Visual Art
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PAINTING. FILM. PHOTOGRAPHY AND INSTALLATION LIVING IN THE MODERN WORLD City Art Centre, Edinburgh, until Sun 4 Mar 0000
The spaces we inhabit and the buildings that surround us shape much of modern life as we know it. This is the basic premise for this densely packed exhibition, which spills out over two floors of the City Art Centre. Yet there are some random and incongruous works popping up here and there which jar with this ambience. Callum lnnes’ visceral, abstract ‘Exposed Painting’, 2001, for example, looks out of place, as does Moyna Flannigan’s ‘Happy Valley 1’, 2005, which depicts a beaming, aristocratic lady with a Dalmatian. Yet, despite this incongruity, there are many powerful and apt artworks here. Jock McFayden’s ‘Great Junction Street’, 1998, is a huge oil painting of the shabby old Bingo Mecca in Leith on a glorious summer’s day, romanticising the local and capturing a bygone Edinburgh building. Similarly, Nathan Coley’s photographic print ‘Waiting on the Scottish Parliament’, 1999, captures Edinburgh before the parliament was built, the artist leaning nonchalantly against a wall at the end of the Royal Mile with mock boredom. Coley’s
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DRAWING. SCULPTURE AND PHOTOGRAPHY
LORNA MACINTYRE
Mary Mary, Glasgow, until Fri 23 Feb .0.
When the natural and unnatural are understood to be artificial concepts. the art object that takes this bleak state of affairs at its word is equally bleak. Lorna Maclntyre's sculptures. photographs and drawings installed at Mary Mary have this effect — of exposing the deadness of nature. Not only as a category. but the materials that litter the work (stones. dead leaves. fallen chestnuts) also stress this demise.
The work is not sentimental. does not bemoan our outcast state: this is not a lament or a romantic longing. Neither is it a desperate celebration of the industrial. It simply demonstrates that there is no difference between the manmade and the natural: both fall in and out with each other on a post- industrial landscape. The human figure is present. skating on thin ice in ‘Untitled 2006'. and frozen and abstracted into a symmetrical pattern in ‘Specular Composition 1'. Elsewhere. the figure is trapped in bronze then in the grey photographs of Degas' dancers. where Maclntyre has locked the already inert figures in simple geometric forms. blacking out the background to emphasise their 'objectness'.
'Storm I' (pictured) is by far the simplest and most successful piece. exposing the dumb act of making: a gesture. a thought symbolically represented by a brass rod is shoved through a block of rosewood. It is both elegant and naive. (Alexander Kennedy)
‘Villa Savoye’, 1997, is similarly tongue in cheek. Here he juxtaposes a pre-recorded voice over describing Le Corbusier’s exclusive French Villa Savoye with seemingly endless slides of generic British houses and estates.
If Coley serves us an apocalyptic vision for today’s architecture, other works warn of things to come, like Will Duke’s absorbing short animated film ‘We Fashioned the City on Stolen Memories’, 2005. An aerial shot reveals grey, shabby high rise buildings as far as the eye can see, the buildings themselves then further multiplying by shooting up out of the ground with phenomenal force and power. Kate Gray’s, ‘Mission’, 2001, is similarly disturbing, a photograph, taken from behind, of two blonde girls in white vests and pants holding hands whilst gazing at Torness power station, which is backlit by a lightbox. The exact meaning is unclear, yet the unlikely combination of half dressed puritanical girls and mechanical power station creates an uneasy post doomsday atmosphere. This gritty industrialist mood prevails throughout much of the show, leaving us with a slightly cynical, less than optimistic vision of modern life. (Rosie Lesso)
FTCHING GOYA - MONSTERS AND MATADORS National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, until Sun 25 Feb 0000
There is something unsettlineg contemporary about the etchings on display in this exhibition; they are vivid and raw. Goya's 'Disasters of War‘ is the centrepiece to this modest collection. and rightly so. The important series. not published during his lifetime due to its graphic and political nature. is ironically one of his most influential works. Without it Picasso would not have arrived at ‘Guernica'. and. more recently. the Chapman Brothers would not have had his work to gorge on.
The exhibition is divided into three sections: 'The Tauromaquia'. ‘Disasters of War' and 'The Proverbios or Follies'. each featuring original etchings from the respective series'. Goya presents a social commt-zntary in all three. most graphically in 'Disasters of War'. in which he depicts the traumas of the Peninsular War. most satirically in 'The Proverbios or Follies'.
The translations of Goya's titles often vary. In turn the levels of satire in his work are difficult to measure. ‘This is Worse'. from the 'Disasters of War' series. depicts a man impaled (through his groin) on a tree. The combination of attention to composition and apt titling are lost in the Spanish/ English translation. investing this and other works with satirical ambiguity. ‘The Proverbios or Follies‘ series. however. is a more straightforward social satire. which plays on Spanish proverbs. Goya exercising his masterful etching technique, which links the exhibited works. This historically significant collection of etchings is a ‘must see' before they return to the vaults. (Steven Cairns)