When the real world drives artists to abstraction

Two exhibitions in Edinburgh take a skewed look at the nature of objects and information. By Jack Mottram

Last summer, after 10 years in a Georgian townhouse, Edinburgh's Ingleby Gallery upped sticks to a new, purpose-designed home on Calton Road. The old premises were grand enough but had a homely, lived-in air, like an establishment equivalent of the grubby fly-by-night exhibition spaces young artists set up in their own homes. The new gallery, housed over two floors that were once pounded by the feet of Edinburgh dancers at the city's much-missed nightclub The Venue, is a very different proposition. This place is as far from domestic as it is possible to get, and clearly means business, with its expanses of glass, blond wood floors and coolly minimalist interior. It is - in a restrained, Edinburgh sort of way - rather flash. The upstairs gallery is also absolutely huge, the biggest commercial exhibition space in Scotland, possibly in the UK.

Some galleries, with all this space at their disposal, might have gone in for big things, in the literal sense, packing the upper hall with monumental sculptures, grand floor-to-ceiling canvases or video projections on a cinematic scale. Ingleby, perhaps bravely, have done the exact opposite, eschewing statement pieces and blowsy installations in favour of some of the quietest, most restrained work the gallery could lay its hands on. The debut show in the new space featured prints and wall drawings by the American artist Kay Rosen; simple studies in language and colour. This was followed by Richard Forster's picture-postcard-sized seascapes, arrayed at regular intervals around the walls, each one a bravura show of draughtsmanship - but unassuming, too, in shades of grey.

Two such shows could be a coincidence but, with their third exhibition in the new gallery, a retrospective selection of lithographs by Ellsworth Kelly, Ingleby have set themselves a trend. Kelly, who is 85 this year, has forged a distinctive practice since the 1940s, always standing apart from those of his peers who followed in the wake of abstract expressionism, making work that could be called minimalist or abstract or op art or all three at the same time, without ever quite fitting in with the mainstream of a particular -ism.

Kelly is an innovative painter, sometimes combining multiple pieces into a single, modular work - a controversial new move in the 1950s - or shaping his canvases into flat, sculptural forms, deploying flat expanses of bright colour with a surface sheen. His sculptures are painterly, too: immaculately balanced, free-standing forms given an illusion of heft by panes of colour.

His work is always rooted in the real, either in the buildings of the cities he has called home, Paris and New York, or, as here, in the natural world - but his paintings and sculptures are so pared-down, so reduced, that their inspiration is rarely evident. The lithographs, however, are different: recognisable immediately, or after a nudge from a title. They lack the tough, precise edges of the paintings and do away with colour. They are not what you would call fussy.

Catalpa Leaf (Feuille), completed in 1966, is made of two lines; lines that look like they were laid down without hesitation, in two seconds flat. They are plumply curved, near-mirror-images, and meet towards the paper's lower edge. This is just enough to suggest the shape of a leaf and nothing more. Many of the earlier works on show are in the same vein, with Kelly doing what he must to evoke the plant life before him, then stopping at the perfect moment. String Bean Leaves III (Haricot Vert III) is just as minimal, and just as freely drawn, with only the bare outline of three leaves, seen from above. Locust (Acacia) sees two leaves on a stalk, and looks to have been drawn with a single, effortlessly fluid line. Grape Leaves III, a work from the early 1970s, comes, after all these almost tentative lines, as a bit of a shock: Kelly has filled in his quartet of heart-shaped forms with dense black ink, like a Rayogram in reverse. The interlocking petals of Magnolia, the cluster of foliage on the stalk of Pear I (Poire I) or the uncharacteristically finicky detail at the edges of the leaves on Woodland Plant might lack the purity of the simpler drawings, but there is not a line out of place, nothing unnecessary.

If all this sounds like a scholarly exercise in form, there are touches of humour, too. Oranges is four awkward and dumpy circles plonked in the centre of the paper, two of which are graced with a little off-centre dot. Is Kelly having a joke at his own expense, or anticipating those gallery-goers who find it hard not to mutter something about their children being able to do better when faced with work so stripped-down and simple? Or has he just drawn it as he sees it? Oranges are not the most graceful of fruit, after all. Whichever it is, the piece is a sweet, funny one.

There are echoes of Kelly's simple gestures in the work of Luca Frei, a Swiss artist who studied at the Edinburgh College of Art. His installation in the small downstairs gallery at Ingleby is dominated by a hanging sculpture made up of outsize school rulers, all of different lengths and marked with an unknown scale. You'd have a job measuring anything with them. On the walls, there are simple works on paper. One shows four circles bounded by a snake-like form, drawn on a piece of carefully folded paper. A collaged piece aligns little scraps of magazine cuttings along hesitant hand-drawn lines. A crudely sketched graph is labelled "Life is a curve, where are you on it?", which turns out to be an oblique advertising slogan for a financial institution that appears not to have weathered the storms of global recession.

If Ellsworth Kelly is in the business of seeing the abstract in the world, Luca Frei sets out to play with the possibilities of representation - of things and of information - obscuring more than he reveals. Each does it quietly, with the minimum of fuss.