VISUAL ART | Previews & Reviews
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REVIEW BRAZILIAN COLLECTION POSSIBILITIES OF THE OBJECT Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until Mon 25 May ●●●●●
Revolutionary spirit pervades in abundance throughout this compendium of 18 contemporary Brazilian artists. Many exhibitors have been rarely seen outside their volatile homeland since the 1950s, when some of the works on show were created. It’s all too telling in the downstairs gallery that each of the ten black cubes scattered around the centre of the room making up Antonio Dias’ ‘Cabecas’ (Heads) (1968) have a slot in the top. While they look as if they’re awaiting a kiddy-sized bus party, they also have the air of stolen ballot boxes put into a more fun environment that redefines politics as playtime.
Elsewhere, the bits and pieces of the show are denuded
completely. Jac Leirner’s ‘Vago 51’ (Vacant 51) (2008) is a plastic bag not only flattened on the wall behind glass but its innards gutted, rendering it useless asides from the remaining handle, which effectively holds the bag’s frame and nothing else. Fernanda Gomes’ untitled vertically standing shelf (2013) is even more functionless, sliced so close that storing anything would be impossible.
Then there is Carlos Zilio’s tellingly named ‘Para um jovem de brilhante futuro’ (For a Young Man with Brilliant Prospects) (1974), which puts an open briefcase filled with rows of nails pointing upwards inside a glass case with the jar of nails that make up ‘Fragmentos de parsagen’ (Landscape Fragments) (1974) beside it. Ernesto Neto’s ‘Partula Passo’ (1988) loads a pair of nylon stockings with lead balls, transforming hosiery into an undercover but no less deadly weapon.
Even more disguised is Artur Barrio’s ‘Nocturnes (Transportative)
no. 4’ (2001), in which a fabric, hooded bread box hangs from the ceiling, its status carefully documented on its covering. In the everyday dictatorship it sprang from, it is the contradictions inherent in the system that make perfect sense. (Neil Cooper)
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PREVIEW MIXED MEDIA NEVER SPOTTED LEOPARD David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, Sat 11 Apr–Sun 10 May REVIEW MIXED MEDIA WHERE LANGUAGE ENDS Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 2 May ●●●●●
For Never Spotted Leopard, David Dale Gallery will bring together two artists dealing in complex issues associated with materiality and authenticity. UK-born Keith Allan and Tomas Downes discovered one another’s practices through their adopted art community in Copenhagen, where they are based. Ross Birrell and David Harding’s synaesthetic display transforms the Talbot Rice Gallery into a haunting and melancholic stage. Music is the defining force that flows from one room to another and informs many of the visual and narrative elements peppered throughout.
This is the first time they will have exhibited Coloured panels on the gallery’s windows and
together, and we can expect to see a synthesis of ideas from these artists whose work has developed, as the show’s curator Max Slaven explains, ‘from a similar starting point aesthetically and conceptually, with interesting divergences. There is an agreement between Allan and Downes in their formal approaches.’ On the surface, both artists utilise an industrial aesthetic, but more interesting are their differing processes for achieving this end. Allan begins with images and transforms them into three-dimensional forms, while Downes compresses his concepts to surface. It will be fascinating to see how these oppositional approaches play out in the gallery space, and what fresh interpretations might be made with the works’ proximity. Both artists will exhibit pieces made recently, with Allan due to produce some more new work. (Laura Campbell)
116 THE LIST 2 Apr–4 Jun 2015
skylights fill the rooms with ambient light and make reference to certain composers while pianolo music flows through the space. In the Georgian Gallery, the red panels covering the glazed cupolas warmly infuse the space and make a nod towards French composer Olivier Messiaen (a synaesthetic who compared his music to a ‘stained glass window’), accompanied by a video work and composition written by Birrell himself.
In the upper gallery is a small but potent sculpture, ‘The Hand of Paulo Virno’ (2011). Virno was a philosopher who celebrated the immaterial worlds of poets, writers and musicians in the 1960s and 70s. The reference to his writing invites us to reconsider the exhibition title, the point ‘where language ends’ and the imagination takes over, leaving viewers to think about the hidden possibilities within Birrell and Harding’s prismatic installation. (Rosie Lesso)
REVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY DIANE ARBUS Kirkcaldy Galleries, until Sun 31 May ●●●●●
The work of Diane Arbus transports you when viewed off the beaten track in Kirkcaldy Galleries. Off the beaten track, of course, is exactly where this seminal figure in the evolution of 20th-century photography went to find her subjects, and this display of 20 works – hung in close proximity under low light in a single room – features many of her most definitive pieces. It includes a menacingly protective husband in Washington Square Park in 1965, his arm slung around his pregnant wife’s shoulders; the fearsome high-contrast of a heavily tattooed man at a carnival; a stern-eyed youth preparing to march in support of the Vietnam War; the dazzling image of another young man, sallow-faced even through a layer of make-up, sassily brandishing a cigarette as he waits for his hair rollers to set.
These are monochrome images redolent of mid-20th century America, and of a particular ill-at-ease uncanniness which stood at odds with the nation’s self-image at the time and even now. While Arbus’ aesthetic may seem somewhat forced to a contemporary eye – those with dwarfism or gigantism aren’t the outsider figures they once might have been – it’s the frail humanity of all concerned which rings true. (David Pollock)