ART & EXHIBITIDNS LIST * q q
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Lothian (see above) these magnificently colourful tapestries were woven in a little village near Cairo, within sight of the pyramids. Driven by the conviction that every child is an artist until educational systems drain his or her creativity. Wissa Wassef began a project over 25 years ago which bound his philosophy in a collection of tapestries made by children with no formal training. He has proved without exception that any child coming to him was able to create works of astonishing beauty. It is
a Barbican touring exhibition.
0 COLLECTIVE GALLERY 52—54 High Street. Tue. Wed, Fri 12.30—5.30pm. Thurs 12.30—7pm. Sat 10.30am-5pm. Closed Sun and Mon.
Sculpture by Rosie Levanton. Until 19
Feb. The strange bulky form grounded at the Collective makes the gallery look like a bottle with a inside. Rosie Levanton‘s
realisation of the Sutton Hoo ship has been made of wood and ghostly
blue X-rays, transforming the dream into a skeletal reality.
0 CRAMOND SCULPTURE PARK
Dunfermline College. Cramond Road Nth. 336 6001. Open all daylight hours.
Scottish Sculpture Open 3 Until 25 Feb. Wrap up well before you visit this 17 sculpture exhibition sited in the grounds of the college.
0 DEMARCO GALLERY lOJeffrey Street, 557 0707. Mon—Sat 10am—6.30pm.
Ian McCulloch Until Sat 15 Feb. Four of Ian McCulloch‘s paintings hang well in Demarco‘s small gallery. The other pictures in the exhibition are being shown concurrently at the Camden Arts Centre in London. McCulloch‘s large, colourful canvases interpret the stories and myths of Christianity and ancient Greece within a personal expression
3 which distorts and questions them.
O EDINBURGH COLLEGE OF ART Lauriston Place, 229 9311. Mon—Thurs IOam—Spm. Sat IOam—12 noon.
Sculpture Court:
Drawing and Painting School Student Exhibition Until Fri 14 Feb.
Build Ye Cities Exhibition of Israeli Architecture. Thurs 13 Feb—Wed 26
Feb. A lecture on Architecture in Jerusalem in the 20th century by David Guggenheim will be held on Tue 18 Feb, 5pm. Mr Guggenheim has been lecturing in Environmental Design at the Bazalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem and is actively engaged in extensive rehabilitation projects in that city.
0 EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY George Square, 667 1011. Mon-Fri 9am—5pm.
Plck up a Penguin Until 30 June (exhibition room). The orange spines are still familiar on many a household bookshelf. This launches the University’s growing collection of Penguin Books (1935—1960) and celebrates fifty years of Penguin publishing. 1t illustrates their development. their predecessors and their imitators modestly but informatively.
William Dnlmmond of Hawthomden 1585—1649 Book Collector and
Benefactor Until March (Drummond Room). Commemorating the 400th anniversary ofhis birth. this exhibition illustrates the growth of Drummond's collection and his relationship with the University and its library. During his lifetime. Drummond donated some 700 books to the library.
0 FINE ART SOCIETY 12 Great King Street. 5560305. Mon—Fri 9.30am—5.30pm. Sat 10am—1pm.
Scottish Paintings 1800—1920 General selection ofwork until end Feb.
0 FORREST MCKAY 38 Howe Street. 226 2589. Mon—Fri 10am-6pm. Sat
10am-1pm. Settling rather well into
the row ofselect shops in Howe ; Street. this new gallery specialises in
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Scottish painting from 1800 onwards. also selling furniture. porcelain. rugs and pottery from the same period.
0 FRENCH INSTITUTE 13 Randolph Crescent. 225 5366. Mon—Fri 10am—1pm.2—5.30pm. Sat 10am—1pm.
French Printmakers1890—1960 Until Fri 21 Feb. This is the Edinburgh public‘s opportunity to appreciate the work of the French lithographers over a century in an exhibition drawn from the collection of Aberdeen Art Gallery. Paul Signac's view of St Tropez brings the exhibition into the
post-impressionist era and work by 10am—5pm. Sun 2—5pm. Rest. [D]
Leger. Braque and Dufy belongs to the more recent past.
0 FRUITMARKET GALLERY 29 Market Street. 225 2383. Tue—Sat 10am—5.30pm. Closed Sun & Mon. Licensed cafe.
Mary Kelly- Interim Until 8 Feb. Interim is the name ofa project which is likely to take Mary Kelly
several years to complete. This is the
first part. Corpus. The body of woman is examined. analysed. paraded and covered in what is visually a spare. controlled exhibition mirroring the gloss of advertising. wherein lurk acute observations made by a woman facing middle-age.
