of the Hollywood actress’s lips, tall lampstands in the form of stacked champagne glasses, and the famous Lobster Telephones.

The idea for the Lobster Telephone dates back to a drawing Dalí made in 1935. The plaster lobsters were commissioned by James from the London design firm Green & Abbott (which also fabricated the Mae West sofas) in the summer of 1938. Dalí and James visited Sigmund Freud in Hampstead in July and this may have given them the idea of actually making the objects. Cast in plaster, hollowed out underneath, and with a hole in the tail to take the telephone flex, they fit perfectly over the standard receivers of the period. The Surrealists’ love of the irrational was instantly and brilliantly embodied in a household object in daily use.

The Lobster Telephone is the most iconic of all Surrealist ‘Object Sculptures’: these became a craze in the 1930s, with Man Ray, Miró, Magritte, Giacometti and Roland Penrose among the many who made them. Instead of making a traditional sculpture by modelling with clay or carving in marble, the Surrealist artists took pre-existing objects, put them together, or changed them slightly, and then exhibited them. It was like 3D collage. From a practical point of view, it allowed artists with no training in sculpture to produce sculptural objects. From an artistic point of view, it enabled artists to produce bizarre objects which instantly challenged conventional notions of reality and normality.

The National Galleries of Scotland has one of the world’s greatest collections of Surrealist art, including major paintings by René Magritte, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Toyen, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and others, and sculptures by Alberto Giacometti. However, until now there has been no major Object Sculpture in the collection: they were quickly assembled for exhibition at the time, and were often simply discarded - so they are rare.

Although Edward James amassed an unrivalled collection of Surrealist art, much of it was sold off in the 1970s and 1980s. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s summer exhibition of 2016, Surreal Encounters, was partly based on Edward James’s collection, which is now dispersed across the globe, and included the red version of Lobster Telephone, lent by the Edward James FoundationLobster Telephone was acquired for the sum of £853,000, supported by the Henry and Sula Walton Fund (£753,000), and Art Fund (£100,000). Henry Walton was a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh and Sula Walton (née Wolff) was an internationally renowned child psychiatrist. They were passionate devotees of the arts and left their art collection to the National Galleries of Scotland. They also established an independent, charitable fund, designed to help the Galleries acquire major works of modern art. Thus far, the Walton Fund has assisted in the purchase of works by Pablo Picasso, Jenny Saville, Toyen and Leonora Carrington – works which would otherwise have been beyond the Galleries’ reach.

Speaking of the acquisition, Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland said: “This major acquisition cements our position as one of the world’s greatest collections of Surrealist art. Object sculptures – where the artist takes an existing, manufactured object and transforms it with a slight addition or alteration – were popular among the Surrealists, but are now incredibly rare. They turned convention upside-down, saying that anything could be art, and that art and life were not separate. Dalí created something incredibly rich, imaginative and funny with the most economical of means. Before this acquisition we had nothing of this kind. This type of work had a huge impact on later artists, including Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.  We’re immensely grateful to the Walton Fund and the Art Fund for their help in acquiring the work: both funds also helped enormously with the purchase of Leonora Carrington’s Portrait of Max Ernst, c.1939, in the summer. It has been an amazing year for the growth of our Surrealist collection.

Stephen Deuchar, Director, Art Fund, said: “Dalí’s Lobster Telephone is amongst the most famous of all Surrealist objects, typifying the spirit of the movement in its witty, subversive eccentricity. Art Fund is proud to help the National Galleries of Scotland add this important work of art to their internationally renowned Surrealism collection.”

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

There are eleven Lobster Telephones in existence: all of them originally belonged to Edward James and to the Edward James Foundation which he established. The Foundation, which is based at West Dean, supports traditional art, craft and conservation practices. It retained one red version and one white version of the Lobster Telephones, but the others were sold off over the years to raise funds. The actual telephone elements of the Lobster Telephones all vary slightly. They were lost or replaced over the years and were sourced by the Foundation to match original 1930s pyramidal models. Eight are in museum collections in Australia, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, the USA and the Tate in London. One is in a private collection abroad.

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 139,000 members who receive the National Art Pass and enjoy free entry to over 320 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 Tate St Ives in 2018) and a range of digital platforms.

Find out more about Art Fund and the National Art Pass at www.artfund.org 

14 December 2018
Bell Rock Lighthouse lights up Turner in January

A dramatic depiction of Robert Stevenson’s engineering marvel, the Bell Rock Lighthouse, by Britain’s most celebrated artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), will shine its light on the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS)’s seasonal exhibition Turner in January, which opens at the Scottish National Gallery on New Year’s Day. In 2019, this much-loved annual exhibition is supported by players of People’s Postcode Lottery for the seventh year.

In a tradition that stretches back more than a century, every January the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) displays an outstanding collection of Turner’s radiant watercolours, bequeathed in 1900 by one of the greatest connoisseurs of his work, Henry Vaughan (1809-1899). Conscious that limited exposure would preserve the brilliant colour and exceptional condition of the works, Vaughan stipulated in his will that his Turners should only ever be shown during the first month of the year, when daylight in Edinburgh is at its weakest. The display runs throughout January, providing a thoughtful counterpoint to the more energetic celebrations of Hogmanay, and a welcome injection of light and colour during the darkest time of the year. 

This year, another outstanding Turner watercolour from the NGS collection will also be on show. Bell Rock Lighthouse was commissioned 200 years ago by the lighthouse engineer Robert Stevenson (1772-1850) to illustrate his book, Account of the Building of Bell Rock Lighthouse. Bell Rock is the oldest surviving rock lighthouse in the British Isles and Stevenson’s engineering masterpiece. First lit in 1811 and constructed at a cost of £61,331 using revolutionary building methods, it stands on a partially submerged reef off the Angus coast, regarded by sailors as among the most dangerous places on the east coast of Scotland. Turner’s spectacular watercolour shows the lighthouse standing proudly above the pounding waves, an indomitable symbol of Stevenson’s great achievement.

The 38 watercolours that make up the Vaughan Bequest, encapsulate Turner’s entire career, and were carefully chosen for their outstanding quality. Highlights including subtle and meticulous images of the 1790s, such as Rye, Sussex and Lake Albano and 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.

Vaughan was just 21 when he inherited his fortune from his father, who had been a wealthy hat maker. During his lifetime Vaughan devoted himself to travel, collecting fine art and philanthropy and became known as a distinguished and generous collector, most notably for nineteenth-century British art, in particular Turner and Constable.

Born in London in 1775, Turner’s talent was evident from a remarkably young age – the gifted draughtsman was exhibiting works at the Royal Academy by the age of 15. He was a prolific, innovative and energetic artist who went on to exploit every possibility of the watercolour medium, travelling widely to capture stunning land- and seascapes. At first, Turner began his travels with sketching tours in England, Wales and Scotland, then later across Europe, where he gathered material for masterful watercolours and oil paintings.

Turner’s extraordinary command of watercolour technique is evident throughout the works in the bequest, from the delicacy and precision of his illustrations to the work of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), such as Rhymer’s Glen, Abbotsford and Loch Coruisk, Skye, to the atmospheric light effects of his 1836 views of the Aosta valley in the Alps, including Brenva Glacier from the slopes of Le Chetif above Courmayeur.

Christopher Baker, Director of European and Scottish Art and Portraiture at the National Galleries of Scotland said: “Every January we are delighted to display Turner’s spectacular watercolours, donated with great generosity by the distinguished collector Henry Vaughan. This wonderful tradition has become the

longest running single artist exhibition in the world. In 2019 it will be enriched with Turner’s splendid Bell Rock Lighthouse – an extraordinary depiction of Scotland’s seafaring past. Turner in January is the perfect antidote to the darkness of Edinburgh in winter.”

Laura Chow, head of charities at People’s Postcode Lottery, said: “This is a highlight in the calendar for art enthusiasts and we’re pleased that players have supported the Turner exhibition for the seventh year in a row. We hope that many people will take the opportunity to go along to the National Galleries of Scotland this month to see the pieces on display.”

–ENDS–

Notes to Editors

About People’s Postcode Lottery

• People’s Postcode Lottery is a lottery operator in which people play with their postcodes to win cash prizes, while raising money for charities and good causes across Great Britain and globally.
• A minimum of 32% from each subscription goes directly to charities, and players have raised £371 million for good causes so far.
• For £10 a month, players can win prizes every day: www.postcodelottery.co.uk/prizes
• Maximum amount a single ticket can win is 10% of the draw revenue to a maximum of £400,000.
• 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.
• Postcode Lottery Limited is regulated by the Gambling Commission under licences number: 000-000829-N-102511-014 and Number: 000-000829-R-102513-013. Registered office: Titchfield House, 69/85 Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4RR.
• People's Postcode Lottery manages lotteries promoted by different charities. For details on which society lottery is running each week, visit www.postcodelottery.co.uk/society

Publications
JMW Turner - The Vaughan Bequest Exhibition Book
£14.95 from the National Galleries of Scotland Shop
This richly illustrated book offers an authoritative commentary on the watercolours, addressing questions of technique and function, as well as considering some of the numerous contacts Turner had with other artists, collectors and dealers. This revised edition offers updated research, vibrant colour reproductions of the works, and a luxurious new binding.

7 December 2018 
2018 BP Portrait Award opens at the National Galleries of Scotland

The 2018 BP Portrait Award exhibition, which opens at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery on 15 December, will feature 48 stand-out works including An Angel at my Table by Miriam Escofet, which took this year’s first prize.

An Angel at my Table shows Escofet’s elderly mother seated at her kitchen table surrounded by tea crockery. The painting suggests a sense of space, perspective and time which conveys the sitter’s inner stillness and calm. Escofet says she was also conscious whilst painting that she wanted to ‘transmit an idea of the Universal Mother, who is at the centre of our psyche and emotional world.’

A delightful and accomplished portrait by National Galleries of Scotland staff member Laura Nardo will also be displayed as part of this year’s BP Portrait Award exhibition. The painting, titled LTR Team A, which features Nardo’s fellow Security and Visitor Services colleague Vittorio Milazzo, was born out of a friendship between the two colleagues. Nardo and Milazzo share Italian heritage; Nardo was born in Turin and has lived in Scotland since 2013 while Milazzo, a second-generation Scots-Italian, has family connections to Cassino, and Marsala in Sicily.

The winning portrait was selected from 2,667 entries from 88 countries, submitted for judging anonymously by a panel which included journalist Rosie Millard and artist Glenn Brown. Commenting on the portrait, Rosie Millard said ‘The crisp tablecloth and china are rendered so beautifully – and then you see that one of the plates and a winged sculpture on the table appear to be moving which adds a surreal quality to the portrait. It is also a very sensitive depiction of an elderly sitter.’ The artist was presented with a £35,000 prize and a commission, at the National Portrait Gallery Trustees’ discretion, worth £7,000.

The BP Portrait Award is one of the most important platforms for new and established portrait painters alike. Its first prize of £35,000 makes it one of the largest global arts competitions.

The second prize of £12,000 went to American painter, Felicia Forte, for Time Traveller, Matthew Napping, depicting her boyfriend Matthew asleep in bed. The judges were particularly impressed by the artist’s bold use of colour, creating a painting that exudes atmosphere while also being distinctly intimate and personal.

The third prize of £10,000 went to Chinese artist, Zhu Tongyao for Simone, his portrait of his neighbours’ child from his time staying in Florence. The judges appreciated how the work combined the tradition of Renaissance portraiture with the sitter’s modern style that conveyed a compelling portrayal of a youth on the cusp of adulthood.

The BP Young Artist Award of £9,000 for the work of a selected entrant aged between 18 and 30 has been won by 28 year-old Suffolk based artist Ania Hobson for A Portrait of two Female Painters – a portrait of the artist with her sister in law. The judges liked the handling of paint and directness in this work, capturing an interesting air of mystery around the relationship of the two young women.

The winner of the BP Travel Award 2018, an annual prize to enable artists to work in a different environment on a project related to portraiture, was Robert Seidel for his proposal to travel along the route of the river Danube by train, boat and bike to connect with people and make portraits in the regions through which the river passes. The prize of £8,000 is open to applications from any of this year’s BP Portrait Award-exhibited artists, except the prize winners.

The BP Travel Award 2017 was won by Casper White for his proposal to create works about music fans in clubs and concert venues in Berlin and Mallorca, representing an often youth-related subculture that is not traditionally recorded in portrait paintings. The resulting work will also be displayed in the BP Portrait Award 2018 exhibition.

2018 will mark the Portrait Award’s 39th year at the National Portrait Gallery, London and 29th 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.

Artists from or working in Scotland featured in the exhibition include Mark H. Lawrence with Mr & Mrs Cooper. Separated. and Laura Nardo with LTR Team A.

Christopher Baker, Director of European and Scottish Art and Portraiture at the National Galleries of Scotland said: “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. We are particularly pleased this year, to be displaying a painting by Laura Nardo from the National Galleries – the portrait she has made of her colleague Vittorio Milazzo is such an affectionate and engaging work. The BP Portrait Award exhibition and programmes around it will, I am sure, once again prove to be immensely popular.” 

BP North Sea Regional President Ariel Flores said: “BP’s support for the arts is part of our wider contribution to society and we are proud of our long association with the prestigious BP Portrait Award. Promoting the very best in contemporary portrait painting, the BP Portrait Award remains an unmissable highlight of the annual arts calendar. We would like to congratulate the prize winners and indeed all who entered. The standard, as always, was of the highest calibre.”

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

The prize winners and exhibition were selected by a judging panel chaired by Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery. The full panel included Dr Caroline Bressey, Cultural and Historical Geographer, University College London; Rosie Broadley, Head of Collection Displays (Victorian to Contemporary) and Senior Curator, 20th-Century Collections, National Portrait Gallery; Glenn Brown, Artist; Rosie Millard, Journalist and Broadcaster and Des Violaris, Director, UK Arts & Culture, BP.

To enter, artists were invited to upload a photograph of their finished painting to the BP Portrait Award website, which were considered by the judges in the first round of the competition. 215 entrants were successful in this round and invited to hand-deliver or courier their work to a venue in London for the second round of judging. From this 48 works were selected for the BP Portrait Award 2018 exhibition.

A fully illustrated catalogue featuring all 48 selected works will accompany the exhibition. The catalogue also includes an essay by Rosie Broadley, an illustrated interview with the BP Travel Award 2017 winner and interviews with the shortlisted artists. The catalogue is priced at £9.99.

BP support for UK Arts & Culture
In the UK, BP is a major supporter of the arts with a programme that spans over 50 years. BP’s investment in long term partnerships with the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Opera House, and the Royal Shakespeare Company represent one of the most significant long-term corporate investments in UK arts and culture www.bp.com/arts

27 November 2018
Powerful abstracts, revolutionary photography, dazzling collage and radical politics:
National Galleries of Scotland announces highlights of 2019 exhibition programme

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) today announces a dynamic line-up of exhibitions for 2019. From the dazzling abstraction of Bridget Riley to the political art of Paula Rego; from world-renowned photographers Francesca Woodman, Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe to the wide-ranging creativity of Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage, our 2019 Programme will energise, inspire and encourage us all to look at the world a little differently.

Our major Festival exhibition in summer 2019 celebrates the work of one of the greatest British painters of our time. Bridget Riley is the first major survey of the artist’s work to be held in the UK for 16 years, and the first of its scale to be staged in Scotland. Over the course of a remarkable career, which has spanned seven decades, Bridget Riley (b.1931) has developed a unique visual language, creating compelling abstract paintings which explore the fundamental nature of perception.  Through her observations of the natural world, her experience of looking at the work of other artists, and through her own experimentation, Riley has made a deep, personal investigation into the act of painting, and of how we see. At its heart, her work explores the ways in which we learn through looking, using a purely abstract language of simple shapes, forms and colour to create sensations of light, space, volume, rhythm and movement.

