Reviews & features: Visual art

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…

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…

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…

Edinburgh International Festival 2011 programme keeps an eye on the East

National Ballet of China, Ravi Shankar, Philip Glass among highlights

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra raise the curtain of the 2011 Edinburgh International Festival in style this year with a performance Robert Schumann’s exotic musical Das Paradies und die Peri, one highlight from an EIF programme that boasts acts from…

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…

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…

Edinburgh Art Festival surrealist exhibition Another World leaves potential unfulfilled

Impressive, if surprisingly straightforward, collection of surrealist works

For a source so rich in departures for radical flights of enquiry, this presentation of surrealist paintings, objects, journals and sculptures is alarmingly straightforward. By marrying a host of mesmerising works by the likes of Dali and Magritte to 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…

Full programme announced for Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013

New shows from Ontroerend Goed, Michael Nyman and Brendon Burns among highlights

After a month of being drip fed nuggets, the full Fringe feast has been revealed, with a whopping 2,871 shows performed by 24,107 artists in 273 venues across Edinburgh up for grabs. From X-rated puppet musicals and guerrilla style pop-ups to the London…

Edinburgh Art Festival 2012: Highlights

Surrealists, symbolists and Scottish colourists at this year's art festival

Leslie Hunter: A Life in Colour. This major study of the Scottish Colourist’s output features over 70 important works throughout his career, with pieces created in venues from Fife to France. If the life and work of Hunter is your bag, then why not also…

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…

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…

David Batchelor

Edinburgh International Art Festival

Edinburgh International Art Festival Colour in David Batchelor thinks we live in a culture that’s scared of bright and vivid hues. That’s why he’s filling his own artistic world with waves of chromatic pleasure. Nick Barley looks at his work and…

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread’s works are in a direct lineage with late 60s and early 70s minimalist sculpture, where the literal ‘objectness’ of art was emphasised. When some sculptors removed the plinth that was once used to present their work to the viewer – a…

Interview: Kevin Harman at 2012 Edinburgh Art Festival

Recent work on 24-hour consumer culture by graduate of Edinburgh College of Art

What was the first exhibition you went to see? It was in the national gallery of Scotland on a school trip. I remember a painting with a woman’s boob on a plate. I distinctly remember that painting as it done a sex thing to me. What was your first…

Dürer’s Fame

Tribute to the German woodcut and engravings master Albrecht Durer

German handball star Pascal Hens gazes out from a black-and-white poster, his torso naked, gaze serious, his pose one of self-deification. This is enhanced further by a tattoo on his stomach of two disembodied hands clasped together as if in prayer.

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 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…

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

Naked Portrait

In contrast with the ‘nude’ figure in western art history, the naked portrait still manages to present a sometimes shocking and raw view of the sitter’s personality that reaches beyond their public façade.

Craig Coulthard - Forest Pitch

Artist Coulthard creates a full-size football pitch in the Borders as part of the Cultural Olympiad

Craig Coulthard has certainly put the ‘beautiful’ in the beautiful game with Forest Pitch; a full-size football pitch created in the middle of a forest in the Scottish Borders. At the end of August two football matches were played on the pitch, the…

George Leslie Hunter: A Life in Colour

Comprehensive survey of the work of Rothesay-born colourist

More than 70 paintings and prints by the least known of the four Scottish colourists not only demonstrate the breadth of Hunter’s painting practice and his constantly changing approach and style, but also reveal the influences on the Rothesay-born…

Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910

Extraordinary exploration of Symbolism and landscape painting

There is something timely and relevant about a major exhibition of paintings created during a time of economic change and uncertainty in society, and against a backdrop of modern living that engendered feelings of fear, alienation and disillusionment…