Festival VISUAL ART
For more info go to LIST.CO.UK /FESTIVAL
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HITLIST THE BEST EXHIBITIONS
Ross Sinclair
✽ Isa Genzken: Botanical Garden See review, left. Inverleith House,
248 2971, until 28 Sep, free.
✽ Ross Sinclair: 20 Years of Real Life Solo show that celebrates the
20th anniversary of Ross Sinclair’s Real Life projects while launching another. See review, page 90. Collective Gallery, 556 1264, until 31 Aug, free.
ISA GENZKEN: BOTANICAL GARDEN Eccentric sculptural and collage works both irreverent and serious T he frenetic energy that resonates in
Isa Genzken’s playful assemblages and eccentric collages has been harnessed by Inverleith House in Botanical Garden, Genzken’s first UK solo show outside London. The exhibition is both an exhilarating celebration of an artist who has worked tirelessly across mediums and movements, and an opportunity to contemplate the past ten years of her practice.
in bright, A room filled with faceless mannequins dressed trashy clothes and straitjacketed in cling film and metallic tape opens the exhibition. Despite their restrictions, they seem to power-walk through the centre of the space. A painting of Donald Duck stacked on storage containers pre-empts a billboard- sized collage where Renaissance paintings are lacquered alongside portraits of the artist and shiny reflective grounds – pools of colour where the audience also emerge.
Upstairs there are two new works selected by
curator Paul Nesbitt and taken straight from Genzken’s Berlin studio. These pastiches of photographs, toy characters, car wing mirrors and gas masks are suffocated by blue spray paint and stacked on top of translucent pillars. The works are poised at angles that force the viewer into awkward positions, mirroring the cumbersome nature of the assemblages.
In one instant these recent pieces appear as excited congregations of form and colour, the next morose tributes of remembrance where obituaries, old newspaper cuttings and photographs of the artist as a young woman are unpicked from the debris. Like each urgent splash of paint, Genzken’s practice swishes quickly and unpredictably between irreverence and seriousness, and we’ll never be sure where she intended it to settle. (Rachael Cloughton).
Inverleith House, 248 2971, until 28 Sep, free. ●●●●●
✽ Art
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Late An evening programme of late openings, performances, artist talks and tours across the city. See preview, page 92. Various venues throughout Edinburgh, 7, 12 & 21 Aug, free (booking essential).
✽ Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood Videos and shadow
play dedicated to the ongoing wars across the world projected onto the Western facade of the Scottish National Gallery on the Mound. Scottish National Gallery, 624 6200, 4 Aug, 10.30pm, free.
✽ Counterpoint New works
commissioned for the Edinburgh Art Festival by some of Scotland’s most promising emerging artists. See feature, page 88. Talbot Rice Gallery, 650 2210, until 18 Oct, free.
✽ Augusto Corrieri and Vincent Gambini The traditional techniques of theatre and magic shows are deconstructed in this playful exhibition through film and new performance work. See preview, page 92. Rhubaba, rhubaba.org, until 31 Aug, free.
31 Jul–7 Aug 2014 THE LIST FESTIVAL 85
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