Organised by the NGS in close collaboration with the artist herself, and presented in partnership with Hayward Gallery, London, the exhibition will be shown first in Edinburgh, before travelling to Hayward Gallery, where it will be shown from 23 October 2019 until 26 January 2020.

Highlights include early paintings inspired by the work of Georges Seurat, such as Pink Landscape (1960); Riley’s first abstract paintings, Kiss and Movement in Squares (both 1961); and other iconic works, including Current (1964), from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Paean (1973) from Tokyo’s Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition also includes Late Morning (1967-8) and Rise 1 (1968), key, large-scale colour paintings first shown at the 1968 Venice Biennale, where Riley became the first British contemporary painter and the first woman artist to be awarded the International Prize for painting. The exhibition will trace developments throughout Riley’s career, right up to her latest works, including a selection from her recent series of disc paintings, entitled Measure for Measure (2016-18).

Occupying the whole of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two) during the summer, Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage is, remarkably, the first survey exhibition of collage ever to take place anywhere in the world. Collage is often described as a twentieth-century invention, but this show spans a period of more than 400 years and includes more than 250 works.

A huge range of styles, techniques and approaches is on show, from sixteenth-century anatomical ‘flap prints’, to computer-based images; work by amateur, professional and unknown artists; collages by children and revolutionary cubist masterpieces by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris; from nineteenth century do-it-yourself collage kits to collage films of the 1960s. Highlights include a three-metre-long folding collage screen, purportedly made in part by Charles Dickens; a major group of Dada and Surrealist collages, by artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Joan Miró, Hannah Höch and Max Ernst; and major postwar works by Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson, Andy Warhol and Peter Blake, including source material for the cover of the Beatles’ album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The importance of collage as a form of protest in the 1960s and ’70s will be shown in the work of feminist artists such as Carollee Schneemann, Linder and Hannah Wilke; Punk artists, such as Jamie Reid, whose original collages for the Sex Pistols album and posters will feature; and the famously subversive collages of Monty Python founder Terry Gilliam. The exhibition also features the legendary library book covers which the playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell doctored with collages, and put back on Islington Library’s shelves – a move which landed them in prison for six months. In addition, the exhibition also demonstrates how collage remains important for the practice of many artists working today. Owing to the fragility of much of the work, the exhibition will not tour: it can only be seen at the SNGMA in Edinburgh. 

Highlighting the richness of the ARTIST ROOMS photography collection, which is jointly owned by NGS and Tate, ARTIST ROOMS: Woodman, Arbus and Mapplethorpe celebrates the work of three of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers. Taking place at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery over the summer, the exhibition includes around 40 works. With a particular focus on self-portraiture and representation, the show explores the connections and similarities between these three Americans, each of whom produced bodies of work that were revolutionary, ground-breaking and at times controversial.

Francesca Woodman began exploring self-identity through photography at thirteen years old and continued to experiment and develop her practice in the following decade, until her tragically early death in 1981. Her photographs speak to her agency in being both the subject and creator of the work. Drawing from the significant holding of Diane Arbus within ARTIST ROOMS, the exhibition will include the limited-edition portfolio, A Box of Ten Photographs (1969-1971), which was selected by Arbus herself and as such, can be seen as representing her creative expression and how she wished to be seen as a photographer. Finally a series of portraits of Robert Mapplethorpe explores the photographer’s varying personas, as expressed for the camera, and poignantly document his declining health as a result of having contracted AIDS. The exhibition will occur during the thirty-year anniversary of his death.

From 2019 to early 2020 the Scottish National Portrait Gallery shows off highlights from an unparalleled collection of Scottish photography recently acquired jointly by the NGS and the National Library of Scotland. Amassed by collector Murray MacKinnon, The MacKinnon Collection documents Scottish life and identity from the 1840s through to the 1940s and includes photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Annan, Roger Fenton, George Washington Wilson, and others. The MacKinnon Collection is distinguished by the work of photographers who captured unprecedented images that brilliantly transport us back to a century of changing rural communities, growing cities and enduring historic sites, but also illuminate the faces and places that continue to affect our lives today.

Paula Rego is an ambitious retrospective of the Portuguese artist’s work that brings politics to the fore. Spanning Rego’s career from the 1950s through to 2012, the works in this exhibition address António de Oliveira Salazar’s fascist regime, the 1997 referendum on legalising abortion in Portugal, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the United States and its allies and, from 2009, female genital mutilation – all of which resonate strongly with contemporary feminist and political issues. Highlights of the exhibition include Dog Woman (1952), Snow White and her Stepmother (1995), The First Mass in Brazil (1993) and Joseph’s Dream (1990).  Curated by independent curator Catherine Lampert and organised by MK Gallery (Milton Keynes), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the exhibition includes over 60 loans.

NOW is the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s dynamic three-year series of contemporary art exhibitions. The fifth instalment in the series will be centred on a major survey of work by Anya Gallaccio. The Paisley-born artist, who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003 and was a prominent figure in the Young British Artists generation, is renowned for her spectacular installations and sculptures. Using all kinds of organic materials, including trees, flowers, candles, sand and ice, she creates temporary works that change over time as they are subjected to natural processes of transformation and decay. Gallaccio also makes more permanent artworks in bronze, ceramics, stainless steel and stone that attempt to capture or arrest these processes. Exploring themes of change, growth and decay, some of the other artists appearing in NOW are Turner Prize nominee Roger Hiorns, the French artist Aurélien Froment and Scottish artist Charles Avery.

Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland Sir John Leighton says he is excited to welcome visitors to this dynamic, daring programme of exhibitions.

“For 2019, we’ve put together a programme of exhibitions that encourages us all think more deeply about the world around us. From Bridget Riley’s work which makes us examine the very way our eyes process images, to Paula Rego who challenges us to look more closely at issues and situations we might rather turn away from. Works from Francesca Woodman, Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as the stunning MacKinnon collection show us the extraordinary capacity of photographs to capture life and convey meaning. The final two installments of NOW will allow us to continue to explore the outstanding work being made by both Scottish and international artists today and Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage will give us an insight into collage as both hobby and high art. I look forward to welcoming you all to the National Galleries of Scotland in 2019,” Sir John said.

Read the full 2019 exhibition programme or find out more about Bridget Riley

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

ARTIST ROOMS: WOODMAN, ARBUS AND MAPPLETHORPE
6 April – 20 October 2019
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#NGSArtistRooms

NOW
Anya Gallacio
Charles Avery
Aurelien Froment
Roger Hiorns
And others
1 June – 22 September 2019
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One)
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#NGSNOW

CUT AND PASTE: 400 YEARS OF COLLAGE
29 June – 27 October 2019
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two)
73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS
0131 624 6200 | Admission TBC
#NGSCutPaste

BRIDGET RILEY
15 June – 22 September 2019
Royal Scottish Academy
Princes St, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
0131 624 6200 | Admission TBC
#NGSRiley

THE MACKINNON COLLECTION
15 November 2019 – 16 February 2020
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#NGSMacKinnon

PAULA REGO
23 November 2019 – April 2020
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two)
73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS
0131 624 6200 | Admission TBC
#NGSRego

Bridget Riley will be at the Hayward Gallery, London from 23 October 2019 until 26 January 2020. For information please contact: Clare Callaghan, Press Officer Visual Arts, [email protected], 0207 921 0752

ARTIST ROOMS
ARTIST ROOMS is a touring collection of over 1,600 works of modern and contemporary art. The collection is displayed across the UK in solo exhibitions that showcase the work of more than 40 major artists, and this touring programme gives young people the chance to get involved in creative projects, discover more about art and learn new skills. Since 2009, nearly 50 million people have visited more than 180 displays at over 85 museums and galleries.

ARTIST ROOMS is jointly owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. The collection was established through The d’Offay Donation in 2008, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund, and the Scottish and British Governments. The current ARTIST ROOMS touring programme is delivered by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate in a partnership with Ferens Art Gallery until 2019, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Art Fund and by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland. www.nationalgalleries.org/artistrooms | www.tate.org.uk/artist-rooms | www.artistrooms.org | #ARTISTROOMS

30 October 2018
Warhol and Paolozzi star in new show at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi | I Want to be a Machine
17 November 2018 – 2 June 2019
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two)
73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS
0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org
Admission FREE
#WarholPaolozziInspires

Pop Art giants Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) and Eduardo Paolozzi (1924 - 2005) burst into the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art this autumn with an exhibition exploring their mutual fascination for automation, machines and mechanical processes.

Running from 17 November 2018 to 2 June 2019, Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi | I Want to be a Machine will consist of two parallel displays devoted to each artist, examining the development of their work from the 1940s onwards. Highlights will include striking images like Warhol’s famous multi-coloured prints of Marilyn Monroe and Paolozzi’s dazzling, kaleidoscopic prints of the ’60s and ’70s.

This exhibition will show how Warhol and Paolozzi drew inspiration from the ubiquitous, mass-produced imagery of popular culture and commerce – packaging, movies, advertising – which exploded in the post-war consumer boom. In the 1950s they used popular images as source material either by tracing them (Warhol) or by bringing them together in collages (Paolozzi), but around 1962-3 they began to exploit the potential of screenprinting, which allowed them to use photographic images as the direct basis for their works, and made the process of producing artworks more mechanised.

Warhol’s first screenprints on paper depicted images of soup cans, race riots and celebrities in a deadpan, flat manner, with no hint of the artist’s feelings about his subject or any expressive, subjective style. Modern printing technology also transformed Paolozzi’s way of working, giving him a greater freedom and allowing him to control the forms and colours of his prints in a similar way to an assembly line, which can turn out the same product in a variety of colours.

Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi | I Want to be a Machine takes its name from a much-quoted declaration by Andy Warhol, which the artist made in a key interview in 1963. Behind this seemingly facetious and characteristically off-hand quip was Warhol’s genuine desire to create art that reflected and celebrated our increasingly mechanised, industrial society. Across the Atlantic, at the same time, Eduardo Paolozzi was responding directly to the beauty he found in machine forms, and became fascinated by the interface between people and machines - in robots, computers and electronic storage of the world’s knowledge.

The exhibits will be largely drawn from the ARTIST ROOMS Collection, which is jointly owned by National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and Tate, and from the NGS’s own excellent collection.

Simon Groom, Director, Modern and Contemporary Art, National Galleries of Scotland said: “We’re so thrilled to be able to explore, with our audiences, the fascinating parallel development in the work of these two great pioneers of the Pop Art movement. Their almost simultaneous ‘discovery’ of screenprinting in the early 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic, ushered in a new world of ever-changing bright colours and a celebration of a fast developing consumer society, fuelled by rapid mechanisation. Their work was to change the way the world looked, and was looked at, forever.”

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

Publications
‘I want to be a machine’: Andy Warhol & Eduardo Paolozzi is published by National Galleries of Scotland Publishing on the occasion of this exhibition.

Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi | I Want to be a Machine-related events can be found via this link here.

15 October 2018
Turner Prize nominee Monster Chetwynd headlines latest instalment of NOW at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Press view: Thursday 18 October 2018, 11:30-13:00hrs, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Mod One).
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR

NOW | Monster Chetwynd, Henry Coombes, Moyna Flannigan, Betye Saar, Wael Shawky
20 October 2018 – 28 April 2019
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One)
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR
0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org
Admission FREE
#NOWInspires

Sponsored by the Ampersand Foundation

Works by five ground-breaking contemporary artists will take centre stage at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) this autumn as part of NOW, a dynamic three-year series of contemporary art exhibitions.

Opening on Saturday 20 October, the fourth instalment of the SNGMA’s NOW programme trains a spotlight on the playful, thought-provoking work of Monster Chetwynd (b.1973), Henry Coombs (b. 1977), Moyna Flannigan (b. 1963), Betye Saar (b.1926) and Wael Shawky (b.1971).

Varying in medium, style and approach, the work of each of these artists is connected by a shared desire to challenge convention and invite audiences to think differently about the world around them.

At the heart of the exhibition, a major survey of work by Turner Prize nominee Monster Chetwynd defies expectations about the ways in which art is presented and experienced in gallery spaces.  Chetwynd, a British artist, based in Glasgow, is best known for her re-workings of iconic moments from cultural history in spontaneous performances that feature handmade costumes and props. The sources that influence Chetwynd’s work run from Karl Marx and Charles Dickens, to Star Wars and the Addams Family to puppet-based plays riffing on Milton’s Paradise Lost. Chetwynd – formerly known as Spartacus Chetwynd and before that Marvin Gaye Chetwynd – is renowned for her exuberant, improvised performances, which feed into her wider work, embracing sculpture, painting, installation and film. For NOW Chetwynd has produced new paintings and specially commissioned wallpaper, both utilizing imagery drawn from the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) collection, which will be shown alongside existing work exhibited here for the first time in Scotland. Also on show will be works from her long-running series of Bat Opera paintings. To complement the presentation of props and imagery related to her performances, the largest room in the exhibition will be devoted to a display of films documenting some of her key performances.

Based in Glasgow, Henry Coombs makes work that is deeply concerned with hierarchy, both within families and in wider society. His work includes painting, collage, drawing and sculpture, but he is best known for his short films - character portraits for which he creates intricate sets that allow him to explore historical themes. The Bedfords (2009) is a brooding re-imagining of the relationship between celebrated Victorian painter Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) and the Duke and Duchess of Bedford. The film will be shown within a specially conceived room lined with images from the story boards and preparatory paintings and drawings, upon which the artist has made further additions.

Edinburgh-based Moyna Flannigan’s series of new collages and paintings, shown here for the first time, marks a significant transition in her approach to making art. The series, called Tear, continues to develop the artist’s interest in the history of art and painting, as well as the recurring power of the figure. In Tear, Flannigan breaks down each work’s elements to make a new order out of the subsequent components – interrogating accepted ideas about seriality, repetition and beauty.

An iconic figure of the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, the African-American artist Betye Saar creates complex assemblage sculptures that address issues of race, memory and mysticism. NOW brings the first major presentation in Scotland of work by Saar, whose career has spanned almost seven decades and whose work confronts the oppressive systems that face African-American people, and particularly African-American women, in the United States today. In the 1987 installation Mojotech, created whilst on a residency at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Saar reveals her interest in spirituality and mysticism in the age of technology. Created using found objects, Mojotech features elements with voodoo characteristics, such as amulets and charms, in addition to printed circuit boards, electronic apparatus and other technological parts. Visitors will be invited to leave offerings at Mojotech – a communal and accumulative process that relates to a tradition in African art, in which certain materials are imbued with power by the community, whilst others are considered purely decorative.

Egyptian artist Wael Shawky’s epic film trilogy The Cabaret Crusades explores notions of national, religious and artistic identity and challenges western European narratives about the Crusades, by examining them from an Arab perspective. Drawing on the Lebanese-born French writer Amin Maalouf’s book, The Crusades through Arab Eyes (1983), Shawky uses marionettes to enact the era from Pope Urban II’s call to conquer the Holy Land (1095) to the fall of Constantinople (1453). Skillfully juxtaposing the historical narrative with the childish world of puppetry – seriousness with naivety, fear with humour, horror with entertainment – these films focus on events crucial to the development of an Arab identity.

NOW is the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s dynamic three-year series of contemporary art exhibitions. Previous exhibitions have included major presentations by Jenny Saville (b. 1970), Susan Philipsz (b. 1965) and Nathan Coley (b. 1967). NOW shines 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. NOW also features 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.

Speaking about the exhibition, Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art at the NGS, said: “NOW IV builds on the extraordinary success of the previous NOW shows, which have seen audience numbers at the Gallery grow substantially. NOW IV offers a highly immersive exhibition that is playful, anarchic, thought-provoking, and beautiful.  The NOW shows offer 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.”

