Edinburgh’s other festival
From stations and salerooms to Jacobean houses, the Edinburgh Art Festival has it all going on this summer, says Colin Gleadell
The largest festival of visual art in the UK, the Edinburgh Art Festival, gets under way next week, with its customary mix of national and international, old and new, and selling and non-selling exhibitions. Although the emphasis is on the contemporary, history is not snuffed out. The first ever exhibition devoted to Scottish art in the Royal Collection is staged at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and covers acquisitions by monarchs from George III to Queen Victoria. One of the artists is James Giles, who is also included in a selling exhibition of historic Scottish art at the Fine Art Society, with a view of the Deer Forest at Balmoral in 1854 (£28,000). This exhibition kicks off with a rare 17thcentury father and son pairing of still life painter William Gouw Ferguson and his little-known son, Henry, whose substantial depiction of Roman temple ruins (£65,000), was discovered by the gallery catalogued under another name.
Fast forwarding to the 20th century, there are exhibitions of work by Anne Redpath, followed by Joan Eardley, at the Scottish Gallery and, showing and for sale for the first time, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by the late John Bellany owned by his widow and life-long muse, Helen. This very personal selection at the Open Eye Gallery spans their sometimes tempestuous life, together and apart, from early figurative drawings of the Sixties, through the dark symbolism of the Seventies to the more joyous, lifeaffirming later works. Prices will range from £750 to £100,000. Also in retrospective mode is an exhibition at the Dovecot Gallery of tapestries and paintings by Bernat Klein, whose fabrics were favoured by Coco Chanel, Dior, Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent. These will also be for sale, priced from £720 to £8,400.
Contemporary art in the city revolves around commissioned work by young artists for the festival, and public gallery arrangements with some established international figures. Amongst the commissions are new performance installations by Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere, who occupy the Old Royal High School, a 19th-century neo-classical building that has been empty for many years. An extraordinary mathematically patterned bronze tree by Charles Avery will also be placed inside Waverley Station. Over the bridge to the side of the station, in the Ingleby gallery, Avery continues the ongoing project he calls The Islanders, exploring the myths, rituals and religions of a fictional island sea port named Onomatopoeia, with paintings, posters and furniture arranged like souvenirs from the island (£500£28,000 each).
Avery, who was brought up in Mull, has an international following, as do four other artists at the festival who are represented by some of the most powerful galleries on the international circuit. Although not ostensibly selling exhibitions, you can be sure gallery representatives will be on hand in case any potential purchaser materialises.
At Jupiter Artland outside the city, the ballroom of Jacobean Bonnington House will open to the public for the first time to display a massive sitespecific sculpture made of plastic cups by American artist Tara Donovan, (Pace Gallery). At the Fruitmarket Gallery, Phyllida Barlow (Hauser & Wirth), has filled the space with plywood, cardboard fabric and paint, much as she did in the Duveen Gallery in Tate Britain. The Talbot Rice Gallery is putting on the first exhibition in Scotland of work by the late conceptual artist, Hanne Darboven (Spruth Magers Gallery); and at Inverleith House is the first museum show in Europe of works by the late John Chamberlain (Gagosian Gallery).
For all these galleries, the Edinburgh Art Festival is considered a prestigious event for their artists to take part in, but sadly it takes place under a cloud this time, as arts funding for both Inverleith House and the Talbot Rice Gallery is under review.
Amid all this activity it may seem strange that the auction scene in Scotland during August is so depleted. A sale of post-war and contemporary Scottish art at Lyon & Turnbull is full of lower-priced prints and leads with minor works by William Gear and the playwright/artist John Byrne. Byrne, who had a near sell-out show at Bourne Fine Art in Edinburgh last summer, has more minor works in an auction at McTear’s in Glasgow. But a spokesman for McTear’s, which holds contemporary Scottish art sales every five weeks, underlined that this will be one of their smallest of the year. “Most wealthy Scots in Edinburgh and Glasgow go away in August,” he said, Edinburgh Art Festival runs July 30Aug 30; edinburghartfestival.com Art Sales returns on Sept 8
‘The ballroom of Jacobean Bonnington House will display a massive sculpture made of plastic cups’