list.co.uk/festival Previews & Reviews | FESTIVAL VISUAL ART
REVIEW THE AMAZING WORLD OF MC ESCHER First major UK retrospective of the influential Dutch artist and designer ●●●●●
To label the work of Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher ‘undiscovered’ is anything but correct, yet the fact that this is his first major retrospective in the UK exposes the ring of truth to such a description. Escher, of course, is one of the most familiar artists of the 20th century, but his standing in the contemporary art world doesn’t mirror that of, say, Picasso or Dali, fellow subjects of mass market hardback collections.
Like Dali in particular, Escher created works that were
accessible but mind-bending. They made him a visual icon to the 1960s’ counterculture and, long after his death in 1972, his work’s mesmerising sense of logical confusion – Escher was fascinated by mathematics – found its way into visual tributes by way of everything from the movie Labyrinth to The Simpsons. The show starts with the first half of his life, when he trained as an architect and then worked as a graphic artist in relative obscurity until the mid-1930s, developing fascinations with woodcut printing, the Arabic tiling of the Alhambra in Spain, and rendering images of buildings, inspired by his time in Italy.
Returning to northern Europe in 1933, Escher began to create some of his more famous pieces: geometric riddles which combined clean monochrome, hallucinatory images and a liking for puzzles of perspective and repeated patterns.
The fact that he created many prints means that all of the major works have been sourced, including the baffling staircase arrangement ‘Up and Down’ and the much-copied maze of logic- defying stairs ‘Relativity’. In person, the intricacy and detail of these delicately shaded, almost photorealistic works becomes as vivid as the singular visions they portray. (David Pollock) ■ Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two, 624 6200, until 27 Sep, £9 (£7).
N A L O N M O T © O T O H P
R E V O H C L O W L E A H C M © O T O H P
I
PREVIEW ARIEL GUZIK: HOLOTURIAN Mexican artist presents underwater invention
REVIEW FRANCE-LISE MCGURN: 3AM Ambiguous mixed media works from the Collec- tive Gallery’s Satellites Programme ●●●●● REVIEW JOHN CHAMBERLAIN: SCULPTURES Dynamic creations by late American sculptor ●●●●●
Ariel Guzik more than qualifies as a visual artist who ‘conjures an imaginary world in their work’, a criterion for this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival Commissions Programme. The objective for Guzik’s complex practice
incorporating invention is a practical one, albeit one that alludes to a magical and largely unknown part of our planet; for over a decade, the artist has searched for ways to communicate with cetaceans. ‘Whales and dolphins are true others; a parallel civilisation to ours. If in this process we achieve a simple gesture, just an exchange of glances – as has happened in my experiences in Baja California and Costa Rica with the Nereida capsule – the meaning of this search is fulfilled,’ says Guzik.
Questions of language, gender and identity permeate this body of work by Glasgow-based France-Lise McGurn, part of Collective’s Satellites Programme for emerging artists. A sound work, broadcasting softly to the crowds on Calton Hill, sets the tone. Inspired by castrato singers, it immediately creates ambiguity: male or female voices? Human or electronically made? The ambiguity continues inside. McGurn paints
androgynous figures, drawn from a range of sources: illustrations in French language textbooks, product advertisements, vintage health posters. They have the confidence of line of modernist oil sketches, but any identity or meaning is veiled.
For his first exhibition in the UK, visitors will have The ideas then extend into installations made of
the chance to get up close with Guzik’s latest endeavour. ‘Holoturian is the product of several decades of work designing and building machines and instruments in my lab,' he explains. It also brings Guzik one step closer to his ultimate
ambition of inventing an underwater manned ship, the Narcisa, that will enable encounters between humans and cetaceans. (Laura Campbell) ■ Trinity Apse, until 30 Aug, free.
sections of printed vinyl, cardboard boxes, and knotted electrical cable sculpted into shapes, draped with paint-stained fabrics. Her work is said to be ‘groping at the frustrations and instabilities of language’, but she counters this with a deliberate ambiguity which doesn’t help pin down the problem. This is a show in which even the questions being addressed are unclear. (Susan Mansfield). ■ Collective Gallery, 556 1264, until 30 Aug, free.
Inverleith House lost its Creative Scotland funding earlier this year, but not before programming a coup for the summer, the first major UK exhibition by American sculptor John Chamberlain. Chamberlain, who died in 2011, has gone down in the annals of art history as ‘the man who crushed cars’. This exhibition tells us how much of a genius he was. Outside, four large sculptures in bright metallic
colours have a pop-art Jeff Koons garishness about them. The real revelation is inside, though. The ground floor gives us classic Chamberlain, sculptures made from car parts. Sometimes they are crushed into new shapes, often they are used as is; at no point does he disguise what they are. Yet they are grouped into new shapes with an acute sensitivity to both form and colour. Chamberlain sculpts like a painter: this is the abstract expressionism of the scrapyard. Upstairs is perhaps more remarkable still: sculptures made from foam, tied with cord, presenting a different face from each new angle. Chamberlain takes ordinary, disposable things and, while never denying what they are, transforms them into surprising new things. (Susan Mansfield) ■ Inverleith House, 248 2849, until 4 Oct, free.
6–13 Aug 2015 THE LIST FESTIVAL 101