The NOW programme is being made possible thanks to the support of the NGS Foundation, Kent and Vicki Logan, Walter Scott and Partners Limited, Robert and Nicky Wilson, The Ampersand Foundation, and other donors who wish to remain anonymous.

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

NOW-related events can be found via this link here.

12 October 2018
Members appointed to the board of the National Galleries of Scotland

The Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs, Fiona Hyslop today announced the appointments of Audrey Carlin and Dr Hannah Rudman as Members of the National Galleries of Scotland Board.

MEMBERS

Audrey Carlin is a property and arts focused professional who brings twenty-five years’ experience of capital projects, property management and fundraising to the Board.  She is currently Chief Executive Officer at WASPS (Workshops & Artists Studio Provision Scotland), the UK’s largest artist studio provider.  Having managed the delivery of major capital projects during her career, she looks forward to supporting NGS with their exciting capital programme as a member of the Board.

Dr Hannah Rudman is an IT and Digital Transformation professional who has personally led the digital transformation of over 150 companies, national organisations and publicly funded institutions.  An experienced non-executive Director, Dr Rudman has served as Board Director for the Macrobert Arts Centre, New Media Scotland and Digital North.  She was elected as Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2016, as Honorary Fellow at Durham University in 2015 and as Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce in 2007.

APPOINTMENTS

These appointments which are regulated by the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland will run for four years from 1 October 2018 to
31 September 2022. 

REMUNERATION

These appointments are part-time with a time commitment of ten days per annum and are non-remunerated.

OTHER MINISTERIAL APPOINTMENTS

Audrey Carlin and Dr Hannah Rudman do not hold any other public appointments.

POLITICAL ACTIVITY

All appointments are made on merit and political activity plays no part in the selection process.  However, 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.

Audrey Carlin and Dr Hannah Rudman have not upheld any political activity in the last five years.

BACKGROUND

NGS is a vibrant organisation, employing around 300 staff at its three Edinburgh sites.  Its mission is to care for, develop, research and display the national collection of Scottish and international art.  This includes a lively and innovative programme of activities, exhibitions, education and publications, which aim to engage, inform and inspire the broadest possible public.

Today, its mission is based on the drive to make the greatest art available, free of charge, to a wide national and international public.  NGS is one of Scotland’s most popular cultural destinations, and in 2017 it welcomed more than 2.5 million visitors to its Galleries.  It ranks within the top thirty most visited museums anywhere in the world.

Core funded by the Scottish Government, like all public bodies, it must operate within a challenging financial climate and must make the most of opportunities to continue to collaborate with other key national and international institutions from a range of sectors and to generate income from a range of sources.  NGS also fulfils a statutory role as one of the nation’s most significant cultural organisations.  It operates within the context of the Scottish Government’s national outcomes and strategic objectives, including public service reform.

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 defined in the National Heritage (Scotland) Act 1906 (as amended in 1985) -.http://origin-www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1985/16/contents

Further information about the National Galleries is available at https://www.nationalgalleries.org

—ENDS—

28 September 2018
Kids can recreate Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen in special week of family art activities

Young visitors to the Scottish National Gallery during the October half-term holidays will be able to recreate one of the world’s most celebrated paintings – Sir Edwin Landseer’s iconic The Monarch of the Glen (c.1851) – in LEGO® bricks.

As part of the National Galleries of Scotland’s special Monarch Makers week, youngsters will be able to help build up a LEGO brick image of the famous artwork over the course of the day on Wednesday 17 October. The finished article will immediately go on display alongside the original painting on the walls of the Scottish National Gallery.

Last year, a similar recreation of John Constable’s masterpiece Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831) was a big hit with young visitors and they will now be able to turn their attention to one of Scotland’s most iconic images.

Numerous art activities will be available for children and families across the whole week, including storytelling and sketching (drawing and collage), daily family art tours, stag-inspired balloon-modelling, puppet making and an interactive music concert for kids.

The special events and the Monarch Makers recreation day will celebrate the end of a recent Scottish tour for Landseer’s masterpiece, which visited major art galleries and a number of schools in the east, west, north, south and centre of the country, before returning to Edinburgh on 30 June.

Throughout the tour, the Galleries have sought to strike up a national conversation around the iconic artwork, by asking audiences of all ages to share their views on the painting and on art in general. This continues at our Monarch Makers event, with visitors able to express their views and engage in discussion at the Talkaoke, a travelling pop-up talk show that has gained popularity in galleries, theatres, conferences and festivals all around Scotland.

Later this year the Monarch will head south, to be shown at London’s National Gallery for the first time in more than 160 years. The gallery once housed the Royal Academy of Arts, the original setting in which the painting received its first ever showing back in 1851. On display in London alongside Landseer’s masterpiece will be artist Sir Peter Blake’s 1966 representation of the painting.

Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland said: “We are delighted to host this special Monarch-related week of family art activities at the Scottish National Gallery. Ever since The Monarch of the Glen entered Scotland’s national art collection, it has been our intention to provide as many youngsters as possible with the opportunity to view, enjoy and engage with the painting. Seeing Constable’s masterpiece recreated in LEGO bricks last year was magnificent and children loved being a part of it, so it will be fantastic to see Landseer’s iconic painting receive the same treatment. We are very much looking forward to capping off the whole landmark tour with these excellent family-orientated art activities”.

Lucy Casot, Head of the Heritage Lottery Fund in Scotland, added: “We are keen that as many people as possible have the opportunity to see this iconic piece of Scottish art in real life. Thanks to funding from the National Lottery, the Monarch’s tour of the country has been a resounding success achieving just that through exhibitions, talks and activities. Monarch Makers will be a fun finale and an opportunity for young people to create their own masterpiece.”

The Monarch of the Glen was acquired in 2017 by the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) after a major fundraising campaign, 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.

It is the Galleries’ ambition to share its collection widely and work in partnership with communities across Scotland, and the Monarch’s tour has been supported with additional funding from The National Lottery and the Scottish Government.

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

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 139,000 members who receive the National Art Pass and enjoy free entry to over 320 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 Hepworth Wakefield in 2017) 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 Emma Phillips, [email protected] / 0207 225 4804

27 September 2018
Scotland’s F1 racer honoured by spectacular new portrait at the National Galleries of Scotland

Susie Wolff MBE has been captured in a striking new portrait, which goes on display at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this week. Wolff, who retired from F1 driving in 2015 and is currently Team Principal of Venturi Formula E racing team in Monaco, is also the founder of Dare to be Different, a high-profile initiative that helps to inspire and develop women who work in, or want to work in, the motor sport arena.

This highly unusual portrait sculpture, which has been created by Scottish artist Angela Palmer, recreates in crystal glass one of the personalised racing helmets worn by Susie Wolff during her career in F1.

Formula 1 race helmets are tailor-made to exacting design specifications to provide the maximum physical protection for individual drivers. To create the portrait, Angela Palmer worked with a team of master glass blowers in Stourbridge near Birmingham (a world-famous centre for glass manufacturing), who made a mould of Wolff’s helmet in brass. Molten lead crystal glass, at a temperature of 1400°c, was then mouth-blown into the mould, forcing the crystal into every detailed crevice. The final stage in the process revealed a beautiful and delicate object whose fragility reminds us of the vulnerability (and bravery) of drivers like Susie, as they take extraordinary risks in pursuit of ever-faster speeds.

Susie Wolff's achievements in motor racing together, with her significant initiative to drive female talent in sport and beyond are an inspiration for today's generation of girls and young women. She was born in Oban in 1982, and grew up in the west coast town, where her parents owned a motorcycle dealership. From a young age Wolff raced karts, and in 2001 she began her professional motor racing career in the Formula Renault UK Championship, where she gained three podium finishes and was twice nominated for British Young Driver of the Year Award. After a brief spell in Formula 3, Wolff made her name with the Mercedes-Benz DTM Team (the German Touring Car Championship) between 2006 and 2012. In 2012 she moved into Formula 1, having being signed by Williams. She entered as a team development driver, holding the position for two seasons before being promoted to a test driver for the 2015 season. At the 2014 British Grand Prix, she made history by becoming the first woman to take part in an F1 race weekend in twenty-two years. In November 2015 Wolff retired from all motorsports and in 2016 launched her own initiative called Dare To Be Different, in collaboration with the UK motor sport governing body, the Motor Sports Association. She is currently an expert analyst for Channel 4's F1 coverage and in June 2018 Susie was appointed as Team Principal of the Monaco-based Venturi Formula E racing team.

Angela Palmer is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University. Her sculptures are in permanent collections of museums and institutions around the world including the National Galleries of Scotland, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Royal College of Physicians, London and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington in the US. Palmer is fascinated by complex forms, and her interests range from human anatomy to engineering. She has explored different materials and craftsmanship to map and represent character and structure, and her recent work has responded to the beautiful forms found within engines, and in particular Formula 1, which is the laboratory for the most technologically advanced, and highest performing, car engines in the world. The artist was given unprecedented access to engineering data from which she created a recent series of sculptures.

Christopher Baker, Director of European and Scottish Art and Portraiture, said: “The Scottish driver Susie Wolff has excelled in the world of motor racing and as an advocate for female talent in sport, and we are delighted that she is now represented in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland in such a fascinating, thought-provoking and unconventional way. This crystal glass racing helmet, based on one of Wolff’s own, and so carefully crafted through the expertise of Angela Palmer and her collaborators, represents a fascinating form of suggestive representation. It is intimate, elegant and intriguing - a sculpture which both refers to the subject’s outstanding success, and moves beyond the boundaries of conventional portraiture”.

Susie Wolff said: “I have the deepest admiration for Angela Palmer and her work so having my helmet as her subject has been a true honour for me. I think the sculpture is stunning and very striking, it’s the most incredible combination of strength with fragility.Seeing the completed piece makes me feel enormously proud and I’m very grateful to Angela for her time and her talent. Just as sport can, art has the capacity to cross so many boundaries, like education, race and religion. I’m delighted to see both sport and art combined in such a brilliant and personal piece of work".

Angela Palmer said: “I met my fellow Scot Susie Wolff, and was immediately struck by the strength of her character and her routine acceptance of the risks as a Formula 1 test driver. She was as gifted and fearless as her male counterparts; her goal was not to be the best female driver in the world, but to be the best driver in the world. This was a difficult proposition for many observers who struggled to overcome their prejudice in this male dominated environment. Interestingly, Susie’s helmet played a significant role in bestowing her equal status as a driver: once her helmet was on, no-one knew if she was male or female. The helmet gave her anonymity, and rendered the gender issue irrelevant. I became equally fascinated by that most potent ingredient which attracts so much of the sport’s following – the acute and heightened sense of risk as drivers slice between each other at over 350km/h with only millimeters to spare. I chose crystal for its fragility, to echo the vulnerable membrane of the skull."

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

Susie Wolff: Portrait of a Racing Driver by Angela Palmer is numbered one in an edition of four and is on display at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery now. Its display is part of National Sporting Heritage Day - a focal point for sporting heritage in the UK - which in 2018, falls on 30 September.

Susie Wolff's website can be found here: www.susiewolff.com

Dare to be Different website can be found here: www.daretobedifferent.org

Angela Palmer's website can be found here: www.angelaspalmer.com

Sporting Heritage website can be found here: www.sportingheritage.org.uk

Angela Palmer's self-portrait, Brain of the Artist was acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland in 2014 and was selected for inclusion in the publication 100 Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland by the Director-General, Sir John Leighton. Brain of the Artist featured in the 2015-16 touring exhibition Facing the World: Self-portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei which was on display at the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

• New gallery spaces, filled with light and colour, will proudly showcase Scottish art for everyone to fully enjoy

• Beautiful new public space in the heart of the capital - extensive new landscaping and accessible paths will link the Gallery to Princes St Gardens

• New displays across the entire Scottish National Gallery, informed by research into the needs and expectations of our audiences

• Gallery will remain open throughout the project

Ambitious plans to create an internationally significant new setting for the world’s greatest collection of Scottish art were revealed today, as work to transform the Scottish National Gallery (SNG) gets underway.

This major project will completely transform the way Scottish art is shown at the Gallery, which stands in the heart of Edinburgh’s World Heritage Site. The £22m scheme will create a new suite of galleries that will be directly accessible from the adjoining Princes St Gardens, and provide a light-filled, new home for the Gallery’s unrivalled collection of Scottish art, raising its profile for visitors from all over the world.

The vision for the project has been driven by the National Galleries’ ambition to ensure that the widest number of people can enjoy our art and activities. The displays in the new galleries will be directly informed by extensive research into the needs of existing and potential audiences.

For the first time in a generation, there will be new displays drawn from the Scottish and international collection throughout the entire Gallery. This fresh approach will allow us to tell much richer stories about Scotland’s art reflecting the international significance of pioneering figures such as Allan Ramsay, Gavin Hamilton and Sir David Wilkie.

The scope of the new displays, which will be revealed when the new galleries open in early 2021, will also be broader, encompassing the work of early 20th-century artists such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Stanley Cursiter and the Scottish Colourists S J Peploe and F C B Cadell.

The project will create a beautiful new space in the heart of Edinburgh, which will be free for everyone to use and enjoy. A series of large windows, running the length of the new gardens-level façade, will fill the galleries with light and colour, and offer spectacular views over one of the most celebrated cityscapes in the world. Extensive new landscaping in the gardens will radically improve access to this much-loved part of the city, and the project will also create a larger shop, brand new café and more accessible restaurant.

Specific activities on completion of the project include a dedicated family day one day a week, more volunteers in galleries to talk with people about the art and ensuring that our interpretation is appealing to everyone.

Construction work on the project - which is supported by The National Lottery and Scottish Government - will begin in October. During construction, the Gallery will be open as usual with free admission. The first milestone will be the opening of a new coffee shop in early 2019, followed by a refreshed restaurant and shop, as well as a new accessible path.

Speaking today, Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “This is a hugely exciting time for us, as we see our ambitious plans for the Scottish National Gallery getting underway. We will create the perfect showcase for the nation’s extraordinary collection of Scottish art, giving it room to breathe and showing it off with real pride to the world. This ambitious project will completely transform the experience of our visitors, creating a National Gallery that is even more open, engaging and inviting with new presentations of Scotland’s art in a setting that will be truly world-class. All will be welcome whether to come in and immerse themselves in the highly romantic paintings of the Scottish Highlands, to take part in a family day or just to linger, enjoy the views and maybe pick up one of our sketch pads.”

Dr Tricia Allerston, Co-Director, Scottish National Gallery Project, added: “Visitor numbers to the Scottish National Gallery have almost doubled in the past ten years but fewer than one in six of them made their way to the cramped, dark spaces which used to house the national collection of Scottish art. Soon, visitors will be able easily to discover, appreciate and enjoy our highly significant collections of Scottish art through a series of innovative displays designed expressly to engage them. Imagine looking at a painting of Sir Walter Scott and then looking out of the windows into Princes Street Gardens, a landscape created during his lifetime and which is now dominated by the great monument marking his international fame. Or being able to appreciate the stunning Scottish landscapes painted outdoors by the Glasgow Boys and then looking out onto a real, natural world.”

The SNG redevelopment has been designed by one of Scotland’s leading architectural practices, Hoskins Architects, which has been widely praised for a number of high-profile designs in the arts and cultural sector. The new designs will place the main entrance to the SNG in Princes St Gardens, giving instant access to the Scottish collection, and much easier routes to the rest of the building as a whole. Additional display space will be created by transforming former offices, and the design will seamlessly connect the Gallery with the gardens beyond.

