BRITISH ART SHOW 7 3 | CHARLES AVERY Mull-born artist Avery is one of the most exciting talents to emerge from Scotland in recent years, working across an array of media, including large-scale drawings, objects and text. His most high-profile project is The Islanders, inspired by his upbringing, which uses the image of the island as a springboard for ruminations on the challenges of art-making and the tools we use to understand our place in the world. Avery’s largest island sculpture to date (pictured, below) will be on show at BAS7.
2 | ALASDAIR GRAY Long celebrated as one of the greatest living Scottish writers, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Alasdair Gray’s murals, drawings, paintings and posters, which are often inextricably linked with his plays and novels but also depict his friends and family. Images such as ‘Andrew Gray Aged 7 and Inge’s Patchwork Quilt’, which was drawn in 1972 and painted in 2009, exemplify the artist’s penchant for turning a drawing into a painting several years after its completion.
5 | WOLFGANG TILLMANS German-born photographer Tillmans is as well known for his tendency to push the envelope as he is for particular works. Having achieved prominence documenting the European Gay Pride in London and the Berlin Love Parade (both 1992), his recent experimental work is often created in darkrooms without a camera. ‘Truth Study Center’, created for BAS7, is a tabletop installation featuring newspaper cuttings, pamphlets and advertisements that explores the nature of perception and truth. 4 | SARAH LUCAS One of the most prominent of the Young British Artists who emerged in the 1990s Sarah Lucas’ work employs everyday materials to create offbeat visual explorations of sex, death and gender. Her abiding interest in the human body and the ways in which sexual identity manifests itself in objects is explored in her most recent series, Nuds, in which pairs of nylon tights have been stuffed and fashioned into ambiguous, organic forms.
6 | BRIAN GRIFFITHS Griffiths employs a junk shop aesthetic to create large-scale sculptures from a range of recycled materials such as a space ship made from cardboard boxes, full-sized cardboard computer workstations and ‘Boneshaker’, a gypsy caravan, constructed from tables and wooden ornaments found in South London antique markets. For BAS7 he has created a giant bear’s head stitched from canvas and supported by ropes, decorated with embroidered patches bearing the names of various international destinations. 7 | DUNCAN CAMPBELL Irish-born filmmaker Duncan Campbell is best known for his documentary portraits of complex historical figures, which combine cinema vérité tropes with abstract scenes. These works include Bernadette (pictured), his study of the relationship between Northern Irish political campaigner Bernadette Devlin and the media in the 1970s, and his most recent work, Make It New John, which tells the story of the luxury DeLorean car and the rise and fall of its charismatic creator, John DeLorean.
8 | NATHANIEL MELLORS The Amsterdam- based artist is known for his satirical, absurdist films and sculptural installations, which include the film ‘Giantbum’, about a group of explorers who lose their way inside a giant’s guts. Mellors’ latest work, Ourhouse, created for BAS7, will be shown in a series of chapters over the run and focuses on a wealthy family, whose mysterious guest ‘The Object’ roams their house at night, swallowing books and excreting foul-smelling sculptures.
28 Apr–26 May 2011 THE LIST 15