VISUAL ART list.co.uk/visualart
HITLIST THE BEST EXHIBITIONS
✽ Economy You’ve still time to catch this excellent group show profiling work by
artists including Tracey Emin and Jeremy Deller, exploring different aspects of the global economy. See review, left. CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 23 Mar; Stills, Edinburgh, until Sun 21 Apr.
✽ Every Day Six Glasgow-based sculptors display work made from everyday materials
and concerned with everyday themes. Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Fri 22 Mar–Sun 1 Sep.
✽ Ink Rembrandt, Rubens and Piranesi
feature in this powerful exhibition celebrating the medium of ink. See review, page 106. Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, until
Sun 9 Jun.
✽ Flickering Lights Three contrasting film and video works from David Bellingham,
Maris and Rachel Maclean, with the latter’s kitsch cartoon-like LolCats being a particular highlight. See review, page 106. Summerhall, Edinburgh, until Sat 18 May.
✽ Jutta Koether The German iconoclast’s
first major show in Scotland takes the form of a series of large-scale paintings and installation pieces inspired by 17th century French painter Nicolas Poussin. See review, page 108. DCA, Dundee, until Sun 21 Apr.
✽ Nick Evans: Solar Eyes Last
chance to see Nick Evans’ faux Mayan ruin that homes his alien-like sculptures. Tramway,
Glasgow, until Sun 31 Mar. 21 Mar–18 Apr 2013 THE LIST 105
ECONOMY Meticulously curated two-site exhibition
E conomy isn’t so much an exhibition. It’s not even two exhibitions. It’s an ongoing project, a conversation and a meticulously- curated attempt to build an echo chamber of ideas and artistic experiments about our relationship with commerce and the transactions – cultural every bit as much as financial – which govern our ability to operate as human beings.
Spread across two sites at opposite sides of the country (sadly the Glasgow leg closes a month before the Edinburgh one, curtailing the opportunity to experience both halves together) and a film screening collection, Economy brings together almost three dozen works that reflect incisively upon these themes. Probably most famous is Tracey Emin’s ‘I’ve Got It All’, in which the artist poses, legs apart, as if giving birth to floods of cash and coins, or documentation of Andrea Fraser’s infamous and scathing 2003 criticism of art as capital market by attempting to sell herself having sex with someone as a performance work. Elsewhere,
amid st a wide range of cross-media works, we experience Tanja Ostojic’s frank commentary on migration, ‘Looking for a Husband With EU Passport’, Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis’ film The Battle of Orgreave and Andreas Gursky’s striking photographic portrait of trading floor as near electronic circuit. In the end what emerges is not a project that takes a position or allows itself to be led down narrow alleys, but rather one which presents a wealth of highly contemporary information, perspectives and ideas on society, and condenses them around the viewer as an overwhelming immersive experience which somehow syncs up into a natural order. In this respect more than any other, the curators have managed to reflect the atomised makeup and very intricate workings of capitalism’s pressurised global system. (David Pollock)
CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 23 Mar; Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 21 Apr ●●●●●