During construction work we intend to keep disruption in the surrounding area and in the Gallery itself to a minimum, though there will be some room closures as galleries are rehung, and the facilities in the gallery are refreshed. To enable excavation works to the galleries directly beneath, the Playfair Steps, at the rear of the SNG, will be closed for the duration of the building work.

Aside from a short period in early 2019, the Mound precinct will remain open, and events such as the Christmas market will go ahead as scheduled.

Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs Fiona Hyslop, said: “This exciting project will further enhance our nation’s profile and raise the international profile of our world-class galleries, ensuring that visitors in Scotland and from all over the world can enjoy our arts and cultural heritage. I am very pleased that the Scottish Government will contribute £5.5 million towards ensuring that the Scottish National Gallery gives the national collection of Scottish artworks the prominence and public access it deserves.”

Lucy Casot, Head of the Heritage Lottery Fund in Scotland, said: “This is a hugely exciting time for Scotland’s arts and cultural heritage with the recent openings of Mackintosh at the Willow and the V&A Dundee and now the beginning of a wonderful new gallery, none of which would be possible without funds from the National Lottery playing public.This, the most important collection of Scottish Art in the world, will be given a bright, modern gallery worthy of its impressive heritage bringing joy and inspiration to all those who visit.”

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

Funding figures from Scottish Government and Heritage Lottery Fund
Scottish Government: £5.5 million
Heritage Lottery Fund: £4.94 million

3 September 2018
Pop Art, pin-ups, puppets and portraits; National Galleries of Scotland announces autumn exhibitions 

Two giants of Pop Art, one of the UK’s most exciting contemporary artists and the world-famous posters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec will be the focus of key exhibitions at the National Galleries of Scotland this autumn, it is announced today.

Among the highlights of the autumn line-up, I Wat to be a Machine, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA), will reveal how a fascination for machines and mechanical processes inspired the work of both the American Andy Warhol and British artist Eduardo Paolozzi.

Also at the SNGMA, the exuberant, beguiling, multi-layered and spontaneous art of Turner-Prize nominee Monster Chetwynd will be at the heart of the fourth instalment of NOW, the SNGMA’s dynamic three-year series of contemporary art exhibitions.

The spectacular Pin-ups: Toulouse Lautrec and the Art of Celebrity at the Royal Scottish Academy will bring together an extraordinary collection of iconic posters, by Lautrec and his contemporaries, which heralded a revolution in design and the birth of modern celebrity culture.

And, rounding off the year, the much-loved BP Portrait Award, which attracts outstanding portrait artists from around the world, will return to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG) in December. With the exception of Pin-ups, entry to all of these exhibitions will be free.

I Want to be a Machine takes its name from a much-quoted declaration by Andy Warhol, which the artist made in a key interview in 1963. Behind this seemingly facetious and characteristically off-hand quip was Warhol’s genuine desire to create art that reflected and celebrated our increasingly mechanized, industrial society. Across the Atlantic, at the same time, Eduardo Paolozzi was responding directly to the beauty he found in machine forms, and became fascinated by the interface between man and machine - in robots, computers and electronic storage of the world’s knowledge.

Both artists also drew inspiration from popular and commercial imagery – packaging, movies, advertising – which exploded in the post-war consumer boom. In the 1950s they used popular images as source material either by copying them (Warhol) or by bringing them together in collages (Paolozzi), but around 1962-3 they began to exploit the potential of screenprinting, which allowed them to use photographic images as the direct basis for their works, and made the process of producing artworks more ‘mechanised’.

Warhol’s first screenprints on paper depicted images of soup cans, race riots and celebrities in a deadpan, flat manner, with no hint of the artist’s feelings about his subject or any expressive, subjective style. Modern printing technology also transformed Paolozzi’s way of working, giving him a greater freedom and allowing him to control the forms and colours of his prints in a similar way to an assembly line, which can turn out the same product in a variety of colours.

Tracing this fascinating parallel development in the two artists’ work, I Want to be a Machine will include rarely seen Warhol drawings from the 1950s, his famous multi-coloured prints of Marilyn Monroe (on loan from Tate) and a group of recently acquired ‘stitched’ photographs. The Paolozzi works on show will include early collages made in the 1950s, dazzling, kaleidoscopically coloured prints of the ’60s and ’70s, and a group of sculptures which demonstrates how the artist’s approach to printmaking was mirrored by his works in three dimensions.

The exhibits will be largely drawn from ARTIST ROOMS Collection, which is jointly owned by National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and Tate, and from the NGS’s own excellent collection.

The fourth instalment of NOW, which opens at the SNGMA (Modern One) on 20 October, will be centred on a major survey of work by Monster Chetwynd. The London-born, Glasgow-based artist – who has previously gone by the names Spartacus Chetwynd and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd – is renowned for her exuberant, improvised performances, which rework iconic moments from cultural history and feature multiple props, costumes and collaborators. These performances also feed into her wider work, which embraces sculpture, painting, installation and video. NOW will feature the first showing in Scotland of new paintings, as well as specially commissioned wallpaper by Chetwynd, composed from imagery of artworks from the NGS collection, collaged with photographs and overpainted by the artist. Also on show will be works from her long-running series of Bat Opera paintings. To complement the presentation of props and imagery related to her performances, the largest room in the exhibition will be devoted to a display of films documenting some of her key performances.

NOW will also bring together new and recent work by four artists who share Chetwynd’s desire to challenge conventions. These include new collages and paintings by Edinburgh-based Moyna Flannigan, a video installation by Glasgow-based Henry Coombes, and the first major presentations in Scotland of installation and video work by the celebrated 92–year-old African-American artist Betye Saar and Egyptian artist Wael Shawky. Saar was born in Los Angeles in 1926, and her career has spanned almost seven decades. She is best known for her collages, assemblages and installations, which incorporate objects, personal memorabilia, and other materials gathered from a lifetime of searching flea markets, thrift shops and yard sales. Her highly political work challenges racial and sexist stereotypes deeply rooted in American culture, and her 1987 installation Mojotech, which will be on show in NOW, also reveals her interest in spirituality and mysticism in the age of technology. Three films by Shawky, which have been inspired by a re-telling of the history of the Crusades from an Arab perspective, will be shown over the run of the exhibition. Exploring notions of national, religious and artistic identity, these epic recreations of medieval clashes between Muslims and Christians were filmed using 200-year-old marionettes from the Lupi collection in Turin, Italy.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) has long been admired for the startlingly modern posters he designed in Paris at the end of the 19th century, which perfectly encapsulate the vibrant, bohemian atmosphere of the city in the era known as the ‘Belle Époque’. His career coincided with a revolutionary moment, just as the poster emerged as an important means of mass-marketing.

Pin-Ups: Toulouse Lautrec and The Art of Celebrity will bring together around 75 posters, prints, paintings and drawings by Lautrec and contemporaries, such as Pierre Bonnard, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen and Jules Chéret, the ‘father of the modern poster’. These will include many of the artist’s finest graphic artworks made for legendary nightclubs such as the Moulin Rouge and the Ambassadeurs.

The BP Portrait Award is the most prestigious portrait competition in the world and represents the very best in contemporary portrait painting. Organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London and sponsored by BP, it carries a first prize of £35,000, and a total prize fund of £74,000; this year’s winner was London-based artist Miriam Escofet, whose stunning portrait of her mother, An Angel at my Table, was selected from 2,667 entries submitted by artists from 88 countries. Every year the BP Portrait Award exhibition showcases around 50 outstanding entries, including the work of all of the prize-winners, who in 2018 include American painter Felicia Forte and Chinese artist Zhu Tongyao.

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

PIN-UPS
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC AND THE ART OF CELEBRITY
6 October 2018 – 20 January 2019
Royal Scottish Academy
Princes St, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org
Admission: £11.50 (concessions available)
25 and under £6.50

NOW
Monster Chetwynd
Henry Coombes
Moyna Flannigan
Betye Saar
Wael Shawky
20 October 2018 – 28 April 2019
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One)
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR
0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org
Admission FREE
#NOWInspires
Press View: Thursday 18 October 2018

I Want to be a Machine Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi
17 November 2018 – 2 June 2019
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two)
73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS
0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org
Admission FREE
#WarholPaolozziInspires
Press View: Thursday 15 November 2018

BP Portrait Award
15 December 2018 – 10 March 2019
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD
0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org
Admission FREE
#BPPortrait
Press View: Thursday 13 December 2018

31 August 2018
National Galleries of Scotland acquire powerful sculptural work by Turner Prize-nominee Christine Borland

A poignant and powerful sculptural work which marks the contributions of organ donors and honours their families, created by one of the UK’s most celebrated artists, has been acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS), it is announced today, in the days before Organ Donation Week 2018 commences.

Positive Pattern (2016) is the latest artwork by leading contemporary artist and Turner Prize-nominee Christine Borland (b. 1965) to enter Scotland’s national art collection.

The artwork – originally commissioned by the Institute of Transplantation in Newcastle – is currently on display as part of NOW, a major three-year series of exhibitions launched at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) in 2017 to showcase the work of some of the most compelling and influential artists of today.

Visitors to NOW still have two more weeks to catch the sculptures The Scotsman recently described as, “delicate, private things… human in scale yet strangely other, negative space given substance. Somehow, [Borland] seems to have captured something of the essence of the transplant process, with its simultaneous dramas of life and loss”.

Christine Borland studied at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) and at the University of Ulster, Belfast. In 1997 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and over the last two decades her work has been internationally exhibited Borland was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (DLitt) from the University of Glasgow in 2016 and is a Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle.

Borland has often collaborated with specialists in other fields, exploring areas such as forensic science, the history of medicine, medical ethics and human genetics. Positive Pattern was commissioned by the Institute of Transplantation 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. At its centre is the idea of making visible an absence or a presence that is unseen. The artist worked closely with staff at the Institute and donor families for over two years, and alongside such intimate conversation, also drew inspiration from the work of acclaimed British artist Barbara Hepworth (1903–75), who placed importance on human connection and the role of internal intuition. Hepworth once noted, “I rarely draw what I see — I draw what I feel in my body”.

Comprising five abstract sculptures produced in dense foam, Positive Pattern recreates in three dimensions the empty interior spaces of five of Hepworth’s carved wooden sculptures, including Wave (1943-44), which resides in the Galleries’ collection. To make the work, interior cavities of Hepworth’s sculptures were laser–scanned, and the resulting data translated into 3–D computer renders. These were then transformed into physical objects by using a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) routing machine that carved the sculptures from specialist CNC milling foam. The five elements of the work are held in specially designed museum cases, displayed at a height which loosely matches that of a number of human organs, such as the brain or the heart. Borland has described these sculptures as, “abstract shapes suspended inside museum cases, which evoke an air of waiting; perhaps for a future, as yet un–imagined function”.

Speaking about the moving experience of working on this powerful project, Borland said: “As an artist, I connected with the surprisingly visceral but tender descriptions and imaginings of interior and exterior spaces of the body which featured in many of our discussions. In particular I was taken by how relatives described the way they processed the loss of a loved one by imagining how they have helped to save the life of another – by offering up a part of their physical being. It was the sense of this absent, but vital ‘other’ that became the central theme of the artwork”.

Positive Pattern is in an edition of three, with the first version in the edition held on permanent display at the Institute of Transplantation; NGS has acquired the second in the edition through the generosity of the Iain Paul Fund.

The artist Christine Borland said: “I’m so pleased that Positive Pattern, which means such a lot to me, has entered the national art collection, and is currently being exhibited in the exquisite space of SNGMA as part of NOW. I know that all who generously supported me in the initial production of this work in Newcastle will be delighted that new audiences can have access to its central narrative”.

Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “We are delighted to have acquired such a powerful, innovative and reflective sculptural work for Scotland’s national art collection. Borland is wholly unique in her discipline and has also been an integral feature of the third instalment of NOW, our ambitious programme of contemporary art which showcases the extraordinary quality and range of work being made by artists associated with Scotland as well as those from across the globe. So we are thrilled to ensure this poignant and thought-provoking project can become a permanent fixture of the collection”.

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

Positive Pattern will be on display in NOW at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One) until 16 September 2018.

27 August 2018
National Galleries of Scotland seeks creative partner to support ambitious vision

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) is looking for a creative partner to support our ambitious vision and help us to reach and engage more audiences and diverse groups via a refreshed brand.

A new visual identity and tone of voice across all elements of the brand will be developed in conjunction with the successful creative partner. A refreshed brand is a core part of the NGS Strategy, and will help to position NGS as inclusive, original and ambitious in an ever-evolving world.

A two-stage open process is being used to appoint a creative partner to work on this creative brand brief. The first stage of the tender process closes at 12 noon on 25 September 2018. A maximum of six submissions will be shortlisted to be taken through to the second stage. 

It is expected that a creative partner will be appointed before the end of 2018. A detailed timeline for the creative development and implementation will be developed in conjunction with the appointed creative partner. 

Jo Coomber, Director of Public Engagement at the National Galleries of Scotland said: "We have grown our visitor numbers year on year and last year attracted a record 2.5 million people and over 1.9 million visits to our website, but we know that we need to keep evolving to ensure that we continue to remain relevant". 

"We are passionate about the power of art and how it can move, inspire and inform. It has a wider transformational impact on lives though by supporting health and wellbeing, expression of thoughts and social skills. Creativity also helps to empower young people, building their self-confidence and critical thinking skills. We want to ensure that the widest possible audiences enjoy our art and activities and that we are seen as inclusive, ambitious and truly engaging and original".  

"We have undertaken significant audience research and brand strategy development work, which will be invaluable in informing this next stage in our evolution. This is an exciting opportunity for both ourselves and a creative partner to help us achieve our strategic aims." 

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

The National Galleries of Scotland cares for, develops, researches and displays the national collection of Scottish and international art and, with a lively and innovative programme of activities, exhibitions, education and publications, aims to engage, inform and inspire the broadest possible public. There are three spectacular sites in Edinburgh, which are home to Warhols and Hockneys, Botticelli and Da Vinci and, of course, the world’s greatest collection of Scottish art and photography plus much more from the Middle Ages right through to the modern day:

The Scottish National Gallery on The Mound
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery on Queen Street
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art on Belford Road

Art is also taken on tour and loaned across the UK and abroad – with art currently on loan as far afield as Australia, Japan and the US and across Europe. The entire collection is also being digitised so that it can be shared online even more widely.

The tender document can be found on the Public Contracts Scotland website.

13 August 2018
Posters, prints and Parisian bohemia take centre-stage in Toulouse-Lautrec’s first major National Galleries of Scotland show

PIN–UPS | TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
AND THE ART OF CELEBRITY
6 October 2018 – 20 January 2019
Royal Scottish Academy
Princes St, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org
Admission £11.50/£9.50 (walk in) | £10/£8 (online)
Under 25s £6.50 (walk in) /£5 (online) | Under 12s free
Free for Our Friends
#ToulouseLautrec

Sponsored by Aegon

The vibrant, bohemian atmosphere of Paris at the end of the 19th century will take centre stage in a spectacular new exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) this autumn, which focuses on extraordinary posters that heralded a revolution in design and the birth of modern celebrity culture.

Pin-Ups: Toulouse Lautrec and The Art of Celebrity is the first NGS exhibition to explore the work of one of the most innovative and popular French artists of the era known as the ‘Belle Époque’. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) was an outstanding painter, printmaker and caricaturist renowned above all for his immersion in the theatrical and celebrity culture of Paris. This exhibition will bring together around 75 posters, prints, paintings and drawings by Lautrec and contemporaries such as Pierre Bonnard, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen and Jules Chéret, the ‘father of the modern poster’. These will include many of the artist’s finest graphic artworks made for legendary nightclubs such as the Moulin Rouge and the Ambassadeurs.

