Kilmorack Gallery Christmas 2011 Exhibition

6 Dec 2011 in Highland, Visual Arts & Crafts

Kilmorack Gallery, until 23 December 2011

THE Kilmorack Gallery Christmas 2011 exhibition presents an invigorating combination of new work.

REGULAR exhibitors include Allan MacDonald, Alan MacDonald, Colin Brown, James Newton Adams, Kirstie Cohen, Helen Denerley, Lynn McGregor, James McCallum, Henry Fraser and Claire Harkness, while Joyce W Cairns, David Cook and Eduard Bersudsky are new artists to the gallery. The quality of work throughout is exceptional and gives an exciting taster of wider showcases of individual work as part of the 2012 exhibition programme.

Joyce W Cairns - North East Village

Joyce W Cairns - North East Village

It is wonderful to see one of the most important living figures in the history of Scottish Art highlighted in this exhibition with the inclusion of work by Joyce W Cairns. North East Village (Watercolour) exemplifies her command of figurative composition, influenced by German Expressionist masters such as Max Beckmann. The architecture of the image confines and defines the figures within, creating real psychological and emotional depth.

The strength of composition in Cairns’s work is compelling, and her crafting of the image absolutely masterful. The geometric arrangement of the cat in the foreground and framing of the central figure between a lighthouse and totemic image of self binds the central protagonist to her surroundings within a formal triptych design. The image is rendered with absolute clarity of line, a stark watercolour tinged with steely blue, red and ochre accents that places the human subject and condition centre stage.

This enduring quality is also very much in evidence in the artist’s figurative work on a much larger scale in oils; The Deadly Wars (1993), Irma (1994-5) or Sword Beach (1996), seen as part of War Tourist, major retrospective of the artist’s work at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in 2006, one of the most significant exhibitions by a Scottish artist in the last decade.

Joyce W Cairns - A Winter's Tale

Joyce W Cairns - A Winter's Tale

Throughout her career Cairns has developed her own unique iconography drawn from the area around her home in Footdee on the North East coast. A Winter’s Tale, like much of the artist’s work, is richly symbolic and intimate in its psychology. Steeped in the grey of northern winter skies, bold ultramarine and cadmium red resiliently define each of the three figures. Again the central portrait is flanked by two attending figures resembling an altarpiece; on the left a nude woman within the statuesque body of a predatory bird whose talons seem to reach toward the ear of the central protagonist and on the right a naïve totemic figure whose pigeon-toed awkwardness and child-like bob are suggestive of youth. Experience weighs heavily on the central portrait, instinctively modelled on the artist’s own features. The female figure sits bound in a red corset, the triangular face of a cat nestled symbolically in her lap and the speckled pattern of her blouse like falling snowflakes of an internalised winter.

Alan MacDonald’s beguiling figurative works are another highlight of the exhibition. In Lumos (Oil on linen), a girl in hooped skirt period costume dominates the space; she gazes beyond the viewer, her tiered dress revealing a series of trapdoors and a surreal juxtaposition of objects within; lollipop, scissors, golden soap (?) and glass bottle. Like the string of coloured fairy lights she holds between her fingers, arms out stretched, she appears luminous against a deep grey background; half abandoned fairground, half antique landscape.

Alan MacDonald - Lumos

Alan MacDonald - Lumos

At the base of the composition are the words – written in a tinge of gold linking text to object – “This is the day your life will surely change”, a poignant expression of human aspiration that feels linked with the fairy lights she grasps in her hands. The middle layer of her dress contains a pattern of numbers of indecipherable code and in the trim of her skirt the text “Somewhere in the depths of my mind there is a warm place, there olive trees grow, surrounded by terraces of grapevines” defies the cold palette and isolated world she inhabits. Painted with the precision of an old master, MacDonald’s work is, like that statement at the base of the painting, an imaginative journey of free association for the viewer.

Allan MacDonald - Pink Sky Over Northern Hills

Allan MacDonald - Pink Sky Over Northern Hills

Allan MacDonald’s Fionaven, Winter Sundown (Oil on Canvas) is a particularly fine example of his work, a blaze of pink light illuminating the sky and the luminosity of yellow cottage rooftops against a blue foreground whiteout of snow. Broad confident brushstrokes and a palette emblazoned with light define the semi-abstract composition with economy and lucidity. Stripped of detail the scene is transformed by the formal design of the canvas and the resonance of colour and light drawn directly from the artist’s experience of the landscape.

Colin Brown - Bardot

Colin Brown - Bardot

Colin Brown’s beautifully composed mixed media collages combine accidental marks with formal design elements, fragments of text and images drawn from advertising and popular culture. At his best Brown balances an assault of visual imagery with contemplative space, and Bardot is a great example. The viewer is presented with multiple layers of imagery; the iconic actress and sex symbol, a trajectory of billboard-like sunlight, a 19th century illustration of two exotically sinister birds, their blue plumage and red eyes echoing the dominant palette of the work in an attitude of both courtship and combat. The artist’s visual language is pure POP ART, seduction and interrogation at the same time, and this ambiguity communicated in the balance of visual elements and ideas within each work is a major strength. Ever present is the human mark, energetic paint splatter coupled with mass media design creating vital tension in the work.

A series of square compositions based on famous figures Orbison, The Beatles and Lee Marvin, although magnificently executed, feel more self conscious, relying on celebrity interest rather than creating an imaginative and contemplative space for the viewer to inhabit. Layers of imagery are densely packed to the point where as a series they become visually repetitive in spite of their very accomplished technique, losing the element of repose exemplified by the Bardot image. Brown, like Warhol, is at his most potent when turning the visual language of Pop culture in on itself rather than relying on a fan base to lure the eye.

Bersudsky - Raven

Bersudsky - Raven

Created from burr elm, Eduard Bersudsky’s sculptures seem to morph mystically and organically out of the woodgrain. His Mechanical Raven ringing a brass bell feels monumental both in its robust form and in its immediate associations with death. Although most strongly associated with Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, the narrative skill present in his sculpture and perhaps most powerfully in his drawings, demonstrate the role of the artist as witness to timeless cycles of human behaviour. Mechanical Raven is a symbolic work, but it is also a personal one as we are reminded even as we smile at its ingenious mechanisation that the bell eventually tolls for us all. There is dark comedy in Bersudsky’s raven, but also an essential truth.

David Cook - Violent Sea

David Cook - Violent Sea

David Cook’s extraordinary paint-handling is exemplified by both Violent Sea and Glowing Flowers (Oil on board), leaving the viewer hungry for the full scale of the artist’s work to be revealed. Thick impasto and the vibrancy of yellow and orange against muted green in Glowing Flowers feel like a celebration of life force. The physicality of painting on board, together with fluent handling of pigment and choice of palette, create a statement of beauty imbued with struggle, not in terms of Romanticism but essential vitality, effectively putting the life back into still life.

Violent Sea is equally impressive, with a variety of mark that is both powerfully sensitive and insightful, rendering the foreground in scratched drawn marks on deep purple in contrast to highlights of Naples yellow and ochre. The artist’s intuitive treatment of the surface reveals the emotional gravitas of the Northern landscape.
With its fluid brushwork contained within a canvas of relatively intimate size, Cook’s The Bay, feels like a concentrated corner of an image belonging to a much greater expanse of work. Overall the introduction of the artist’s work gives an intoxicating glimpse of exhibitions of future work on a larger scale. It is always wonderful to discover new paths in familiar artist’s work and the work of new artists and Kilmorack Gallery’s latest exhibition contains a gratifying abundance of both.

Open Thursday- Sunday, 11am-5.30pm.

© Georgina Coburn, 2011

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