Make sure the sun’s shining brightly when you visit Richard Wright’s new temporary installation at The Modern Institute’s Aird’s Lane space. The artist’s four leaded glass skylights are beautiful constructions in themselves, but to get their full impact, light needs to be streaming in from clear skies above, dancing and shifting across the walls and floor of this white cube gallery. The conditions, then, need to be right – a fitting metaphor, perhaps, for Glasgow’s rise as an international art city.
Wright’s show is part of Generation, a Scotland-wide celebration of the last 25 years of Scottish art in which, not surprisingly as its biggest city and the beating heart of the country’s visual arts scene, Glasgow plays a leading role. Many of the 100-plus artists involved are either from Glasgow, based in Glasgow, or studied at Glasgow School of Art.
It’s Edinburgh, though, that has the summer blockbuster shows, and it was the opening of these last week that marked the formal launch of Generation – although exhibitions have been popping up all over Scotland since March.
The Scottish National Gallery on The Mound is hosting seven artists including Martin Boyce, David Shrigley, Steven Campbell and Christine Borland, while the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is home to 22 artists; more from Richard Wright, plus Douglas Gordon, Lucy McKenzie, Claire Barclay, Torsten Lauschmann, Roderick Buchanan – pretty much a roll-call of key names from the last 25 years. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery presents Luke Fowler’s 2012 film, The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott.
Like Fowler’s piece, much of the work at the National Gallery has been shown previously – although the context of this institution’s grand, early Victorian-era galleries makes for a very different viewing experience. Martin Boyce’s 2002 installation, Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, feels like a museum piece here, transposed from its original post-industrial setting in the rough and ready Tramway and now sitting at the heart of the country’s art establishment.
There’s something about the incongruity of this that makes you smile and feel slightly uneasy at the same time – a little like the Generation project itself, in fact, which although teeming with great works can at times feel like an outbreak of generational backslapping: didn’t we all do well! Either way, Boyce’s installation looks amazing, the dim lighting, fluorescent tubes and wire mesh providing an instant visual shift as you enter the galleries.
Meaning and emotion
Back in Glasgow, Cathy Wilkes inhabits the original home of Our Love… with her darkly emotional, bleak but beautiful sculptural forms resembling small children and bowed adults. While some artists would seek to go big in order fill this huge space, Wilkes’ intimate and ghostly installation is like a quiet scream, its silent echo filling the gallery.
Over at Glasgow Print Studio, Michael Fullerton’s Meaning Inc. is another highlight. Packed with new work that straddles portraiture, print and sculpture, the thread that pulls it all together is Fullerton’s ongoing exploration of the way information and ideas are created, disseminated and absorbed. Here, a cast of key players includes file sharing entrepreneur Kim Dotcom (currently fighting extradition from New Zealand to America to face charges of copyright infringement), MGM founder Samuel Goldwyn and the current governor of Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow.
There’s hardly an art gallery anywhere in Scotland (and particularly Glasgow and Edinburgh) that isn’t in some way touched by the Generation project over the coming months – there’s even a shop selling artists’ t-shirts at Glasgow’s South Block, and tucked away in the Zaha Hadid-designed transport museum on the Clyde are a couple of humourously thoughtful video pieces by Alan Currall.
And wisely, perhaps, most of the shows – unlike Wright’s skylights – will remain unaffected by the vagaries of a Scottish summer.