Workshop 9 Feb. Limited numbers. Phone 225 2383 for details.
Richard Tuttle -Two Pinwheels Until Sat 8 Feb. A stark exhibition upstairs too. Wooden sculptures hanging on the walls are painted with flat. whitened colour. giving them a soft
malleable appearance like large
chunks of unwieldy plastieine.
An extensively illustrated catalogue in a highly original format (designed by Tuttle) has been co-published by the Fruitmarket with the [CA in London and is available from the gallery. price £5.95.
0 GALLERY OF MODERN ART Belford Road. 556 8921. Mon—Sat
SOLVING THE RlDDELL
Every so often a gallery will receive a
g new work of art as a gift or bequest.
Collections can be significantly
. improved by the generosity of an ;_ individual. But itwas a special day I when the Scottish Portrait Gallery
(Queen Street, Edinburgh) learned that
i it was to receive a collection of 10,000 5 items, a windfall by any gallery’s standards.
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Last year an enthusiastic collector sadly died. Bitten by the collecting bug as a boy with an interest in stamps, Peter Biddell began buying old photographs in the 1950's at a time when there was little interest in the subject.
In the following years he
amassed the thousands of items - prints, books, daguerrotypes, tintypes — now held at Queen Street.
Apart from the sheer volume of the
collection, it was the quality of the work i . collection which is one of the largest In
. Britain and which will enable people to
which struck the gallery staff when the boxloads arrived. Peter Biddell's keen sense of judgement led him to buy photographs, not necessarily by the famous, but which he considered beautiful and worthy oi preservation. Many therefore are unnamed and the search is on to find out ‘by whom' and ‘of where’. Julia Lawson, Scottish Photography Archive researcher and historical sleuth, has been doing quite a bit of detective work in identification. The clues lie in the photographs themselves - the angle of a shot, the method of printing, an identifiable street or shop, a unique costume, the
mood of a setting. In the case of a
series of Edinburgh wynds she discovered that their maker was a
American Images 1945—1980 Until 23 : Feb. In this month of monochrome, 1 this exhibition must not be missed. 1 It’s a long haul through the rooms of American photographs but worth every minute and deserving of repeat : visits. At the very beginning your attention is grabbed by Weegee‘s i startling shots of People caught by
night street of New York or in the
: movies. The cameras roll over 35 years of America’s history with an eye to the development of
photography itself. 0 HANOVER FINE ARTS 104 Hanover Street. 225 2450.
Mixed Exhibition Until further notice. 0 HM GENERAL REGISTER HOUSE
Princes Street. 5566585. Mon—Fri 10am-4pm. Watch This Space Until 25 April. An exhibition of historic advertising. interesting not so much for the designs, but for the wealth of sociological detail it contains. 0 MALCOLM INNES GALLERY 67 George Street. 226 4151. Mon-Fri 9.30am—6pm. Sat 10am—1pm. General Exhibition Throughout February.
O MERCURY GALLERY 2/3 North
, Bank Street. 225 3200. Mon—Fri
10am—5.30pm. Sat 10am—1.0()pm. Mascaras de Mexico- Indian Dance
certain Archibald Burns, prolessional photographer. Ajigsaw of clues from old newspaper articles led herto . discoverthat the Edinburgh
Improvement Trust, set up to alleviate the poor social and sanitary conditions ofthe city, mentioned this photographer in theirminutes of 1871, with reference (plus ca change) to his bill.
Not all the photographs present such an open and shut case. Many cannot be
_ identified and the exhibition, which
opens on 14 February, will contain a number of question marks and ‘photographerunknown’ labels. Perhaps the memory of a visitorwill be triggered off and another discovery
made.
About a quarter of the collection is Scottish, but it is the foreign work that
makes it special to the Scottish
Photography Archive. “We now have a
come to Edinburgh to study the history
ofphotography’,says Julia.
A catalogue with an extremely
amusing introduction by Sarah
Stevenson to the history of photography has been published, acting as a lasting tribute to Peter Riddell. As the Scottish
Arts Council exhibition ‘The
‘ Photographic Art' leaves Stills Gallery f to begin its four and the American
Images exhibition keeps the
star-Spangled banner flying at the
' Gallery of Modern Art, the Biddell
Collection‘s debut exhibition must
' certainly confirm February as the Month of Monochrome
(Alice Bain).
The List-fl-I—Zoigcb 31 '
his flash in the dark whether it be in a i