Reviews & features: Visual art

Golden years - Tracey Emin

Edinburgh International Art Festival

As the leading female light of Britart, Tracey Emin has been revered and rejected in equal measure. Writer and broadcaster Bidisha has a few words of scorn for the detractors and reflects on the already profound legacy she will leave behind It’s been…

Programme for the Edinburgh International Festival 2013 puts artists and technology centre-stage

Tod Machover, the Wooster Group and Oper Frankfurt among the EIF programme highlights

A crowd sourced orchestral work by boundary breaker Tod Machover is just one of the many highlights of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival programme. Set over three weeks this August, the EIF’s line-up includes an homage to Allen Ginsberg with…

7x7th Street

Interactive sounds sculptures create a musical promised land

Seven and seven is, well, a very magic number indeed in Jean Pierre Muller's walk-through collaboration with musical icons including Robert Wyatt, Nile Rodgers, Archie Shepp and Terry Riley. Free-associating ideas based around the number seven (days a…

World Press Photo

The List looks at this year's exhibition

Brian Donaldson casts an eye over the winning shots in the World Press Photo collection and witnesses both horror and heaven. Sometimes even captured within the same image.

Peter Blake: Venice

Poptabulous exhibition of screenprints inspired by La Dominante

When Art went POP!, Peter Blake defined a very British view of how the 60s swung. Collaging trash iconography with pop star royalty, all involved were bestowed with mutually acquired cult credibility. Forty-odd years on from Sergeant Pepper, the…

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…

Nakedness and nudity at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival Fringe

The Naked Busker and lap dancing photography exhibition among highlights

It may get the moral minority’s g-string in a twist, but nudity and Edinburgh go hand in hand. Here are some naked highlights. Pot of Dreams - Jannica Honey & Holly Davidson Photographic Exhibition. The multifaceted human aspects of Edinburgh’s lap…

John Byrne: Moonlight and Music

Major exhibition of works by much-loved Scottish artist

So recent are some of the pieces in this show – timed to coincide with the launch of a biography of the artist by Lund Humphries – that self-portrait ‘Chop Suey’ and Byrne’s children’s book Donald & Benoit: A Story of a Cat and a Boy arrived close to…

Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys

An art world friendship under a Scottish sky

A single rose can make a garden; a single friend can make a world. Writer, artist and philosopher Richard Demarco’s friendship with the humanistic artist Joseph Beuys was something special. These two passionate, occasionally obtuse men were drawn to…

David Mach: Precious Light

Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition of biblical proportions by Fife-born artist

Without doubt, Methil-born artist David Mach’s work ‘Golgotha’ will stand out as the defining image from the artistic strand of this year’s Edinburgh Festival. Three enormous figures of threaded steel nailed to metallic crosses, which take up the entire…

Lineage: Michael Craig-Martin, Ian Davenport and Julian Opie

Edinburgh Art Festival 2010 - Printmaking, but not as we know it

Drip, drip, drip go the variations on a theme that form the quartet of works culled from Ian Davenport’s ‘Etched Puddle’ series, in which assorted rainbow-arrayed, candy-striped, multi-coloured streams trickle down into a similarly hued liquid carpet at…

Precious Light - David Mach interview

Artist's first major Scottish exhibition in years at Edinburgh Art Festival 2011

It’s just after 9am in Forest Hill in South London. The denizens of this leafy area have walked their children to school and boarded their commuter trains. In David Mach’s messy but unfussy two-floored studio, two handfuls of assistants and technicians…

Impressionist Gardens

A remarkable exhibition of iconic, influential works at The National Galleries

The National Galleries of Scotland’s ambitious exhibition brings together around 100 paintings focusing on the garden as subject for impressionist painters: remarkably the first show of its kind to have been held anywhere in the world. It’s hard to…

Profusion of painting at 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival

Richard Wright, Joan Mitchell and Julie Roberts head up painting programme

Painting has inspired some epic declarations over the years. In the 1960s Donald Judd declared the medium dead. In 2005 Young British Artist Damien Hirst advised people that they were more important than paintings. And this year, in light of the…

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…

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…

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…

Hitlist: Festival Art

The best exhibitions in the Edinburgh Festival

Interview: NVA's Speed of Light at Edinburgh International Festival 2012

Sport and art combine to cover Arthur’s Seat with light and colour

Arthur’s Seat will be a dramatic spectacle of light and colour thanks to NVA. Claire Sawers talks to Angus Farquhar and some of his runners ahead of this ambitious meeting of sport and art

2012 Edinburgh Festival of Politics highlights

Talks on George Wyllie, the music industry, Canongate and Scotland's wood cabins

Singin’ I’m No a Billy, He’s a Tim. The difficulties of overcoming ignorance associated with the issue of sectarianism in Scotland were perfectly highlighted last season when one football radio pundit accused Des Dillon’s play of actually promoting…

Edvard Munch: Graphic Works from the Gunderson Collection

Extended introduction to troubled Norwegian painter

Perhaps the greatest surprise for casual viewers of this high-profile new exhibition from the Scottish National Galleries is the discovery that Norwegian painter Edvard Munch had a whole catalogue of work besides ‘The Scream’. One of the most famous…

Norman McBeath & Robert Crawford: Body Bags / Simonides

Mournful collaboration between photographer and poet

Scots translations of epitaphs by the ancient Greek poet Simonides, coupled with black and white photographs, adorn the high-rising walls of two lofty Edinburgh College of Art studios. Joined by tall vases of white lilies, classical casts from the…

Elizabeth Blackadder

Brilliant retrospective of work by one of Scotland’s major artists

Elizabeth Blackadder is a Dame, a Royal Academician and arguably Scotland’s most popular female painter and printmaker. A major retrospective of her work at Scotland’s biggest gallery space was only ever going to draw sighs of resignation from art snobs…

Edinburgh Art Festival 2011 highlights

David Mach, Tamsyn Challenger and Anish Kapoor among picks

David Mach. Explosive and daring exhibition of large-scale collage and sculpture works inspired by and confronting the narratives of the Bible on the 400th anniversary of the publication of the highly influential King James version. 400 Women. A…