Festival VISUAL ART
For more info go to LIST.CO.UK /FESTIVAL
PHYLLIDA BARLOW: SET The infl uential tutor and sculptor brings new works to Edinburgh
It’s the sheer, literal volume of Phyllida Barlow’s sculptural work that excites when it’s glimpsed in person. It fills the space, bearing a sense of weight and of oddly manipulated scale.
The 71-year-old sculptor and former tutor to Douglas Gordon and Rachel Whiteread has created new work that is a mish-mash of large- scale productions cast in wood, plastic and polystyrene, and daubed with paint and plaster. The materials are mostly lightweight, but the visual effect of these pieces suggest they’re precarious, bone-crushing things.
In one corner a stack of stone-grey plaster ‘boulders’ totters on a sandwich arrangement of wooden pallets. In another, a bundle of pallets are piled dramatically in no particular – or traversable – order. Propped against the walls are chunky slabs of what might be concrete, while scaffolding and wooden posts are crudely cemented together in frame- like arrangements. The sensations involved
in viewing these works are mixed, with the rogue paint covering the objects reminding of the bright disarray of an art studio and the concrete-effect materials used suggestive more of a building site. ‘Untitled: blockade’, is a breathtaking
showpiece upstairs; a floor-to-ceiling circular wall of sharp-edged geometrical shapes ringing the room. Viewable almost entirely only from the outside, its occasional dead-end recesses accentuate the fact that any single viewpoint gives little opportunity to achieve a sense of perspective. The mind may be drawn to thoughts of the globalised economy by the piece; it’s like being lost in a maze of long- distance shipping containers, and only when we’re shown an accidental glimpse inside are we given any sense of its internal fragility. (David Pollock) ■ Fruitmarket Gallery, 225 2383, until 18 Oct, free. ●●●●●
6–13 Aug 2015 THE LIST FESTIVAL 95