list.co.uk/visualart Reviews | VISUAL ART
GROUP SHOW FROM DEATH TO DEATH AND OTHER SMALL TALES Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art One, Edinburgh, until Sun 8 Sep ●●●●●
From the moment you step into the first corridor and meet an opening tease of Magritte, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed physically and mentally by this major mix-and-match collection of 20th and 21st century work. And that’s really how it should be for a show that’s about the body but which in its epic parade through both floors of Modern One says just as much about mind and spirit. The first room sets the tone by off-setting Sarah Lucas’ spindly
and be-stockinged ‘Bunny Gets Snookered #10’ with Otto Dix’s more bulbous ‘Mädchen auf Fell’ (Nude Girl on Fur), and things seem to swell up into something spectacular with each wonderland entered. Genitalia are, of course, in abundance, but this is no prick-tease, despite the rise and fall of Matthew Barney’s stunningly glossy five-screen ‘Cremaster’ cycle of phallic fantasias (the cremaster being the muscle that lifts and separates the testicles), which at times resembles the ups and downs inside Monty Python filmmaker Terry Gilliam’s head. ‘Pirate Party’, Paul McCarthy’s equally monumental multi-
screen film installation, transforms Pirates of the Caribbean into a grotesque limb-hacking blood’n’guts extravaganza à la Marat/ Sade. Marina Abramovic’s film works, too, give food for thought, as a naked man and woman are gatekeepers of an entrance which cool dudes are forced to squeeze past.
It’s a truly astonishing archive that, seen together at such close quarters, becomes a living, breathing organism in itself. Seemingly apposite in execution, it actually finds every artefact joined at the hip with gloriously throbbing umbilical abandon. (Neil Cooper)
INSTALLATION MASSIMO BARTOLINI: STUDIO MATTERS + 1 Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh until Sun 14 Apr ●●●●●
Like a moth to a flame, the habitual party-goer will always be drawn to Kraftwerkian big-city neon. So it goes in ‘La Strada di Sotto’ (The Street Below), the toytown-style installation that maps out the whole of the Fruitmarket’s main downstairs room in Italian artist Massimo Bartolini’s first solo exhibition in Scotland. A working model culled from frameworks of
lights used during Sicilian street celebrations, this complex network of criss-crossing tracklines is operated by the rise and fall of voices from the film in the adjoining room. The fact that the figure onscreen is Don Valentino, the man behind Sicily’s mass illuminations, speaks volumes of the light and shade intensity of what looks like a denser, Michael Bentine’s Potty Time version of Blackpool in all its after-dark glory.
DRAWING DAVID GALLETLY: WEE Recoat, Glasgow, until Sun 3 Mar ●●●●●
The first solo exhibition of David Galletly’s work at Recoat, Wee, showcases the highly peculiar drawing work of this Scottish illustrator. The show comprises impeccably detailed and disconcerting ink drawings, with bizarre and darkly comic characters and scenes such as a sagging, tired old Santa Claus watching telly or a pair of apparently independently dancing arms on sticks.
His style is obsessive, to say the least, with an obvious huge time investment as an integral process: you get sucked into examining the details and textures Galletly builds up, in the swirling smoke stream of ‘Rockets’, and the white noise- like pattern of his ‘Circle’, ‘Triangle’, and ‘Square’ abstracts.
Galletly’s style feels familiar in its idiosyncrasies, faux folk art with bleak humour – the kind of thing made famous by David Shrigley – but it still manages to keep you entertained.
Upstairs, there’s a similar sense of playfulness He achieves this partly through the wonderful
to the large table-top filled with out-of context looking miniatures picked and mixed from Bartolini’s studio: the scaled-down Buddhist monk says it all. If the carnival mash-up of sculpture and civic pride downstairs is anything to go by, the throbbing heart of the city just got brighter. (Neil Cooper) miasmatic detail, and partly through the silly stories (including a man balefully waving a white flag under a mountain of purring cats, or Batman and Iron man staggering home with a beer). There’s a genuine wide-eyed fun in Galletly’s whimsy. (Michael Davis)
PAINTING SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE Ingleby, Edinburgh, until Sat 30 Mar ●●●●●
A debut showing for the work of Frank Walter, the decidedly eccentric 20th century Antiguan artist, writer and philosopher who fancied himself a descendant of European nobles, provides a jumping-on point to exhibit the work of a trio of outsider artists. Also appearing are Forrest Bess, the Texan fisherman who would paint literally visionary semi-abstract forms and who grew to obsess over hermaphroditism as the key to immortality, and Alfred Wallis, the Cornish painter, also a fisherman, whose naïve, perspective-free harbour scenes earned him the attention of Ben Nicholson. Walter’s work is the best represented of the
three, and the show makes a good case for his deserving an equal place alongside the others. Time spent in Scotland (just one country in which he fancied his roots lay) yielded a series of small but evocative thumbnail landscapes, while the exhibition also bears pleasing abstract designs, some almost caricatured portraits of Antiguan ladies and gentlemen, and one amusingly baffling painted sketch of Hitler playing cricket. The biographies, however, are at least as enticing as the actual work. (David Pollock)
21 Feb–21 Mar 2013 THE LIST 105