New Edition (3 stars)

This article is from 2017

New Edition

Emer Tumilty's 'Collage 3'

Edinburgh Printmakers celebrate 50th anniversary with new commissions from Museums Press, Poster Club and Emer Tumilty

To mark the 50th anniversary of Edinburgh Printmakers – the open-access art studio facility in Union Street which will soon be moving to an impressive new building in Fountainbridge – this group exhibition has been put together by Glasgow-based writer and lecturer Sarah Lowndes.

It's a celebration of poster art which emphasises the medium's collaborative nature, its inter-generational appeal, and its roots in the same late-1960s milieu as the Printmakers itself. She cites the era's 'idealism and productive creativity … when screenprinting first became the medium of choice both for political activists and for artists of all stripes.'

Poster Club – a group of six artists which includes Ciara Phillips and Nicolas Party – have shared a wall of rough designs for what looks like an imaginary magazine named New Erotics, including plays on modernist architecture, cat pictures, images of a copyrighted mouse and class-based sloganeering.

Elsewhere, Museums Press (the duo behind Glasgow's Good Press bookshop) deal in dense photographic collages and individual text pieces, while Emer Tumilty provides eye-catching splashes of abstract colour design. If there's a certain slimness to the number of works on show, that's more than likely down to the restrictions on gallery size rather than the wealth of talent involved.

Edinburgh Printmakers, until 21 Oct, free.

New Edition 
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The title NEW EDITION underlines the generational group of the exhibiting artists, who were born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, and are part of a reinvigorating wave of young Scotland-based artists working in print. NEW EDITION is presented as the special 50th-year anniversary exhibition of Edinburgh…