The exhibition will also include the work of British artists who were drawn to the dynamic café culture of Paris, such as Walter Sickert, Arthur Melville, J D Fergusson and William Nicholson.

Lautrec has long been admired for the startlingly modern posters he designed and for his mastery of the recently developed printmaking technique of lithography. His career coincided with a revolutionary moment, just as the poster emerged as an important means of mass-marketing. Lithography and poster-making were central to his creative process from 1891, when he made his first experiments in the technique.

Paris, the 'city of pleasure’, was renowned for its cabarets, dance halls and cafés; most famous of all were the nightspots of the district of Montmartre on the edge of Paris, where Toulouse-Lautrec worked and socialised. Pin-ups will focus on the artist’s lithographic posters, portfolio prints and illustrations which made famous Montmartre’s venues and their stars – personalities such as Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril and Aristide Bruant.

Lautrec was born into aristocracy in Albi, near Toulouse in south-west France.  His parents were first cousins, which resulted in serious health problems, most notably a rare bone disorder which halted the growth of his legs and caused him to walk with a cane. Displaying great natural talent, he pursued a career as an artist, receiving training in Paris from Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon, and finding his favourite subjects – performers and women working in prostitution – in the vibrant, liberated world of bohemian Montmartre. He exhibited with the Société des Artistes Indépendants and in solo shows in Paris, Brussels and London, but secured wider success and his own celebrity through his lithographic posters.

Lautrec witnessed the Parisian demi monde as artist and observer but also as participant, and could be found every night drinking and sketching at his favourite haunts. However, his debauched lifestyle, which included regularly imbibing the notorious (and subsequently banned) spirit absinthe, eventually took its toll and from 1897 onwards his health deteriorated rapidly. Alcoholism and syphilis contributed to his early death in 1901 at the age of only thirty-six.

Pin-Ups will capture the colour and excitement of this period of economic prosperity and cultural optimism. This was a climate that gave rise to a new mass-celebrity and consumer culture and a golden age of the poster. Public enthusiasm for these images was such that they were removed from walls by collectors, sometimes as soon as they were put up, a process that transformed ephemeral advertising to a collectable form of fine art which bridged ‘high’ and popular culture for the first time.

A highlight of the exhibition is the iconic poster Moulin Rouge - La Goulue (1891), on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. A landmark in Lautrec’s career, this was the first poster he designed and was his earliest experiment with colour lithography. Some 3000 copies of the poster, which advertised the dancer ‘La Goulue’ performing at the Moulin Rouge, were pasted across the streets of Paris, turning Lautrec from a virtually unknown artist to a household name literally overnight.

The exhibition will also include a selection of posters by Jules Chéret, whose pioneering designs – characterised by their bright colours and inclusion of glamourous stars – were the first to bring real artistry to the advertising industry. On display will be one of his most famous designs, his poster for the American dancer Loïe Fuller, who took Paris by storm when she debuted at the Folies-Bergère in 1892.

Lautrec’s 1892 poster for the nightclub singer and poet Aristide Bruant has become one of the most memorable and frequently reproduced images of the era. A savvy self-promoter, Bruant was one of the first stars to enlist Lautrec to market his act and went on to give the artist more commissions than any other performer. Lautrec’s promotion of the singer made him recognisable across the whole city – so many copies of the poster were pasted on the streets it was said to be impossible to ‘take a step without finding yourself face to face with it’.

Another iconic poster on display in Pin-Ups is Tournée du Chat Noir avec Rodolphe Sali by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen. Featuring the bold silhouette of the black cat that gave the celebrated Montmartre nightclub its name, the poster has become one of the most recognisable commercial images of all time.

Christopher Baker, Director of European and Scottish Art and Portraiture at the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “This fascinating exhibition provides an opportunity to taste the decadence and visual richness of culture in late nineteenth-century Paris. The elegance and inventiveness of Toulouse-Lautrec’s brilliant designs which helped transform contemporary performers into stars and have an enduring appeal will be set in the wider context of his contemporaries’ riveting work.”

Aegon chief executive, Adrian Grace said: “Collaboration between businesses like Aegon and the cultural sector is a great way of making modern visual art widely accessible. Bringing the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition to Edinburgh allows visitors to be engaged and inspired by some wonderful works of art and we are delighted to be able to support this.”

Publications

Pin-Ups: Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art of Celebrity is published by National Galleries of Scotland Publishing on the occasion of this exhibition.

Pin-Ups: Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art of Celebrity
Hannah Brocklehurst and Frances Fowle
120pp; 100 colour illustrations; Paperback; £19.95; ISBN 978 1 911054 21 4

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

Pin Ups: Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art of Celebrity-related events can be found via this link here.

31 July 2018
Portrait of Scottish superstar Calvin Harris to enter nation’s art collection

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) is absolutely delighted to announce it has acquired a portrait of one of the most successful and influential music artists working today, the Scottish songwriter and DJ Calvin Harris.
The photographic portrait will be the first image of Harris to enter the NGS collection and will go on display immediately in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG) in Edinburgh.

The internationally known musician – real name Adam Richard Wiles (b. 1984) – was photographed by the English photographer Paul Stuart (b. 1971) as part of a commission by GQ Italia magazine in February 2015.

The large chromogenic print shows Harris seated on a trestle table, his profile diagonal to the camera, his hands resting on his lap and sleeves rolled up. Stuart has captured the artist looking deeply thoughtful yet poised.

As Calvin Harris, the Scot has achieved remarkable success as a DJ, singer, songwriter, record producer, model and entrepreneur. Born in Dumfries, he first began making demos in his bedroom in 1999, before going on to release his first single at the age of 18. Harris' sound is predominantly inspired by music from the 1980s, along with groups such as Jamiroquai and Fatboy Slim. In 2010 he launched his own record label Fly Eye Records.

Harris became one of the most popular artists in the world, accruing recognition at the very highest level, with Grammy, Ivor Novello and MTV Europe Music awards among his accolades. Harris is also the highest-paid DJ in the world, a title he has held since 2013, and has broken numerous long-standing records in the UK and American music charts. He recently extended a deal to be resident DJ at a nightclub within Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas until 2020.Closer to home, the DJ has a massive following in his native Scotland, regularly headlining music festivals and selling-out standalone appearances in minutes.

The photographer Paul Stuart was born in West Sussex and studied at the University of Wales, Newport from where he obtained a first class degree in documentary photography. He is now based in London and specialises in portraiture, with his photographs regularly appearing in publications such as GQ, The Guardian and the Sunday Times; his work is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London.

While Stuart has exhibited work as part of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize that was displayed at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in spring 2016, this will be the first of his photographs to be represented in the permanent collection.

Christopher Baker, Director, European and Scottish Art and Portraiture at the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “Calvin Harris has made a remarkable contribution to music both in Scotland and globally over the last decade and we are absolutely delighted to have him represented in Scotland’s national collection. Few artists can equal the impact he has made on contemporary culture, and Paul Stuart’s portrait is a reflective, exceptional image which the many visitors to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery will now be able to enjoy”.

Paul Stuart said: "I found Calvin to be thoughtful and considerate and at 6ft 5’ he is also physically striking. In contrast to his profession, I am interested in silence to create an atmosphere. It is an honour to have my work included in the National Galleries of Scotland”.

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

The portrait of Calvin Harris by Paul Stuart is on display in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery now.

Paul Stuart’s website can be found here: www.paulstuart.co.uk

24 July 2018
First portrait of HRH The Prince Charles, Duke of Rothesay, to enter Scotland’s national art collection

A stunning new portrait of HRH The Prince Charles, Duke of Rothesay, will be unveiled in the Great Hall of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG) in Edinburgh today (Tuesday 24 July 2018).

The portrait, painted in oil on linen, is the work of the distinguished artist Victoria Crowe and was painted at Birkhall on the Balmoral Estate in Royal Deeside, Aberdeenshire, Scotland earlier this year. This is the first portrait of the Duke of Rothesay to enter the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) collection.

Victoria Crowe OBE FRSE RSA (b.1945) is a widely admired artist whose practice encompasses portraiture, still life and landscapes. Portraits by her are included in a number of major public and private collections, including that of the National Galleries of Scotland.

The first major exhibition of Crowe’s portraits, Victoria Crowe: Beyond Likeness, which is now on show at the SNPG, will be a highlight of the 2018 Edinburgh Art Festival programme, which opens this week and runs until 26 August. Victoria Crowe: Beyond Likeness will continue until 18 November.

Crowe often uses objects and other personal symbols and sympathetic settings to evoke the personalities of her sitters, and the resulting portraits are richly layered with personal resonance and meaning. Numerous prominent cultural figures, ranging from actors, authors, publishers, composers and scientists, including Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Higgs, composer Thea Musgrave and astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell are among the sitters whose portraits are included in Beyond Likeness.

Victoria Crowe commented on her new portrait of The Duke of Rothesay: “This commission was a very great pleasure… I had four sittings at Birkhall. The first visit was intensely vivid, with beautiful light on the landscape, thick snow around and plummeting temperatures. His Royal Highness was extremely relaxed and generous during the sittings and we talked about painting, the Royal Drawing School and shared interests, as well as attitudes to conservation and ecology. The more we spoke the more I realised the importance Birkhall and the sanctuary it had provided. So, the landscape element of the painting became very specific. I felt that so much of his thinking was rooted in a deep love of the natural world… and indelibly linked with a philosophy of respect and sustainability. I was not painting a symbol of power or establishment but an engaging, thoughtful and sympathetic human being. Because of time constraints, I had to paint as directly as possible... no time for many sketches”.

Christopher Baker, Director of European and Scottish Art and Portraiture at the National Galleries of Scotland said: “We are delighted with this new portrait for the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland. It is a deeply thoughtful and sensitive portrayal of His Royal Highness and encompasses all the subtlety, insight and delight in painterly effects that Victoria Crowe’s work is rightly renowned for. It also perfectly complements the experience of seeing her impressive exhibition currently at the Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. ”

—ENDS—

17 July 2018
Exceptional portrait with an extraordinary history is first painting by Leonora Carrington in Scottish national art collection

This new addition to the collection has been purchased with assistance from the Henry and Sula Walton Fund and Art Fund

A mysterious and powerful portrait by the celebrated Surrealist painter, sculptor and writer Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) has become the first work by the artist to enter the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS), it was announced today. Carrington painted Portrait of Max Ernst about 1939, two years after she left a privileged but stifling life in England to join the inner circle of the Surrealist movement in Paris.

Carrington’s painting depicts the German artist Max Ernst (1891-1976), who became her lover in 1937, and with whom she escaped to France that same year.

The painting is one of Carrington’s most famous works, and has an extraordinary history. By December 1942, following a series of upheavals caused by the outbreak of war, Carrington had become estranged from Ernst and was on her way to Mexico, where she spent much of the rest of her life. She and Ernst met in New York, and as a parting gift she presented him with this portrait. In exchange he gave her a painting titled Leonora in the Morning Light, which remained in her possession until her death in 2011. They never saw each other again.

Speaking of the acquisition, Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland said: “The NGS has one of largest and most significant collections of Surrealist art anywhere in the world, but until now we have not had a painting by Leonora Carrington. This extraordinary portrait of Max Ernst is one of her most celebrated works, and is richly woven with imagery which hints at her complex and ambivalent feelings about her lover and fellow-artist. We are deeply grateful to the Trustees of the Henry and Sula Walton Fund, and Art Fund, for helping us to make this stunning addition to our collection.”

Stephen Deuchar, Director, Art Fund, said: “Leonora Carrington’s striking Portrait of Max Ernst is the National Galleries of Scotland’s latest addition to their growing collection of important works by women Surrealist artists, joining the recent Art Fund-supported acquisition by Czech artist Toyen. Both are powerful, haunting works by remarkable artists, overlooked for far too long. We’re delighted to be supporting bold and imaginative curatorship of this kind.”

Carrington was born in Chorley, Lancashire, the daughter of a wealthy textiles industrialist. A rebellious child, she was twice expelled from school in England, and was sent to Florence and then Paris, where she developed an interest in art. She returned to Britain in 1935, where her family expected her to marry ‘well’; fiercely independent, she had other ideas.

While studying painting in London, Carrington met Ernst at a dinner party and they fell in love. She had only just turned 20; he was 46 and on his second marriage. They immediately started a relationship and when Ernst returned to Paris, Carrington joined him. Their circle in Paris included the artists Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Leonor Fini and Joan Miró, and in January 1938 Carrington’s paintings were shown in a major Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts.

In 1938, with war looming, the couple moved to the south of France, settling in the village of Saint-Martin d’Ardèche, near Avignon. Portrait of Max Ernst was painted in Les Alliberts, a derelict farmhouse which they spent the next year decorating with murals, sculpture and mosaics (it still exists, more or less intact).

Ernst, with his prematurely white hair and piercing blue eyes, is shown in a red robe made of fur or downy feathers, which ends in a fishtail – possibly referencing the mermaid Ernst made in concrete for their garden. In the painting, one of Ernst’s feet is clad in a striped yellow sock. In his right hand he is holding a green lantern within which is a tiny horse. He is standing in a frozen landscape, with icy mountains on the horizon. A frozen horse, dripping with icicles, stands behind him.

The painting’s meaning is ambiguous, but while Carrington refused to interpret or explain her work, her short stories, several of which were published in the late 1930s and 1940s, offer clues. Horses were important in her writing and her paintings, acting as surrogate self-portraits; it has been argued that her portrait of Ernst captures some of the ambivalence in their relationship, a sense of being emotionally captive and the need to escape Ernst’s shadow.

In 1940 Ernst was imprisoned as an enemy alien, and Carrington was persuaded by a friend to flee France for Spain, where she ended up in an psychiatric hospital. On his release, Ernst was shocked to discover the house had been sold; by night he gained entry and retrieved the few paintings left there, including this work, and later made his way to Lisbon where by chance he met Carrington. She had escaped from the hospital and made a marriage of convenience with a Mexican diplomat, in order to travel to America. Although he had taken a new lover, the American collector Peggy Guggenheim, Ernst was devastated that Carrington had effectively left him. He flew to New York with Peggy, while Carrington went by sea, with most of their possessions.

Following the exchange of paintings in New York, Portrait of Max Ernst subsequently passed into the collection of Pegeen Guggenheim, Peggy’s daughter. She gave it to her husband, the British artist Ralph Rumney, and it has been in private collections ever since.

This exceptional painting makes a very significant addition to the NGS’s world-famous collection of Surrealist art, which already includes a number of important works by Ernst.

—ENDS—

Notes to Editors

Breakdown of funding for the acquisition:
Henry and Sula Walton Fund: £310,000
Art Fund: £150,000
National Galleries of Scotland: £100,000

TOTAL: £560,000

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 139,000 members who receive the National Art Pass and enjoy free entry to over 320 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 Tate St Ives in 2018) and a range of digital platforms.

Find out more about Art Fund and the National Art Pass at www.artfund.org

29 June 2018
Monarch of the Glen returns to Scottish National Gallery after landmark nationwide tour

#MonarchOfTheGlen

One of the world’s most celebrated paintings – Sir Edwin Landseer’s iconic The Monarch of the Glen (c.1851) – has returned to the Scottish National Gallery after completing its historic tour of Scotland.

Landseer’s masterpiece – famously depicting a proud stag imperiously surveying a Highlands landscape – arrives back in Scotland’s capital city after travelling across the nation, with the public now having enjoyed the painting in major art galleries and community events in the east, west, north, south and centre of the country.

It will be welcomed back in the capital city this Saturday (30 June) with a special event in celebration of both the work and the tour, featuring performances from young poets and dancers from Paisley and Edinburgh schools.

