Having recently relocated to Bath Street in Glasgow, Roger Billcliffe is once again delighting art lovers by showcasing the very best  contemporary Scots painters, writes Sarah Urwin Jones

“Well, I was going to retire...” says Roger Billcliffe, cheerily, as we discuss the opening of the new city centre premises to which his eponymous art gallery, known for selling fine contemporary Scottish and 20th century art to Glasgow and beyond since its foundation in 1992, has just moved. 


When the lease on their five storey premises looked to be up just before the pandemic, and the gallery was forced – like all others around Scotland – to shut its doors as the virus ran riot, it became clear that the future of the art market was going to be a very different one from that which any had imagined some few months before.
“It coincided with a radical rethink of how we go forward,” he says, smiling. “So I thought I’d stay on.” There is nothing, after all, like a new challenge. 
Certainly the new gallery space is very different to the old. Centrally placed in what is perhaps something of an “art quarter” – the Compass Gallery is round the corner and there are other galleries dotted in the vicinity – it’s very different to the ‘grand’ assemblage of their old building. 


An intimate basement space next door to Cooper Hay Rare Books, downstairs from The Glasgow Art Club, it’s a welcoming viewing space ideal for solo shows and the quiet contemplation of the paintings which the gallery highlights. The move is perhaps indicative of a larger change in the art market in the past two years.  
“Covid formulated the practice of people buying from the web, or from email newsletters – without ever seeing the picture!” Billcliffe says, initially as surprised, and doubtless relieved, as anyone at the initial upturn in sales in the unknown territory of the early days of the pandemic. 


And yet if Covid suggested that art could go online in some respects, and threw in to relief a fact that the gallery had long been considering – that they didn’t necessarily need the expensive, and perhaps somewhat intimidating four floors that they then inhabited – the physicality of a gallery still seemed important, and not least with a younger crowd coming in to the gallery with different buying criteria. 
“It’s a lot more approachable,” says Billcliffe. “And people are not making collections as such any more, at least not in Glasgow,” says the gallery director, whose career at the Fine Art Society in the 1970s and ’80s was forged amongst obsessive collectors, relentlessly ticking off Colourists or Glasgow Boys. 
“Now it's about the things that people want to have in their houses. People think of a picture as completing a room or starting a room – it’s a different way of working.” 
But if fine art paintings are the gallery's bread and butter, painters are increasingly hard to come by these days, he contends. 


“Art schools are not producing that many painters now. I'm glad artists want to move on and do something different, but I'm not in the business of selling conceptual art to hedge funds.” 
It's all about fashion, he says – the art market seeming to find a way even when times are hard. 
And perhaps surprisingly, it’s not so much about investment, even in this dire economic climate. It's about living with the art you want to live with – and perhaps an extension of that prime place in our lives that our homes took during the lockdown era, when the walls we might be lucky enough to have became so intensely focused upon. 
On Billcliffe's own walls, beyond the opening mixed show of the gallery's well-known roster of artists, the new premises will make its mark with a joint solo show placing two contemporary artists at the forefront, Saul Robertson and Louis McNally. 


“These two artists both create work that's almost like magic realism, producing landscapes that have an air of unreality about them – it probably starts off as topographical but changes in to something else. We’ve always had their work on a small scale, but people are beginning to recognise it and look for it.” 
Long-established gallery artists will follow, with new work from Gordon Mitchell, Glen Scouller and Duncan Shanks, individually, over the next six months, and the gallery's much-loved Christmas 'Postcard' exhibition inbetween. 
With 2024’s shows already sketched in, it looks, for Roger Billcliffe at least, as if that retirement is still some way off. 

Visit Roger Billcliffe Gallery 185b Bath St, Glasgow G2 4HU or go online at 
www.billcliffegallery.com

This article was brought to you by Roger Bilcliffe Gallery