A former head of the Master of Fine Art Programme at Glasgow school of Art has said her first major show in the city is the summation of her life’s work.
Sam Ainsley’s exhibition ‘Wednesday is Cobalt blue, Friday is Cadmium red’ opened at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) on Saturday and will run through out the winter.
It is the first such show for Ainsley since her 1987 solo exhibition – Why I Choose Red at the Third Eye
Centre (now Centre for Contemporary Art, CCA), and marks a return to the city where she taught for more than a decade.
Featuring acrylic paintings on canvas, framed prints, bound and shaped acrylic canvas works, and a wall drawing, this show is a deeply personal culmination of recent work and draws strands together from nearly 50 years of art practice.
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Sam said: “I am really excited to be working with GoMA for my first one person exhibition in Glasgow since Why I Choose Red in 1987.
“I feel it encapsulates almost all of the concerns and ideas I have worked with for many years- it is a sort of summation of a life-time's work.”
Ainsley’s interest in the human body - especially the female body, however abstracted - and its relationship to the world has been at the core of her work, and has remained constant despite shifts in the focus of her attention over the years:
She added: “My parallel interest in relationships between the natural world and the human body, maps and mapping has also been consistent as has a fascination with scale; both the microscopic world and the macroscopic.
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“The relationship of our bodies to landscape and the man-made world ie. trees seen as the lungs of a city, rivers as arteries and so on has long fascinated me.
“Many of my works are also influenced by literature, poetry and geo-politics. The body has become a kind of landscape for me, familiar and with powerful memories. Imagining the body as a landscape or as a mirror of the world that sustains us can be difficult in the centre of a city, but I try to relate these thoughts to the man-made world too.”
In the last year the artist has had solo presentations at the Royal Scottish Academy and Leeds Arts University, and is included in the major Tate Britain group show ‘Women in Revolt!’ which opens later this year.
Wednesday is Cobalt blue, Friday is Cadmium red has been supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
The exhibition runs from 25 November 2023 to 10 March next year.
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