Reviews & features: Visual art

No more heroes - graphic novels

Edinburgh International Book Festival

The Book Festival is once again acknowledging the rapid expansion in graphic novels. Henry Northmore chats to a number of comic book guys (and girl) to ask what the future may hold for the superhero While graphic novels may be still be a minority…

Turning point - Richard Wilson

Edinburgh International Art Festival

Installation artist Richard Wilson is a true pioneer whether he’s experimenting with drawing, film or sculpture. Rosie Lesso hears from the man about how he loves to defy preconceptions British artist Richard Wilson has an uncanny ability to distort…

Room with a view - Ingleby Gallery

Edinburgh International Art Festival

From much-missed nightclub space to the biggest commercial gallery outside of London, Kirstin Innes goes behind the scenes at the new Ingleby Gallery

Andrew Grassie

Edinburgh International Art Festival

There promises to be a lot of visitors doing a double-take in front of Andrew Grassie’s paintings at Edinburgh University’s Talbot Rice Gallery this summer. While a fleeting glance might suggest that the images are photographs, Grassie actually…

Foto: Modernity in Central Europe 1918-1945

Edinburgh International Art Festival

Between the wars, the world changed. European cities were rebuilt taller and denser than before, with new technology giving rise to an industrial and creative hub. More than half a century on, this major touring show originating from Washington’s…

Best of the rest - Edinburgh Art Festival

Edinburgh International Art Festival

Richard Hamilton One of the key figures of British Pop Art brings us Protest Pictures, a selection of paintings, installations and collages examining his often damning portrayal of politics, movements and leaders. Inverleith House, Inverleith…

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller

Edinburgh International Art Festival

Husband and wife duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are quite possibly the most vibrant artistic force to have emerged from Canada in recent years. Certainly, this show will be one of the least missable exhibitions of the Festival period, as…

Dovecot Studios to take over Infirmary Street baths

Tapestry company will revive derelict Edinburgh building A Festival opening is planned for tapestry specialist Dovecot Studios in the former Victorian baths on Edinburgh’s Infirmary Street. The £5m refurbishment will provide new studios for the…

Picasso on Paper

They say that all is fair in love and war – although the word ‘fair’ seems a little humdrum when you take in the remarkable collection of works exhibited in one of the Festival’s undeniable big guns. Throughout a selection of around 120 graphic works…

Nathan Coley

Be careful when entering this exhibition – a sturdy strip of wood runs right across the entrance just high enough to trip unsuspecting visitors flat onto the floor. This is not a health and safety oversight but artist Nathan Coley’s intervention…

John Stezanker

When representations of the human face are fragmented through photographic techniques or physically cut and pasted, as in the work of John Stezaker at the Stills gallery, the viewer cannot help but react. This easy appeal to our emotions is exploited by…

William Eggleston

5 Questions

5 words to describe Eggleston’s show this year? Even William Eggleston loves it. 4 exhibitions you really want to see at the Art Festival? Richard Wright, the Andy Warhol films, Jock McFadyen and Amazing Rare Things. 3 things that you…

Frances Richardson: Internus

Richardson’s sculptural works present a vision of the emotional dereliction that lies beneath the surface of contemporary consumerist culture. Internus, draws on elements from a 15th century Italian painting Archangel Raphael Saving an Attempted Suicide…

William Eggleston: Portraits 1974

No matter what decade you were brought up in, the 1970s are absolutely dripping with glossy, honey-hued nostalgia. And it’s exactly this kitschy, colour-saturated era that William Eggleston has captured in his 1974 photographs on show at Inverleith…

Michael Craik: Razed to the Ground

There can be an arresting intimacy in small paintings. The artist’s relationship becomes that much closer and more private, the intentions more modest. Certainly this seems to be part of the appeal of Michael Craik’s most recent works, all of which are…

Hitlist - The best Festival art

Richard Long: Walking and Marking As one of this country’s important land artists, long takes over the SNGMA with works that record and relate to his treks around the world. Paintings and photographs fill the gallery, as sculptures and land art…

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol is 20th century America. It is impossible to decide which came first. Did he create that nation’s brash, shiny, sexy yet sickening materialism, or is he a product of it? The exhibition of his work at the National Gallery makes it impossible…

Picasso: Fired with Passion

The crowd puller/money spinner for this exhibition is its heavy emphasis on Picasso’s ceramic work, running from his later years of 1947–1961 and all produced whilst living and working in the South of France. And indeed they are fascinating, ranging…

David Batchelor

David Batchelor has been a busy man of late, scouring pound shops in London and Scotland for pegs, combs, cutlery, clothes pegs, children’s toys, girly hair accessories and a whole manner of other cheap plastic objects in preparation for this new site…

David Batchelor and Nikolai Suetin

Now in its tenth year as one of Edinburgh’s established independent galleries, the Ingleby has chosen to mark the occasion with a series of 26 small-scale shows which present a work by a well-known contemporary artists alongside another ‘complementary…

William Kentridge

One of South Africa’s most highly-regarded artists, it seems somehow appropriate that this first Scottish collection of William Kentridge’s print works should fall in the middle of the Edinburgh Festival. Although this show concentrates solely on his…