Reviews & features: Edinburgh Art Festival

Richard Wright at Edinburgh Art Festival

Richard Wright has always been a man to think outside the box. A Turner prize-winner, commended for ‘rejecting the canvas’, he’s done just that with his latest masterpiece. Commissioned by the Edinburgh Art Festival, Wright’s latest creation has been…

Edinburgh Art Festival work from Richard Wright

Things are getting inventive at the Edinburgh Art Festival courtesy of 2009 Turner prize-winner Richard Wright, who has unveiled his specially commissioned painting for the EAF. Showcased in the west stairwell of the Dean Gallery, the black-on-white…

Sitting and Looking showcases furniture design from Jim Partridge, Liz Walmsley and El Ultimo Grito

One of the more eclectic exhibitions in this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival is this group show at Dovecot, curated by internationally acclaimed furniture designers Jim Partridge and Liz Walmsley. Alongside work by the pair, who have worked together for…

Edinburgh festivals line-ups announced

Whatever your cultural poison, Edinburgh’s festival circuit has it covered

Visual Art hitlist

Agnes Martin, Alan Davie, Cerith Wyn Evans with Throbbing Gristle, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Henry Coombes, Agnes Martin, Dani Marti, Thomas Hirschhorn

Scottish Paintings: Old Masters to Contemporary

Great works undermined by staid and debilitating presentation

This closed and muted historical survey covers a time span of around 400 years and reaches from the dark, still-life ages of William Gow Ferguson in 1632, to the rarely exciting contemporary abstract paintings of Callum Innes. Chronicling Scottish…

John Bellany’s: A Celtic Voyage

Cramped but impressive selection of works by Scottish artist

Scottish painter John Bellany’s East Coast hometown of Port Seton, a small seafaring community where fishing was a way of life and Calvinism blew fear through the streets, informs the artist’s oeuvre. Fish, gannets, swans, playing cards and boats…

The Enlightenments

Don’t expect worship of Enlightenment rationalism from the artistic crowd

A curious exhibition, The Enlightenments. As the extra ‘s’ suggests, it isn’t a homage to the art of the 18th century, and it doesn’t offer a single rational view of what ‘enlightenment’ might mean. The catalogue for this year’s International Festival…

Bob and Roberta Smith: This Artist is Deeply Dangerous

Humorously subverting the relationship between artist and critic

Leave this one for last: it is a good end to a long day of wandering around the Festival. Bob and Roberta Smith’s painted panels hang in the plush interiors of Hawke and Hunter’s upstairs bar. Viewers can sit down on comfortable seats with soft throws…

Hitlist: Visual art

Our pick of visual art for the week

Scottish Paintings: Old Masters to Contemporary. Milestone, The Creative World of Alan Davie, Jane and Louis Wilson: Unfolding the Aryan Papers, The Enlightenments, The Discovery of Spain, Eva Hesse: Studiowork

5 Questions: Alex Hetherington

5 words to describe your contributions to the Edinburgh Art Festival Intense, experiment, synthetic, synchronized, abrasive. 4 visual artists who should be better known than they currently are Ulrike Müller, Yuval Pudik, Lyndsay Mann, Christy…

Rough Cut Nation

Graffiti warriors v neo-Gothic architecture

‘No one notices your pointless actions’, read the letters cut out of the floor. That’s not entirely true nowadays. Graffiti culture has entered the mainstream art world. Largely due to Banksy, art that was once firmly associated with lawless…

Reveal/Reset

Ingenious web-based creations that sadly lack the ability to connect

Designed to support the development of creative applications that challenge the notions of what networked or web-based digital creativity can be, the Alt-W Fund has financed new artworks by nine Scottish-based artists. New media projects include FOUND’s…

Rewind: Artists’ Video In The 70s & 80s

Audience-unfriendly presentation of a tricky medium

In 1968 the portable camcorder was invented, and the decades which followed were a period of impassioned invention and experimentation in a fertile new medium. Rewind contains fine examples of video art. There are classic videos like David Hall’s ten…

Visual Art Hitlist

Our pick of the week's exhibitions

Self-Made Cavalcade, Milestone, Jane and Louise Wilson: Unfolding the Aryan Papers, The Creative World of Alan Davie, The Enlightenments, The Discovery of Spain, Eva Hesse: Studiowork

The Travelling Gallery

Now something of an annual institution, the Travelling Gallery returns to the capital, showing its wares from inside a big, beautiful bus. This year’s exhibition explores how contemporary artists are using paint, both on canvas and within other media…

Nigel Peake: Making Ends Meet

Schop, the new gallery initiative from Oliver Chapman architects, which exhibits artists steeped in architecture and the built environment, showcases the work of Irish-born artist Nigel Peake for its first EAF exhibition. Peake’s drawings and prints…

5 Questions for Go Reborn

Five things to see and buy at go reborn A rotating showcase of work by Scottish artists, designers, writers and fashionistas. A temporary pop-up Godiva shop taking the best of designers and newcomers from Godiva Boutique. Furniture that charts…

Top 20 Festival Shows

Emmanuel Jal There are few people who could even imagine the terrors of being a child made to fight in a war-torn homeland. This guy has lived it and come through the other side. Jen Hadfield In a year of poetry shocks, this Shetlands-based…

The Creative World of Alan Davie

Remarkable mix of the dark and the sublime from much-loved Scottish artist

Saxophonist and journeyman translucent Alan Davie is surely one of Scotland’s greatest living artists. At almost 90 years old it’s remarkable to think that this is the first exhibition of his work to embrace the breadth of his output in painting…

Self-made Cavalcade

Playful, engaging group show by international artists

Artists from Munich, Edinburgh and Glasgow go head to head in this enjoyable and playful exhibition of multimedia, multi-discipline work developed from a previous exchange show in the German city. Christian Newby’s ‘Kromvex Mirror’ opens the show…

Katie Pollard: Passing

Photographer’s finer details speak strongly of the mourning process

This set of 15 C-type prints by American photographer Pollard was created in the short- and medium-term aftermath of the artist’s father’s death two years ago. The works track the reactions of her family to the news over an extended period of…

Milestone

Provocative exhibition accompanying a live stone-carving project

Entering the quad of the Edinburgh College of Art feels a bit like discovering yet another ill-placed tram construction site. The air is full of the drone of power tools, and dust clouds settle in your hair and mouth. Milestone is an unconventional…

This is Now: From Drawing to Contexture

Well-stocked ragbag from a new wave of textile artists

The first impact of this show, and the most enduring, is the overwhelming urge to touch. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the artworks are more tactile than, say, a series of oil paintings.

5 Questions: Callum Innes

One of the most influential abstract painters in recent years, Callum Innes is a former winner of the Jerwood Prize and was also shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1995. As he gears up for an exhibition of new work at the Ingleby he takes on our Q…