Reflections: A Series Of Changing Displays Of Contemporary Art
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One)
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh
0131 624 6200
www.nationalgalleries.org
Until January 10
Daily, 10am-5pm
A few months ago the upstairs galleries at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art's Modern One building were completely reorganised, cleverly stuffing the rooms to the gunnels with the National Galleries of Scotland's permanent collection. That accomplished, the curatorial team have turned their attention to the downstairs rooms, recently cleared of the long-running Generation show.
This latest exhibition, Reflections, which will change throughout the year, takes its starting point from the late series of works by Roy Lichtenstein that has just been hung on the walls in the intervening ground floor rooms. While much of the work in Reflections may come from the permanent collection, this is also the place where the gallery will show new acquisitions and commissions.
Running the length of the central corridor, the heart of this new display is a brilliantly eclectic series of portrait 'heads', running the gamut of the 16th to the 21st centuries. "We've taken works from the Scottish Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery as well as our own collection for this," says SNGMA Director Simon Groom, as we walk around during the exhibition installation.
The series is based, he says, on the recent acquisition of a cubist drawing by Picasso, Head (1912), displayed alongside Picabia's bold 1928 work Subtlety. Further along this long gallery of arresting faces, Groom points out 17th-century engraver Claude Mellan's arresting face of Christ - made up of one continuous increasing circle of pencil beginning on the tip of the nose - which sits between a dark self-portrait of Edvard Munch and the bright harrowed colours of John Bellany's post-operative self-portrait. "We wanted to mix things up so they are not confined by school or chronology," says Groom.
In the rooms letting off the corridor, the focus is on specific works by a small number of artists, with an emphasis on sparseness, both of concept and execution. "We took our cue from the artists we wanted to show, then looked at how their work had 'reflections'," explains Julie-Ann Delaney, SNGMA Curator.
Here, then, are wall tracings from American artist Louise Lawler, whose work is displayed for the first time in Scotland. "No worries about shipping costs with these," jokes Groom, who tells me the artist sends a pdf and the gallery simply takes it along to a printer to be printed out on vinyl before sticking it to the walls. Other rooms contain a powerful work by Cathy Wilkes (We Are Pro Choice, 2007), marrying slip-skin latex, scattered staples and the dead-eye stare of a mannequin in a discomfiting, meticulous tableaux.
In the room opposite, a recent gift of a moving work by American artist Taryn Simon, on display for the first time, charts one family's history of Thalidomide poisoning (A Living Man Declared Dead And Other Chapters, 2008-11. Chapter VIII), whilst further down the corridor, Abraham Cruzvillegas also gets his first showing in the gallery alongside fellow Mexican Gabriel Orozco's Pinched sculptures.
And there are new works here too, not least Martin Creed's harlequinnish wall painting, which provides the bright backdrop to Sol LeWitt's subdued, mathematical Modular Structures (Sequential Permutations On The Number Five). "There's both a difference and a similarity with these pieces that works really well," says Groom, who asked Creed to put together a scheme for works to exhibit alongside the Galleries' LeWitt holdings. "It's really all about putting the collection in a new context."
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