Reviews & features: Visual art, Issue 635

Nashashibi / Skaer: Our Magnolia

Collaborators tackle controversial subject compellingly and powerfully

The artistic careers of Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer have followed parallel courses. Born two years apart, the pair studied at Glasgow School of Art, exhibited at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, and have collaborated as Nashashibi/Skaer on five…

The Discovery of Spain

Fascinating exhibition of British and Spanish art demands a long look

Besides proffering a coloured selection of chapters from an intriguing art historical narrative, this major exhibition presents some seriously affecting works of art. Didacticism aside, simply gazing at these terrifically moving paintings – Goyas, El…

Poorboy Playroom bring creative chaos to museum

Scottish collective bring site specific improvisations to Fringe

Scotland’s mighty collective, the Poorboy Playroom, are bringing a creative flurry to this year’s Fringe. The popular posse, best known for their multi-sensory site specific improvisations, are heading indoors to occupy space in the National Museum of…

Unspoken Lines

For this exhibition at the new Henderson Gallery Scottish artist Joyce Gunn Cairns showcases a key strand of her work: portrait heads of key figures in Scottish life. Inspired by Kaethe Kollwitz, Pat Douthwaite and Rembrandt, Cairns’ original subjects…

Visual Art Hitlist

What's getting us excited in the visual art world.

Andrew Ranville, Bob and Roberta Smith This Artist is Deeply Dangerous, The Discovery of Spain, Eva Hesse: Studiowork, Jane and Louise Wilson, Milestone, Peter Blake: Venice.

Rough Cut Nation

Music meets art uptown

Gallery gigs are ordinarily bespoke, underground shop-front affairs that flaunt their art-rock credentials like billy-o. The renovation of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery has allowed some of that DIY spirit to mess up its normally plush interior…

Rough Cut Nation

The National Portrait Gallery may have been closed for refurbishment for the past six months, but this has only served to enhance its appeal as an evocative space. Rough Cut Nation brings together 12 young artists inspired by street art and graffiti…

Not set in stone: sculpture at the Festival

Talitha Kotzé explores the nature and appeal of the form

An unofficial but recurring thread in this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival programme is sculpture. That is not to say traditionally moulded or contemporarily modulated, but sculpture in its broadest sense. It ranges from new work by the Wilson sisters to…

Bob and Roberta Smith: This Artist is Deeply Dangerous

David Pollock reports on the latest subversive work from Bob and Roberta Smith

For this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition Bob and Roberta Smith – the multiple pseudonym of Goldsmiths graduate Patrick Brill – slices up the text of an entire review and transferring it to a series of hanging paintings.

The Discovery of Spain in Edinburgh

Fascinating and beautiful exhibition of British and Spanish art demands a good, long look

Besides proffering a coloured selection of chapters from an intriguing art historical narrative, this major exhibition presents some seriously affecting works from the likes of Goya, El Greco, Zurburan, Morillo, Velázquez and Picasso.

5 Questions: John McCracken

American minimalist sculptor John McCracken’s surfboard-inspired objects, with their bold use of colour and form, have influenced generations. As Inverleith House prepares to unveil his first solo exhibition in Scotland he tackles our Q & A