VISUAL ART | Reviews
PAINTING JOHN BELLANY: A PASSION FOR LIFE Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 27 Jan ●●●●●
The curation of this welcome large-scale retrospective exhibition of the Scottish painter John Bellany’s work must have been, in one sense, an easy task. Lending itself to far more than merely a dry recollection of influences and periods of note, Bellany’s life is both blessed and cursed with a strong narrative thread which takes in alcoholism, marriage and remarriage, death, depression and an unlikely happy ending. What truly resonates is that it’s all there in his paintings, arranged here into an emotive journey.
Beginning with his early days at Edinburgh College of Art at
the turn of the 1960s, we’re introduced straight off to the trio of obsessions which would return to Bellany’s work throughout the years: a fascination with the East Lothian coastline of his youth and the hard but somehow simple lives of the fishing communities which skirted it; an almost impudent enjoyment in casting these same communities within tableau which mimic the grandeur of the Old Masters; and a fearful and decidedly pessimistic sense of religious foreboding and iconography. Right away, his early ‘Allegory’ triptych sets several recurring
themes – mainly the recurrence of a Holy Trinity motif and the gore of a half-gutted fish (in this case hung in Christ-like pose) as metaphor for human suffering. Through the late 60s and 70s his work gains greater confidence and power, inspired by his viewing Otto Dix’s work in Dresden and seeing the remains of Buchenwald concentration camp. Dark sexual motifs involving butchered meat evolve and his portraits are weary-eyed and sad, with the representative quality eventually all but obliterated in a haze of alcohol. Following the death of his second wife and father, however, a liver transplant and a reconciliation with his first wife inspires works of sober clarity and dream-like imagery, with bright vistas of his current Italian home forming a cheerful coda filled with echoes of the past. (David Pollock)
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GROUP SHOW SLOVAKIAN MASTER PRINTERS Edinburgh Printmakers, until Sat 2 Mar ●●●●● GROUP SHOW THE 7TH STREET LEVEL OPEN Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, until Sun 3 Feb ●●●●●
There’s a muscular gloss to much of the work on show in this showcase of four Slovakian printmakers that forms part of an ongoing international exchange initiated by the Scottish Society of Artists. Much of this is to do with the mezzotint techniques by two of the artists, which lends their extravagant images the air of 1970s fantasy graphics, capturing some of the wilder imaginings of the decade all four came of age. This is most apparent in Karol Felix’s gold-
tinged apparitions, in which parallel worlds reflect back on each other with an ornate totemic sheen. There are intimations of ancient alchemy, too, in Igor Benca’s more technologically inclined work. Both Robert Jancovic and Marian Komacek’s contributions are even more beguilingly opaque. Komacek’s pieces veer between a brooding seductiveness and, on ‘Crosses’, a near Beuysian sense of post-industrial detritus. Jancovic’s work is most interesting of all, occupying a terrain where Icarus seems to swoop from the womb, while elsewhere blades abound in impressions of Swiss army knives and axe-heads that are more forensic dissection than bloody execution. (Neil Cooper)
106 THE LIST 24 Jan–21 Feb 2013
Street Level’s Open exhibition has become something of a staple event and as usual the standard is extremely high. The show this year has 19 photographers displaying their works, giving a broad and disparate overview of current approaches to the photographic process.
These range from the evocative and wistful with Jen Wilcox’s black and white landscapes of foggy and unknown, transcendental places, to the bright and bold capture of Glasgow tower blocks in the midst of their destruction, by Chris Leslie. There is strength in depth with good examples of staged scenes, visual metaphors, travel photography as well as works which reference current debates about the media. With photography straddling the past, present and future, it is ubiquitous in our lives and able to strike nostalgia instantly yet simultaneously portray absolute perfection, the full variety of its usage can be underrated. It is difficult to pick particular artists as stand outs, such is the overall quality – Street Level’s Open is a great introduction to some imaginative and energetic photographers in Scotland. Recommended for anyone interested in techniques of image-making. (Michael Davis)
MIXED MEDIA ZOE BELOFF: A HISTORY OF DREAMS REMAINS TO BE WRITTEN Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 16 Feb ●●●●●
Libido and revolution are not so strange bedfellows in New York-based Edinburgh expat Beloff’s first solo show in Scotland, in which imaginary worlds collide in two complementary takes on utopia. In ‘Dreamland’, Beloff mines the archive of the Coney Island Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle, reimagining its founder Albert Grass’ extravagant vision of a Freud-inspired theme-park for the mind that the Brooklyn-based fun palace could have become if its own pleasure principle had been unleashed. Beyond comic books and assorted ephemera, films of the Society’s members’ dreams are shown, while a model of Grass’ proposed design incorporating a giant figure of a young girl as Libido is at its centre.
Upstairs, ‘The Days of the Commune’ finds Beloff putting Brecht’s 1948 play about the Paris Commune on the streets and in the moment via a series of filmed stagings involving a non- professional public that included supporters of the Wall Street Occupy movement. Both sections are glorious flipsides of a dream-state Shangri-la that both reclaims hidden histories and looks to brighter futures in what really is another world. (Neil Cooper)