It Happened Last Summer
The Smithy Gallery
74 Glasgow Road, Blanefield, Glasgow
01360 770551
www.smithygallery.com
Until March 29
The art world can't get enough cats at the moment. Just last month, as part of the Glasgow Film Festival, visitors basked in the surreal glory of a Cat Video Festival at the city's Gallery of Modern Art. It brought hundreds of first-time visitors into the gallery, which is always music to a gallery director's eyes and ears. What's not to like about watching someone's feline friend saying "NOM NOM NOM" while eating sour cream?
I'm not a cat lover, but I do love to see a well-drawn or painted cat. Veteran Scottish artist Elizabeth Blackadder does a mean line in kitties, as does Carol Dewart, who has a lush new collection of paintings on show at The Smithy Gallery in Blanefield.
Dewart can paint. She has a beautiful feel for pattern and colour and a spot-on eye for detail coupled with a lovely line. In this body of work she gets the chance to show off how well she paints. Her inspiration has come from the domestic environment in which she lives and works; which includes an inquisitive cat. Or two or three.
Each painting has been named after a a classic film. The Great Escape shows a budgerigar sitting jauntily outside his cage while Home Alone reveals three cats looking languorous as they laze around a people-free house. This exhibition only opened last week but already more than a quarter of Dewart's paintings have sold. This is work which is as fresh as one of Dewart's crisply painted daisies (in a painting called Please Don't Eat The Daisies).
Hugo Canoilas: Someone a long time ago, now
Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design
13 Perth Road, Dundee
01382 385 330
www.exhibitions.dundee.ac.uk
Until April 10
This major solo exhibition of the work of Portuguese artist Hugo Canoilas, hosted by Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) in Dundee, mixes up collaged projections of paintings, photographs, drawings and writing; all are cast on each other as well as the architectural fabric of the ever-lively Cooper Gallery.
In the last ten years Vienna-based Canoilas has received international recognition. His most recent body of work was shown to great acclaim during the 30th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 2012.
Canoilas's art maintains a dialogue between abstraction and social realism, by drawing upon the thoughts of 20th-century philosophers and writers, including Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger and Fernando Pessoa. By focusing on painting as both material and metaphor, Canoilas has found an intimate and visually seductive way to register what he calls the "signals of the world".
Along the way he attempts to offer up ways to sensitise ourselves to this world. To accompany his installation, Canoilas has collaborated with comic book artist Francisco Sousa Lobo, creating a journal called I Like Your Art Much which mirrors and examines the journeys of his alter ego, Jeffrey, a 60-year-old hippie.
Set out to be an exhibition within an exhibition, this comic book acts as departure point from which the entire exhibition evolves to mirror the artist's critical stance on contemporary social and political histories.
Jan Patience
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