Across its tour The Monarch of the Glen was seen by over 28,000 visitors, from those in galleries to schoolchildren engaging with the artwork in various communities. Additionally, the Inverness, Paisley and Perth galleries all experienced double their average visitor figures from the previous year (Kirkcudbright Galleries was a brand new venue).

The artwork was acquired last year by the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) after a well-publicized fundraising campaign, 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.

It is the Galleries’ ambition to share its collection widely and work in partnership with communities across Scotland, and the Monarch’s tour has been supported with additional funding from The National Lottery and the Scottish Government.

Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland said: “This tour was a massive thank you for the remarkable support we received during the fundraising campaign, as well as being a celebration that this brilliant, widely recognised artwork now belongs to the people of Scotland. Thanks to The National Lottery and the Scottish Government’s generosity, the Monarch has been able to visit Scottish communities far and wide, where audiences have been able to admire, debate and greatly engage with the work. The celebration of its homecoming to Edinburgh is also a celebration of the whole tour’s great success”.

Last October the Monarch left the Scottish National Gallery for the Scottish Highlands and its first destination, Inverness. The work went on display in Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, and was shown alongside a thought-provoking response by celebrated contemporary artist Ross Sinclair, entitled ‘After After After The Monarch of the Glen, Real Life Is Dead’ (2017).

It then left the north for Perth Museum and Art Gallery, but not before making a special surprise stop nearby in Aberfeldy, where school pupils of the local Breadalbane Academy could enjoy the painting in the back of the Galleries’ art-moving truck, in its specially adapted travelling frame. The idea for the visit was inspired by an old sketch for BBC Scotland’s programme Chewin’ the Fat, created by comedians Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill. The latter gave the visit his public backing and described it as, “his proudest moment”.

In January this year it arrived in the east of Scotland with a special community visit to Arkleston Primary School in Renfrewshire before being welcomed at Paisley Museum and Art Gallery in an event attended by schoolchildren and featuring special performances by contemporary dancers inspired by the work itself.

The tour then culminated in Scotland’s south in the town of Kirkcudbright, helping to usher in the beginning of the redeveloped Kirkcudbright Galleries, which opened on the same day as the painting was unveiled to the public. Prior to this, the painting also made a stop to Gatehouse of Fleet Primary School for a special community event.

Later this year, the Monarch will be shown in the London’s National Gallery for the first time in more than 160 years. The gallery once housed the Royal Academy of Arts, the original setting in which the painting received its first ever showing back in 1851. On display in London alongside Landseer’s masterpiece will be artist Sir Peter Blake’s 1966 representation of the Monarch.

Stephen Deuchar, Director of Art Fund, said: “We are pleased to hear that following its tour of venues across Scotland Edwin Landseer’s masterpiece The Monarch of the Glen has returned to its permanent home at the Scottish National Gallery. Art Fund’s support for this important acquisition was the starting point for a public fundraising appeal which captured the imagination of people nationwide, and its success means this powerful and iconic painting can now be enjoyed by everyone for years to come”.

—ENDS—

For further information please contact:
Michael Gormley, Communications Manager, National Galleries of Scotland. 0131 624 6247 | [email protected]
Harris Brine, Communications Officer, National Galleries of Scotland. 0131 624 6332. | [email protected]

Notes to Editors:

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 139,000 members who receive the National Art Pass and enjoy free entry to over 320 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 Hepworth Wakefield in 2017) 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 Emma Phillips, [email protected] / 0207 225 4804

20 June 2018
Four centuries of Rembrandt’s impact on Britain explored as the Dutch master comes to Scottish National Gallery

Press view:  11.30–13.00, 5 July 2018
Royal Scottish Academy, Princes St, Edinburgh EH2 2EL

REMBRANDT
BRITAIN’S DISCOVERY OF THE MASTER
7 July – 14 October 2018
Royal Scottish Academy
Princes St, Edinburgh EH2 2EL
0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org
#Rembrandt
Tickets £15.00 to £10.00
Concessions available | FREE to children under 12

Supported by the Friends of the National Galleries of Scotland and Players of the People’s Postcode Lottery.

Part of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2018

Britain’s love affair with one of history’s greatest artists will be explored in the major Festival exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery this summer. Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master is the first exhibition to tell the exceptionally rich story of how Rembrandt’s work in Britain has enraptured and inspired collectors, artists and writers over the past 400 years. This major new exhibition, which will only be shown in Edinburgh, will bring together key works by Rembrandt which remain in British collections, as well as treasures that have left the country. Some of the exhibits have never been on public display before, while others return to Britain for the first time in decades, some after even a century or more.

Speaking of the exhibition, Christopher Baker, Director, European and Scottish Art and Portraiture at National Galleries of Scotland, said: “This exhibition provides an extraordinary opportunity to study the staggering range of Rembrandt’s achievement and its profound impact on British taste and art. Featuring both major international loans and many less well-known rarities, it tells a riveting story. From the collectors of the artist’s own life time in the seventeenth century to today’s painters, Rembrandt has cast a spell on the British imagination. It’s a tale of scholarship and money, of privilege and popularity – and it’s all laid out exclusively in Edinburgh this summer!

For the first time, we’ll be offering a range of new ticket options, including off-peak prices, which we hope will allow as many people as possible to experience Rembrandt’s inspiring work.”

The genius of Rembrandt (1606-69) is so universally admired, and his imagery so ubiquitous, that he has become a global brand like few other artists in history; yet no nation has demonstrated such a passionate, and sometimes eccentric, enthusiasm for Rembrandt’s (or indeed any artist’s) works. As a result, there is a wealth of paintings, drawings and prints by Rembrandt in British collections, and the number of his works that have been here at some point in their history is staggering, surpassing any other country apart from the Netherlands, where they originated.

The arrival of an early Self-portrait (c.1629), which was presented to Charles I before 1633, makes an impressive starting point for the exhibition (it was the first painting by Rembrandt to leave Holland), but did little to anticipate the level of adulation his work would inspire in the following century and which had become a kind of mania among British collectors around 1750. Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery Of The Master will bring together 15 major works in oil (and two further oils attributed to Rembrandt, and two more from his workshop), as well as an extensive selection of 15 outstanding 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).

Great paintings such as Belshazzar’s Feast (c.1636-38) from the National Gallery London, and Girl at a Window (1645) from Dulwich Picture Gallery, will be shown alongside star works that are 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.

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 son of a miller, Rembrandt was born and trained in Leiden, where he spent his early career. From 1631 he also worked in Amsterdam, mainly as a portrait painter, and he settled there permanently in 1634. Rembrandt married the same year and enjoyed a success as painter and printmaker, covering a wide range of subjects and receiving important private and public commissions. He oversaw a busy workshop with many pupils. Rembrandt nevertheless ran into financial difficulties – most likely due to an enormous mortgage on his house and substantial expenditure on his art collection – and was declared insolvent in 1656. After his large house and possessions had been sold, he continued to work in Amsterdam until his death. Contrary to what is widely believed, Rembrandt did not die in poverty, although he never again prospered as he had done at the height of his career.

Among the early arrivals in Britain were Rembrandt’s only portraits of ‘British’ sitters, Reverend Johannes Elison and his wife Maria Bockenolle (both 1634), which will be on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Although they were painted in Amsterdam, the Boston portraits depict a Dutch couple who lived in Norwich, and the paintings were in Britain by 1680. Such expensive and ostentatious portraits are uncommon for clerics, and rare in Rembrandt’s work; they presumably reflect the status of the couple’s son, a successful merchant, who probably commissioned them. They are one of only three pairs of full-length portraits painted by Rembrandt, and have not been seen in the UK since 1929.

A few years after the visit from the Norwich minister and his wife, Rembrandt was again busy exploring English subjects. A group of four drawings depicting English views has been much debated and is exhibited here together for the first time. The drawings, in which the locations – St Albans Cathedral, Windsor Castle and London with Old St Paul’s – are clearly identifiable, are of similar size and executed in pen, brown ink and wash. On stylistic grounds all four drawings must have been created in Rembrandt’s studio in about 1640, but controversies have centred around the questions of whether they are (all) by the hand of Rembrandt, and if they were drawn from prints or ‘from life’, which would infer, tantalisingly, that Rembrandt might have visited England.

From about 1720, the steady flow of major paintings by Rembrandt, such as the beautiful and tender Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1647) (which will be on loan to this exhibition from the National Gallery in Dublin), grew into an enormous surge. By the 1770s Rembrandt mania was in full swing, pushing demand and prices to extraordinary levels. Even so, British collectors still succeeded in bringing prized pictures into the country, including An Old Woman Reading (1655), on loan here from the Buccleuch collection, and A Woman in Bed (Sarah) (1647), which is now in the National Galleries of Scotland.

The publication in 1752 of a catalogue of Rembrandt’s etchings gave collectors a tool to identify different states or versions of the artist’s prints, as well as copies and forgeries. At the same time, it fuelled the craze for rarities such as corrected proof prints and impressions on exotic papers. To meet this desire for the uncommon, those who were fortunate enough to have access to Rembrandt’s original etching plates pulled new editions, sometimes creating collectors’ items that Rembrandt himself never produced; for example, impressions on satin or in red ink, such as Portrait of the Preacher Jan Cornelis Sylvius (1633) in the NGS collection. Reprints and copies catered to the huge demand for Rembrandt’s etchings in a competitive market. Captain William Baillie infamously acquired the worn plate of The Hundred Guilder Print, one of Rembrandt’s most famous etchings. He reworked it and in 1775 printed a limited edition, thereafter cutting the plate into four pieces and continuing to print from these mutilated fragments.

The impact of the massively enhanced exposure to Rembrandt’s imagery on artists in Britain was profound. The Dutch artist’s portraits and self-portraits in particular inspired British painters from William Hogarth, Thomas Hudson, Joseph Wright of Derby and Allan Ramsay to Sir Henry Raeburn and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Above all, it was Sir Joshua Reynolds who appreciated Rembrandt as an artist, writer and collector. His Rembrandt collection was one of the most distinguished in Britain, including prized paintings such as A Man in Armour (‘Achilles’) (1655), on loan here from Glasgow Museums. The strongest impact on Reynolds as a portraitist lasted from about 1745 to about 1770. His Portrait of Giuseppe Marchi (1753) (Royal Academy of Arts, London), and his Self-portrait from around the same time (Tate), both show strong chiaroscuro combined with warm colouring and – in the former – fancy oriental costume, all reminiscent of Rembrandt’s paintings.

In the early nineteenth century, British landscape painters also began to fall under Rembrandt’s spell. A major catalyst for this was the acquisition by a group of British collectors of The Mill (1645/48), which will be lent by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and had been in the celebrated collection of the Duc d’Orléans. The Mill epitomises the Dutch artist’s influence on British landscape painting throughout the nineteenth century, starting with Turner, John Crome and John Constable.

The Victorian era also brought major shifts in the reception of Rembrandt’s art, thanks to the founding of public galleries, and the creation of exhibitions. The introduction of cheap reproduction techniques permitted an unprecedented popularisation. Rembrandt’s reputation also transformed, as a romantic image of him gained currency and he became, in the public imagination, a universally celebrated genius. Ultimately, Rembrandt himself became the subject in art and popular culture: with artists such as John Gilbert producing sumptuous paintings depicting imaginary scenes from his life.

Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, Rembrandt continued to represent the gold standard for etching revival artists, including the Scots James McBey, Sir David Young Cameron, Sir Muirhead Bone and William Strang. Their moody landscapes were much in fashion among specialist print collectors and fetched huge prices in Europe and America (some sold for higher prices than many original Rembrandts). This allowed printmakers like Cameron to become collectors of Rembrandt prints themselves (Cameron’s bequest of 55 outstanding etchings to the NGS transformed its holdings), but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the global financial collapse which ensued brought about a parallel collapse in the print market.

Rembrandt was also profoundly relevant for the artists of the ‘School of London’ group, which emerged in the 1950s. Among them Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, who have been close friends for more than 60 years, have copied Rembrandt voraciously. Works by both artists based on Rembrandt’s celebrated A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654) in the National Gallery collections, will feature here, as will Rembrandt’s painting itself.

Many others have borrowed from Rembrandt in recent years. John Bellany, for example, did so in direct homages such as Danae: Homage to Rembrandt II (1991). Other, younger artists have viewed Rembrandt in a way that may seem cynical or disrespectful but which turns out to be the opposite. Glenn Brown has made painted, drawn and etched variants after Rembrandt since 1996, in works such as Unknown Pleasures (2016) and Half-Life (after Rembrandt) (2017), which offer a vibrant but deeply felt homage.

Clara Govier, Managing Director of People’s Postcode Lottery, said: “We are thrilled that, together with the Friends of the National Galleries of Scotland, players of People’s Postcode Lottery are supporting this beautiful exhibition. Like Rembrandt, PPL is a popular export from the Netherlands; our British players have now helped us to raise £310m for charities across the UK. We hope this once-in-a-lifetime show will be enjoyed by visitors from across the world, and we’re proud that the support of our Players has helped the National Galleries of Scotland to bring this ambitious project together.”

Publications

Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master and Rembrandt & Britain are published by National Galleries of Scotland Publishing on the occasion of this exhibition.

Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master
Christian Tico Seifert with Peter Black, Stephanie S. Dickey, Patrick Elliott, Donato Esposito, M.J. Ripps and Jonathan Yarker
176pp; 140 illustrations; Paperback; £22; ISBN 978 1 911054 19 1

Rembrandt & Britain
Christian Tico Seifert
36pp; 26 illustrations; Paperback; £7.95; ISBN 978 1 911054 26 9

—ENDS—

12 June 2018
The Remaking of Scotland: new display explores how Scotland's place in the world dramatically transformed from 1760-1860​

The Remaking of Scotland:
Nation, Migration, Globalisation 1760- 1860
16 June 2018 – 27 June 2021
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#ScotPortrait

A dynamic new exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG) explores how Scotland’s place in the world was dramatically transformed after the mid-eighteenth century, as the country emerged as a leader of European cultural life and a major force in Britain’s industrial and imperial expansion. The Remaking of Scotland: Nation, Migration, Globalisation 1760-1860 will trace this remarkable transformation through the many extraordinary personalities who contributed to this turning point in Scottish history, bringing together a range of fascinating paintings, sculptures and drawings from the National Galleries of Scotland’s outstanding collection. 

As well as tracing the changes that took place within Scotland in the areas of science, technology and literature, it will also look beyond Scotland’s borders to highlight the many Scots who ventured further afield—as soldiers, sailors, administrators, artists, missionaries, and adventurers. Their destinations ranged across the world, and the exhibition will showcase work featuring Scots with close relationships to India, the Americas and Arctic, as well as the Caribbean.

Among the portraits on display is a captivating new acquisition – a portrait of the lawyer Sir Thomas Strange (1756-1841) by the fashionable London painter John Hoppner. Strange was the son of a Scottish engraver, and spent his entire career abroad, first in Nova Scotia, Canada, and then in India. While in Nova Scotia he used his position as Chief Justice to protect runaway slaves from their masters. In India, he helped create the fusion between British Common Law and Hindu traditions that would be the foundation of the modern Indian legal system. Hoppner’s characterful portrait gives a vivid sense of Strange’s intelligence and fair-mindedness. Strange’s portrait will be shown with a number of other paintings highlighting the relationships between Scotland and India at this time, including Scottish artist George Willison’s dramatic portrait of his Indian patron, Ali Khan Waledjah, Nawab of Arcot (1717-1795).

