Where Art Now? Y
ou might be wondering how the first quarter of the year has managed to flash past. This is no April Fool’s, 25% of the year has come and gone. The good news is there’s still a sweet nine months left to see mindbending artwork. Sorry to say, seeing it on Instagram only counts for a half point so get these dates down because April’s bringing many opportunities to catch-up with the Scottish art scene, not to mention some worthy deadlines to keep in mind for the artists out there. Exhibitions and events After a long period of development, research and engagement with the sex workers’ communities involved, Collective this month present an exhibition by artist Petra Bauer. At the centre is Workers!, the result of the long term collaboration between Collective, Scottish sex worker charity SCOT-PEP and the Swedish artist and filmmaker. Sex workers’ voices as experts on their labour and lives are given priority, and the film’s
approach is inspired by feminist film practitioners ‘who emphasise the importance of making films with their subjects, not about them.’ The exhibition is open from 13 April-13 June. Also on 13 April from 12-4.30pm, Rhubaba host an intimate presentation of new work in development by the choreographer Mark Bleakley. What will be presented is a performance lasting three hours, during which three performers will build a sculptural landscape of ‘flesh and plastic that is simultaneously revered and disposed of ’, opening up questions about contemporary value systems and the body. The performance will be followed by a reflective discussion with artists with similar interests to Bleakley. Booking is necessary: email markrbleakley@gmail.com with the subject line ‘HWHTS appointment’. Throughout April, Embassy Gallery in Edinburgh runs its members’ show, providing an opportunity for their members to show in the space. With Embassy members spanning the
breadth of the artistic scene, the show is always a packed sample of artists making work around Edinburgh and beyond. Stills and Street Level Photography team up this month to put on the exhibition Ambit, which collects a diverse range of artists who are all working experimentally in relation to photography. Across the exhibitors, they work with drones, cameraless photography and across locations in Scotland and Ethiopia. The preview is from 6-8pm on 11 April and the exhibition continues from 12 April-2 June. Residences and Open Calls Scottish Sculpture Workshop are seeking applications for their summer residencies until 15 April. Each residency lasts four weeks and allows the artist to spend one month working on the development of their practice – whether this is for production, research or experimentation. The summer residencies run from June to September. There’s the chance to use their
Andrew Kerr The Modern Institute rrrrr
Prunella Clough, Person with Pink, 1999, oil on canvas, 40.5 x 48 cm
Prunella Clough 42 Carlton Place rrrrr With 21 paintings representing the enviable breadths of painter Prunella Clough’s career and experimentations, you’d be forgiven for wondering if the works from 1944-99 were actually the work of several artists. In the back room, the first of these works chronologically is the dark but luminous Study for a Scene on Ruined Beach. The tone and palette are metallic, and the canvas of the painting itself could be mistaken for a plate of aluminium or steel, looking as heavy and conversely luminous as it does. It sings next to the noisy, holey surface of the hot pink abstraction next to it, which looks a lot like what might be left after one pulls some plasterboard away. Each one is dense in allusion. Some of Clough’s reference images can be found in one of the catalogues by the entrance. There isn’t a one-to-one direct relationship between them and any single painting, but nevertheless there’s the sense of Clough observationally quoting an elegant shape or texture, then amassing and mixing these visual samples into abstract concentrations.
April 2019
Hung conspicuously low, many of these works – on paper, board and sometimes canvas – emanate the same subtle feeling of being at an unusual vantage that carries through several of Andrew Kerr’s latest paintings. For example, Bright Hook could be the corner of a roof detail seen from above – a shining oblong white shape is the paper left bare, and it gleams in comparison to the sfumato metallic muted blues and grey-purple top section. Throughout the richly gestural small-scale compositions, the colour relationships are deliberately non-representational in most of the works, with purples, mustard and rusted pinks or reds usually butting up alongside each other. But maybe the colours aren’t so imaginary. Outside the large window in the gallery, there are some old red sandstone railway arches with white scuzz growing on them, with green moss emerging where they meet the pavement. The ground is the
Words: Adam Benmakhlouf
production facilities, as well as receive timetabled support from the technical and curatorial team, and a loose programme of activities, including ‘film and sauna nights’. Though not completely supported, the residencies are heavily subsidised. Until 23 April at 10am, LUX Scotland are accepting proposals from artists to be included in their Margaret Tait 100 Programme. Ten works will be commissioned, five of which will be drawn from this open call to Scotland-based artists and filmmakers for ‘new short moving image works that respond to the life, work, approach or attitude of Tait’. They are envisioned as ‘one-minute for Margaret’. Each successful proposal will receive an award of £1000 which should cover both production costs and artists’ fee. Grampian Hospital Trust are also offering a £17,500 budget for a horticulture-interested artist to develop a new patient garden in the Inverurie Community Hospital Site. The deadline is Monday 15 April at 5pm.
blue-grey of a dusty paving stone. This view maps visually on to the overcast, postindustrial atmosphere of the foggy railway bridges in several of Kerr’s works. The paintings begin to swirl with time and rot and organic intrusion. They seem to accumulate, as smokey texture is overlaid with daubed descriptions of a ledge, then a crisply drawn form. As in the work Corner, this is a rounded-off triangle with two antennaelike limbs. A small oval is just above and to the left. The paper is cut away, creating more of a sheer edge than in other works. Cloud-gazing into the many different works, at moments they begin to coalesce into something like the landscapes seen in some damp on a wall. Many of the ambiguities speak to a sense of the liminal, the moment before shapes and forms coalesce into sense. At once, these are the renderings of a murky inner life but also the outside world through a subjective and unreliable lens. [Adam Benmakhlouf] The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until 11 May
See for instance Soft Ring. This work is in a rich turquoise and a thick, opaque beige cream. The oval-ish shape in the middle of the composition has angles that one might mistake for the outline of a rounded-off, abstract cube shape. In the background, a line of rich blue-green goes in and out of focus as Clough seems to have carefully blotted parts out, perhaps with calculated spills of turpentine on the oil paint. The effect is to create further ambiguous depth and the texture of marble or blue cheese. This central composition recurs in what looks like the whirling, smokey crystal ball cloud that fills the portrait-oriented rectangle of Sweet Jar, the perfect circle in By the Seaside I – surrounded here by two green and red cloud shapes – and the lightly-sketched onion in the 1957 mixed media on paper work of the same name. This recurrence among the visual variety of the abstract paintings gives a sense of Clough’s wandering and captious eye that collects a diverse vocabulary of unpredictable forms and shapes, then subtly and patiently reinvents an ingenious grammar across the works on show. [Adam Benmakhlouf] 42 Carlton Place, Glasgow, until 28 April, Thurs-Sun, 12-6pm
ART
Andrew Kerr, Mist at the Pillars, Installation view, The Modern Institute 2019
Review
Photo: Patrick Jameson
There’s the culmination of years of work between artist Petra Bauer and sex worker charity SCOT-PEP at Collective this month, as well as other events, exhibitions and opportunities to note, all collected here for maximum diary-updating convenience
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