Other highlights of the display include Alexander Nasmyth’s portrayal of John Sakeouse (1792-1819), the first arctic Inuit to travel to Scotland. Sakeouse attained instant celebrity from the moment he arrived in Leith in 1816 as a stowaway on a whaling ship, and was particularly famous for his remarkable canoeing and harpooning skills, which he demonstrated at the docks. Nasmyth painted the portrait after spotting Sakeouse on the street, and went on to give him drawing lessons. Sakeouse became an indispensable member of Admiral John Ross’s arctic expedition of 1817-18, acting as a translator and artist. Fittingly, Sakeouse will be shown alongside a portrait of Ross, one of the great explorers of his time and one of the first Scots of the period to be represented in the collections of the SNPG.

In addition to documenting the material and cultural benefits that came from this period of unprecedented achievement, the display will also consider some abhorrent contemporary issues.  A particularly important theme is Scotland’s extensive involvement in the plantation economy of the Caribbean, and its dependence on slave labour.  Many Scots went to the Caribbean in the hope of making their fortunes, becoming plantation and slave owners on a large scale. Meanwhile, Scottish merchants in the great ports of Glasgow and Leith maintained a vast West Indies trade, importing slave-produced sugar, rum and tobacco. Some became hugely wealthy, but they were only the most prosperous of the thousands of Scots who enjoyed secure incomes from plantation investments. Others, however, were inspired by religious and moral convictions to oppose the appalling human cost of the slave trade. In the face of fierce resistance, abolitionists, including the prominent Scottish liberal lawyer and politician, Lord Brougham (1778-1868)—also featured in the display—finally brought slavery to an end in 1838.

Warfare, too, was a constant feature of life in this period, as Britain’s imperial interests involved the many Scottish soldiers and sailors in the British armed forces in bloody land and sea battles. Two spectacular full-length portraits of soldiers in full Highland Dress, John Singleton Copley’s Hugh Montgomerie, 12th Earl of Eglinton (who served in the French and Indian War of 1754-63) and Sir Joshua Reynolds’s John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore (made Governor of New York in 1770 and then of Virginia in 1771), show how the cost of war to life and health was made acceptable by the glory of victory.

Taken together, these diverse works give a vivid portrait of the richly complex, and sometimes controversial, legacies of this remarkable period, both at home in Scotland and across the wider world.

—ENDS—

29 May 2018
Navigating land, sea and air through the ages of photography at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES: TRANSPORTATION PHOTOGRAPHS
FROM THE NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND 
2 June 2018 – 13 January 2019
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#PlanesAndTrains

Part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2018

The extraordinary advances in the technology of travel over the past 170 years, and their wide-ranging impact on our lives will be the subject of a dramatic and inspiring new exhibition of photographs at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG) this summer. Planes, Trains and Automobiles will draw upon the outstanding collection of the National Galleries of Scotland to consider the rapid expansion of transportation from the end of the Industrial Revolution to the present day. It will feature 70 exceptional images, including key images by Alfred G Buckham and Alfred Stieglitz, which demonstrate how the technologies of photography and transport have evolved in tandem, each of them broadening our horizons and radically altering our perception of our ever-shrinking world.

The exhibition will include iconic photographs such as The Steerage, a career-defining image by the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), made in 1907, while he was travelling to Europe by sea; and Inge Morath’s striking portrait Mrs Eveleigh Nash, The Mall, London (1953). Walking on the first-class deck, Stieglitz looked down into the third-class steerage area below him. Immediately struck by the strength of the composition created by the group of travellers gathered there, he quickly retrieved his camera, and captured the jarring class divide. Celebrated both for its modernist composition and its social commentary, the resulting photograph is one of the most recognisable images in the history of photography. Similarly, Morath (1923-2002), one of the first female photographers to work for renowned photo agency Magnum, used the door frame of an open-topped car to artfully divide her composition, suggesting the social gulf between the wealthy Mrs Nash and her chauffeur.

One of aerial photography’s pioneers was Alfred G Buckham (1879-1956) who took breath-taking photographs in the skies above Edinburgh. Just as fascinating as his photographs, are Buckham’s dare-devil techniques to capture the perfect shot. He gave this sage advice to budding aerial photographers: ‘It is essential to stand up, not only to make the exposures but to see what is coming along ahead. If one’s right leg is tied to the seat with a scarf or a piece of rope, it is possible to work in perfect security’. Buckham also pioneered early layering of multiple negatives to create the perfect shot giving his photographs an ethereal, otherworldly quality.

The Industrial Revolution led to the rapid expansion of the railways, which had a huge impact on the way that people lived and worked and led to the expansion of many towns and cities. As early as 1845, the railway line in Linlithgow was photographed by David Octavius Hill (1802-70) and Robert Adamson (1821-48), who travelled by train to document the main sights of the town.

The Forth Bridge was the longest bridge in the world when it opened in 1890 and it is now widely regarded as a symbol of Scottish innovation and cultural identity. Radical in style, materials and scale, it marked an important milestone in bridge design and construction during the period when railways came to dominate long-distance land travel. Evelyn George Carey (1858-1932), a young engineer working on the construction of the bridge, made an incredible series of photographs as the building work progressed. In one of these photographs Carey records the amusing sight of two men demonstrating the cantilever principle – resulting in the boy sitting at the centre of the ‘bridge’ being lifted into the air. This series of photographs inspired the German contemporary photographer Dieter Appelt (b.1935) to make Forth Bridge - Cinema. Metric Space – a photographic montage of 312 separate silver gelatine prints which together offer a beautiful, lyrical interpretation of an engineering masterpiece.

Another innovation explored in Planes, Trains and Automobiles is the Victorian phenomenon of the stereograph. Made of two nearly identical scenes, which when viewed together in a special device, create a single three-dimensional image; this new photographic technology essentially mimicked how we see the world. It sparked curiosity and encouraged the public to view images of far-flung places from the comfort of their own home. The natural association between travel and transport meant that modes of transport were one of the most popular themes for stereographs. This exhibition will feature over 100 stereographs from the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection in a dynamic wall display, alongside digital interpretations.

524 million journeys were made by public transport in Scotland last year and Planes, Trains and Automobiles explores this common form of travel. Photographers have been repeatedly drawn to the theme of commuting, fascinated by its ability to show humanity in movement, following regulated routes to work. Among these are documentary photographers Humphrey Spender (1910-2005) and Larry Herman (b.1942) who both made work observing Glasgow and Glasweigians on their daily commute.

From photographs of the iconic Forth Bridge to images of commuting, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is a photographic celebration of transportation in all its forms.

​Christopher Baker, Director, European and Scottish Art and Portraiture, National Galleries of Scotland, said:  “This is the third in a hugely popular series of thematic exhibitions drawn entirely from the outstanding collection of photography held by the National Galleries of Scotland. The carefully selected photographs on display show how technology and transport have impacted on so many aspects of our lives and provided such a rich and thought-provoking focus for outstanding Scottish and international photographers, from very earliest days of the medium to today’s innovators.”

—ENDS—

25 May 2018
New gallery bus for National Galleries of Scotland is Scotland's first fully accessible electric bus of its kind

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) is to launch a new, fully accessible electric bus – the first of its kind in public service in Scotland – on its much-loved shuttle service between its three main Edinburgh sites. The zero-emissions Orion E bus, is the Scotland’s first fully electric, fully low floor bus, and has been designed for maximum accessibility.

The NGS comprises the Scottish National Gallery, in the heart of Edinburgh’s world heritage site, the nearby Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which is located in Edinburgh’s leafy west-end. The popular daily shuttle service for gallery goers links the three sites, operating on a circular route throughout the day, seven days a week.

The NGS Orion E, in its eye-catching new livery, will be officially commissioned on Monday 28 May.

Commenting, NGS Sustainability Officer, Brian Troddyn said:
“We’re delighted and proud to have the first bus of this kind in Scotland, specially designed with a low floor for wheelchair access. NGS is very committed to promoting green tourism, and reducing our carbon emissions is an important part of achieving our goals. We look forward to welcoming visitors on board and being accessible to all.”

The Orion E is built by Mellor, a leading manufacturer of small buses and specialist passenger-carrying vehicles. It combines an environmentally friendly all-electric drive system with class-leading step entry and flat floor throughout, making it both accessible and versatile.

With a range of 100 miles on the super-efficient LiFe PO4 batteries, the Orion E is also incredibly economical to run – it’s estimated that it will cost only £500 in electricity per year with a saving of around £1,420 in fuel and tax each year. The introduction of the bus will result in an annual saving of 3.0 t CO2 carbon emissions.
—ENDS—

Note to editors
Bus by Mellor Coachcraft www.mellor-coachcraft.co.uk. The Orion E provides accessible and versatile transport for all with its step entry and a flat floor throughout.

National Galleries of Scotland

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) looks after one of the world's finest collections of Western art, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present day, including masterpieces by Titian, Rembrandt, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso and Magritte. These holdings include the national collection of Scottish art, which is displayed in an international context. Every year, the NGS welcomes over 2.2 million visitors from Scotland and the rest of the world to our three Galleries in Edinburgh: the Scottish National Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

The Scottish National Gallery is home to our collection of fine art from the early Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century, including masterpieces by Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Constable, Turner, Monet, Van Gogh and Gauguin, amongst many others. The most comprehensive part of the collection covers the history of Scottish painting with all the major names represented, including Ramsay, Raeburn, Wilkie and McTaggart.

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art comprises two buildings, Modern One and Modern Two, which house our outstanding collection of modern and contemporary art. The early part of the collection features French and Russian art from the beginning of the twentieth century, Cubist paintings and superb holdings of Expressionist, modern British and international post-war art. The gallery is a world-renowned centre for the study of Dada and Surrealism and home to the world's most important and extensive collection of modern and contemporary Scottish art.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery first opened to the public in 1889 as the world’s first purpose-built portrait gallery. Over the past century, its collection of portraits has grown to become one of the largest and finest in the world, comprising 3,000 paintings and sculptures, 25,000 prints and drawings. The Gallery tells the story of Scotland through the people who have shaped its history – past and present, famous or forgotten. This distinctive red sandstone building also houses the national collection of photography, with some 38,000 historic and modern photographs and film.

22 May 2018
Spectacular rare portrait of last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, is loaned to National Galleries of Scotland

A highly accomplished and vibrant portrait of the last Tsar of Russia, in the uniform of The Royal Scots Greys, has been placed on loan by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Regimental Trust with the National Galleries of Scotland, where it will go on public display this week.

In 1902, Tsar Nicholas II was portrayed by Valentin Serov (1865-1911), one of the greatest Russian painters of the pre-revolutionary era, wearing full dress uniform as the Colonel-in-Chief of Scotland’s senior regiment, the 2nd Dragoons (The Royal Scots Greys). He was appointed to this position in 1894 by Queen Victoria and retained the distinction until his death. The portrait was commissioned by the Tsar and presented to the Regiment. Now its successor Regiment, The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, has generously lent the painting to the National Galleries. This is an especially noteworthy and poignant gesture at the time of the centenary of the execution of the Imperial family by the Bolsheviks.

The British and Russian royal families had an intimate relationship and Nicholas II made five visits to Britain: in 1894 he stayed with Queen Victoria and spent time with Princess Alix of Hesse, one of the Queen’s granddaughters, who, following his marriage to her, became Empress Alexandra Feodorovna.

Queen Victoria bestowed various honours on the Tsar: he also became a Knight of the Garter, an Honorary Admiral of the Fleet and in 1916 a British Field-Marshal. However, his connection with the Scots Greys appears to have been especially appreciated. In the 1880s he had served in a Russian cavalry regiment and was clearly proud of his new role, wearing his full dress uniform on a number of occasions, including during his time at Balmoral in the autumn of 1896.

It was the 1896 visit that cemented the relationship between the Tsar and the regiment and had an impact on the creation of the Serov portrait. The Tsar was photographed during this visit by Robert Milne, a local photographer, who specialised in portraits. Photographs that he created established the pose later utilised by Serov in his painting.

Born in St Petersburg, the son of a composer and music critic, Serov received a wide-ranging training as an artist in Munich and under the outstanding realist painter Ilya Repin in Paris and Moscow, as well as at the St Petersburg Academy. Although chiefly considered a portrait painter, he also excelled as a master of genre scenes and landscapes and theatrical sets. Extensive travels across Europe allowed him to draw inspiration from a wide range of earlier and contemporary artists, ranging from Velázquez to the French impressionists, Sargent and Boldini, although he forged his own distinctive style.

Serov taught at the Moscow College and received numerous accolades, including a grand prix at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. His sitters were drawn from right across Russian cosmopolitan society and as well as including the Tsar and his circle embraced the world of writers, artists and actors.

The portrait of Nicholas II – which is the only major oil painting by the artist in any British public collection – formed part of a group of studies of members of the Imperial family depicted in military uniforms which date from the years around the turn of the century. The Tsar’s uniform survives in the collection of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.  A major and very popular exhibition of Serov’s work was mounted in 2016 at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Christopher Baker, Director of European and Scottish Art and Portraiture at the National Galleries of Scotland, commented: “This impressive portrait of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, is an important, poignant and generous loan to the National Galleries of Scotland, a century after the execution of the Imperial family.  What makes the painting so arresting is its relative intimacy, the intense eye contact with the viewer and singing colours. Painted by one the greatest of Russian artists, whose work is little known in Britain, it has strong and fascinating connections with Scottish military history.”

Brigadier David Allfrey MBE, Colonel, The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, added: “We are tremendously proud of our Regiment’s history and our association with our Royal Family right back to 1678 and Charles II. In similar vein, our connections with Russia are long-honoured, not just through Tsar Nicholas as our Colonel-in-Chief but through a number of regimental customs and routine contact with friends and families across the years. We carry an icon of Saint Nicholas with Regimental Headquarters on operations and on training and the Serov portrait has traditionally hung at the end of the Officers Mess Dining Room. It is a precious and important object for all of us.”

“We are delighted the National Galleries of Scotland has accepted our Trust’s offer to loan the picture and we are honoured that it will hang in close company with a host of other notable works of art. Great portraits offer an intimate view into the world of the sitter and the painter and this picture serves as a fabulous marker in the colourful and oscillating relationship between our country, Russia and our people over several centuries.”

The portrait will be on display at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh from Tuesday 22 May. Entry to the Gallery is free.

—ENDS—

Note to editors
The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Museum in Edinburgh Castle interprets and displays over 300 years’ history of the only Scottish cavalry regiment in the British regular Army. The museum exhibits a wide range of objects including weapons, uniforms, medals and paintings. See: www.scotsdgmuseum.com

14 May 2018
Murray MacKinnon collection charting 100 years of Scottish photography secured for the nation 

An exceptional collection of historic photographs that captures a century of life in Scotland is to be shared with the public following a special collaboration between the National Library of Scotland and the National Galleries of Scotland.

More than 14,000 images – dating from the earliest days of photography in the 1840s through to the 1940s – have been jointly acquired with support from the Scottish Government, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund.

The collection covers an expansive range of subjects – including family portraits, working life, street scenes, sporting pursuits, shops, trams, tenements, mountains and monuments. Until now, it was one of the last great collections of Scottish photography still in private hands.

The collection was put together by photography enthusiast Murray MacKinnon, who established a successful chain of film-processing stores in the 1980s, starting from his pharmacy in Dyce, near Aberdeen.

He said: “The collection covers the day-to-day lives of Scottish people both rich and poor, the work they carried out including fishing and farming, in order to survive, and their social life including sport and leisure. These were turbulent times what with industrialisation, shipbuilding, new forms of transport, the social upheaval caused by the First World War in Europe and the Boer War in South Africa. The discovery of penicillin and radiography heralded the development of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry in Scotland.

“I would like to thank all the people involved in acquiring this collection for the Scottish nation, and for their great efforts in making this acquisition possible.”

Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop welcomed the public acquisition.

She said “The MacKinnon collection is one of the most remarkable collections of Scottish photography and an invaluable resource for researchers, students and the wider public. I am delighted that £300,000 of Scottish Government funding has supported the acquisition, curation, touring and digitisation of this collection, preventing it from being broken up or sold overseas.

“Our rich cultural and artistic heritage plays an intrinsic part in boosting our economy and tackling inequalities. I commend the National Galleries of Scotland and National Library of Scotland for their achievement in ensuring that this unique collection can now be enjoyed by the people of Scotland, enabling the public to learn more about our fascinating early photography tradition.”

National Librarian, Dr John Scally said: “Scotland has a unique relationship with photography which dates back to the work of the early pioneers such as Hill and Adamson. This acquisition is akin to buying Scotland’s photographic album of 14,000 pictures and bringing it home, and together with the National Galleries of Scotland, we were determined to make that happen. I am confident that every Scot will feel a connection with these wonderful photographs and we look forward to sharing them with the public over the coming months."

National Galleries of Scotland, Director General Sir John Leighton, said: “This collection superbly demonstrates the important role Scotland had in shaping the history of photography. Our ability to tell this story is greatly enriched by this acquisition, and we look forward to the exciting partnership with the National Library of Scotland in making these artworks accessible to all.”

Heritage Lottery Fund, Manager for Scotland, Lucy Casot, said: “Taken in the pioneering days of photography in Scotland, these historical images allow us to glimpse our ancestors going about their daily lives. Thanks to players of the National Lottery, this valuable resource has been secured for us all to enjoy. It’s a fascinating collection detailing what life was like and how that has shaped us as a nation.”

Director of Art Fund, Stephen Deuchar said: “We are proud to be able to support both National Library of Scotland and National Galleries of Scotland in acquiring Murray MacKinnon’s unparalleled collection for the nation. It is incredible to have these photographs join a public collection where they can be enjoyed for generations to come through their display and tours as well as digitally."

The photographs provide a visual record of how Scotland has changed physically, socially and economically since the 1840s.

Highlights include:

• More than 600 original photographs from the pioneering days of photography featuring work from David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848), James Ross (d.1878) and John Thomson (d.1881), Cosmo Innes (1798-1874) and Horatio Ross (1801-1886).
• Some of the finest work of Thomas Annan (1829-1887) and his son, James Craig Annan (1864-1946) including rare examples of their original albumen prints.
• Fine examples of the work of Scotland’s successful commercial photographers including George Washington Wilson (1823-1893) and James Valentine (1815-1880).
• Portraits of Scottish regiments from the Crimean War by Roger Fenton (1819-1869).
• A series of albums and prints depicting life in the main towns and cities from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
• Studies of farming and fishing communities in remote villages and hamlets.
• Scenes of shipbuilding, railways, herring fishing, weaving, whisky distilling, dockyards, slate quarries and other working environments.

The collection contains an exquisite view of Loch Katrine by William Henry Fox Talbot, who travelled to Scotland in the autumn of 1844. Talbot was the inventor of the calotype, a negative-positive paper process that was patented around the world, but, importantly not in Scotland, allowing for free use and experimentation. As a result, early Scottish photographers, such as Hill and Adamson and Ross and Thomson, were encouraged to take up the new technology, becoming key figures in developing its potential as both document and art form within its first two decades.

As the photographic medium evolved, Scotland once again was at the forefront when, in 1883, Thomas Annan and his son James Craig Annan secured the British rights for the previously secret process of photogravure. The photomechanical process created prints in large editions, revolutionising the publication and reach of photography.

While photography is known for its reproducibility, many of the artworks contained within the collection are unique, including daguerreotype portraits and hand-made albums. One such impressive example is the Fairlie album, consisting of family portraits and photographs by known makers including Julia Margaret Cameron. Using elements of collage, drawing and marginalia, the pages are a one-of-a-kind celebration of the Fairlie Family, from Fife. Reginald Fairlie was the architect of the National Library of Scotland building on George IV Bridge.

A major exhibition of the MacKinnon collection will be held at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery next year, with touring exhibitions around the country to follow. The entire collection will also be digitised over the next three years and made available online.

#ScotlandsPhotos

Notes to Editors:

The collection was purchased from a private collector, who bought the collection from Murray MacKinnon.

Breakdown of funding for the acquisition:

• Heritage Lottery Fund - £350,000
• Scottish Government - £300,000                              
• National Library of Scotland - £125,000
• National Galleries of Scotland - £125,000                                
• Art Fund - £100,000

TOTAL     £1 million

The National Library of Scotland

The National Library of Scotland is a major European research library and one of the world’s leading centres for the study of Scotland and the Scots – an information treasure trove for Scotland’s knowledge, history and culture.

The Library’s collections are of world-class importance. Key areas include digital material, rare books, manuscripts, maps, music, moving images, official publications, business information, science and technology, and modern and foreign collections.

The Library holds more than 26 million physical items dating back over 1000 years in addition to a growing library of e-books, e-journals and other digital material. The collection includes more than four million books, eight million manuscripts, two million maps and more than 45,000 films and videos. Every week the Library collects around 5,000 new items. Most of these are received free of charge in terms of Legal Deposit legislation. 

www.nls.uk / @natlibscot / facebook

National Galleries of Scotland

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) looks after one of the world's finest collections of Western art, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present day, including masterpieces by Titian, Rembrandt, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso and Magritte. These holdings include the national collection of Scottish art, which is displayed in an international context.

Every year, the NGS welcomes over 2.2 million visitors from Scotland and the rest of the world to our three Galleries in Edinburgh: the Scottish National Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

The latter first opened to the public in 1889 as the world’s first purpose-built portrait gallery. Aside from its outstanding collection of paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, this distinctive red sandstone building also houses the national collection of photography, with some 38,000 historic and modern photographs and film.

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 139,000 members who receive the National Art Pass and enjoy free entry to over 320 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 Hepworth Wakefield in 2017) and a range of digital platforms.

Find out more about Art Fund and the National Art Pass at www.artfund.org

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

—ENDS—

2 May 2018
First major exhibition to focus on Victoria Crowe’s portraits set to open at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

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

Part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2018

Some of the finest works by one of the UK’s most distinguished portrait painters are to be brought together for a captivating, career-spanning exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG) in Edinburgh this spring.

Victoria Crowe: Beyond Likeness will be the first major exhibition to focus on the artist’s portraits - a hugely significant element in her work, and will bring together 54 paintings and drawings, celebrating Crowe’s wide-ranging responses to her sitters and their lives. Highlights will include Crowe’s remarkable portraits of cultural figures such as Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Higgs (b. 1929), radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927-89) and composer Thea Musgrave (b. 1928), as well as intimate images of the artist’s friends and family.

Beyond Likeness will feature major loans from private and public collections from across the UK and Europe as well as key works in the National Galleries collection, demonstrating not only the exceptional skill and versatility of a remarkable painter, but also to telling Crowe’s own story and tracing her development – both professional and personal – through her art.

Born in Kingston upon Thames on VE Day in 1945, Victoria Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art (1961-65) and at the Royal College of Art in London (1965-68), and subsequently taught at Edinburgh College of Art for 30 years, while developing her own artistic practice. She has had over 50 solo exhibitions and her work is represented in collections around the world.

Crowe is renowned as a painter whose work is richly imbued with layers of meaning and personal resonance. If this is true of her of landscapes, interiors and still-lifes, then it is perhaps even more intensely felt in her portraiture.

The portraits most important and fulfilling to Crowe are those whose sitters have enriched her own thinking and awareness. In the early 1980s, she began to paint people who had broadened her interest in the inner life, the world of dream and myth, and the search for some sort of spiritual understanding. As her work evolve in this direction, Crowe developed her distinctive approach to portraiture, which seeks to record more than just a sitter’s outward appearance; her paintings also document – through symbols – the subject’s experiences, preoccupations, ideas and dreams.

Beyond Likeness will showcase many of such works, including Crowe’s portraits of psychoanalyst Dr Winifred Rushforth (1885-1983), the poet Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), her close friend Jenny Armstrong and the artist’s late son Ben.

One of the early pictures in Beyond Likeness is Large Tree Group (1975), which is set in the hamlet of Kitleyknowe in the Scottish Borders. In this winter scene, Crowe’s close friend and neighbour, the shepherd Jenny Armstrong, appears as a small figure in the foreground, dwarfed by bare trees silhouetted against snowy fields and a lowering sky. A Large Tree Group is one of the most popular images in the NGS collection and has been made into a large tapestry by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, and gifted to the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) by a private collector. Armstrong, who lived in and herself documented the shifting Borders landscape, features in numerous Crowe portraits, three of which will be in the show, including Crowe’s very last portrait of her.

The SNPG has enjoyed a long association with Victoria Crowe over three decades. One of her most striking commissions for the Gallery is her portrait of R.D. Laing, the maverick psychiatrist whose unconventional ideas upended psychiatry in the 1960s. Crowe was well-versed in Laing’s work, having first encountered it when she read his book The Divided Self as a student. Sittings for the portrait took a week, in which the artist’s impression of Laing as grave, forbidding intellectual was overturned. Nevertheless, Crowe’s imposing portrait, painted from an uncomfortable kneeling position below Laing, captures the psychiatrist’s intense, uncompromising and piercing gaze.

Victoria Crowe has often spoken about the ‘privilege’ of painting a portrait and the relationship that develops between artist and sitter and cites her experience of painting the physicist Sir Peter Higgs as particularly rewarding. In the course the sittings the artist was captivated by the way the Noble laureate, in spite of his worldwide fame and the fact that his research has changed the way we perceive the world, remains resolutely modest and shy. Crowe painted him resting in an iconic Wassily chair designed by the modernist architect Marcel Breuer, with the famous Higgs equation jotted on a wall nearby; a depiction of the explosion that confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson, the subatomic particle that bears his name, hangs above Higgs like a lampshade.

Beyond Likeness will also feature Crowe’s striking portrait of the British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b. 1943), who, as a 24-year-old research student discovered the existence of rapidly spinning neutron stars known as pulsars. Burnell’s illustrious career, has included professorships at Princeton and Oxford Universities, and she has also served as President of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the latter of which commissioned Crowe to paint her.

Speaking of the exhibition, Victoria Crowe said: “My work does contain passing reference to ideas of philosophy, genetics, visual sensation, consciousness of the self, memory echoes and resonances of a physical order we do not fully understand. I’m beginning to see my own journey and the work that reflects it as having a link to a continuing tradition of human questioning”.

Christopher Baker, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, added: “Victoria Crowe is a painter of great accomplishment who allows us an intimate view of her fascinating sitters, the relationship she builds with them and their complex interior lives. She is also a wonderfully subtle colourist who creates layered works of remarkable beauty. It has been a privilege for the National Galleries of Scotland to work with her on selecting this exhibition, which will we are confident will prove immensely popular during Edinburgh’s Festival season.”

Victoria Crowe: Beyond Likeness will be accompanied by a lavishly-illustrated catalogue, available from 12 May 2018.

—ENDS—

1 May 2018
Major Raeburn paintings acquired by National Galleries of Scotland through Acceptance in Lieu scheme

Two outstanding portraits by Sir Henry Raeburn, one of the greatest Scottish artists of the early nineteenth century have entered the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland, thanks to the Acceptance in Lieu scheme, which enables works of art to be presented to the nation and offset against inheritance tax.

Raeburn, who was born in Edinburgh and lived from 1756 to 1823, was the leading portrait painter of his time in Scotland, and is regarded as one of the most accomplished and innovative in European art of the period. Originally apprenticed to a goldsmith, he showed enormous artistic talent as a young man. In 1784 Raeburn moved to London and he spent some time in Italy, but returned to Edinburgh in 1787, where he began painting portraits of famous and important contemporaries. He was in constant demand and received many honours, being knighted in 1822.

These highly skilled and ambitious portraits show Raeburn at the height of his artistic powers. They depict the two eldest sons of Sir William Forbes, 7th Baronet of Pitsligo in Aberdeenshire, a wealthy and influential banker, art collector and patron. The paintings were commissioned in 1809–11, when the young boys were around seven years old.

The eldest son, William Stuart Forbes (1802-1826), is shown feeding a hunk of bread to his pet, apparently a Bernese Mountain dog. Fixing the viewer with a playful stare, he holds the bread out in the air, while his other hand rests on the neck of the dog, who patiently awaits the coming prize. The scene is depicted with Raeburn’s customarily deft and economical brushwork, which complements the painting’s skilled handling of light and shade and harmonious colouring. The charcoal grey of the sitter’s suit offsets the glossy black and tan of the dog’s coat and the gentle greys, greens and blues of the wooded landscape around them. The light-hearted theme in combination with Raeburn’s unparalleled artistry makes this one of the artist’s most attractive and engaging portraits.

Its quality is matched, if not exceeded, by the depiction of the younger of the two brothers, John Stuart Forbes (1804-1866). Like the portrait of William, it shows its young sitter with his arm around his dog, possibly a Dalmatian Pointer cross. The boy sits sprawling in a sunlit landscape, gazing up towards his pet’s head. The boy’s face is boldly illuminated but nevertheless rendered with extraordinary sensitivity and delicacy of touch. Once again, the colouring is superb, with the warm pink, ochre and green tones forming a perfectly judged contrast to the cooler palette of its companion work.

The acute observation of the relationships between the boys and their dogs makes these works differ from the conventional portraits that Raeburn more usually produced, giving them much of the appeal of ‘genre’ paintings that show scenes from everyday life. As such, they have an exceptional status within the artist’s output and, indeed, in British portraiture of the period. The National Galleries of Scotland holds a fine survey of Raeburn’s work, although only one other example of his child portraiture, a later painting of about 1822.

The National Galleries of Scotland are grateful to Sotheby’s Tax & Heritage Department for the role it played in making the allocation of these paintings to the collection.

Speaking of the acquisition, Christopher Baker, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, said: “Raeburn’s work has enormous appeal through its technical sophistication and the empathy with which he portrayed his subjects. Both these achievements are brilliantly distilled in these delightful portraits. We are very grateful indeed to the Acceptance in Lieu (AIL) scheme for making the transfer of the paintings to the nation possible. It seems especially appropriate to celebrate this, in view of the age of Raeburn’s subjects, during Scotland’s Year of Young People.”

Edward Harley, Chairman of the Acceptance in Lieu panel, commented further: “These portraits were amongst the finest of the artist’s paintings still left in private hands. The allocation of the works to the Scottish National Gallery highlights the importance of the Acceptance in Lieu Scheme in bringing exceptional works of art into public ownership.”

Clarissa Vallat, Sotheby’s Tax & Heritage Department, said: “We’re delighted to have played a part in negotiating the placement of these wonderful paintings with the Scottish National Gallery, by an artist so beloved by the Scottish nation.”

Notes to Editors

The acceptance of these two portraits settled £631,600 of tax.

The Acceptance in Lieu scheme enables taxpayers to transfer important works of art and other heritage objects into public ownership while paying Inheritance Tax. In this way, objects that might otherwise be sold on the open market and thus be potentially lost to the nation, remain in the public domain. AIL is a reserved matter but “executive devolution” arrangements are in place to enable Scottish Ministers to deal with cases in which there is a Scottish Interest.

AIL is administered across the UK by the Arts Council, which also oversees the Cultural Gifts Scheme.  Combined the two Schemes are capped, so can offset a total of £40m worth of tax per annum. Full details and guidance are available on the Arts Council’s website at http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/supporting-museums/cultural-property/tax-incentives/

—ENDS—

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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• Players can sign up by Direct Debit online at www.postcodelottery.co.uk, or by calling 0808 10-9-8-7-6-5

• Postcode Lottery Limited is regulated by the Gambling Commission under licences number: 000-000829-N-102511-014 and Number: 000-000829-R-102513-013. Registered office: Titchfield House, 69/85 Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4RR

• 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”.

—ENDS—

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.