CRITIC’S CHOICE

The Scottish Gallery has long been associated with Wilhelmina BarnsGraham, the Scottish artists who set up studio in St Ives, Cornwall in 1940 and remained rooted there until her death in 2004. Representing the artist in her life, and after, the gallery here presents this retrospective of her later career, beginning in 1958, when the artist was working through rigorous abstraction to a more fluid and organic approach to colour, form and textural expression. Wide-ranging, eclectic, Barns-Graham never stood still, experimenting with intensity of colour, with contrasting forms or geometries, with precision or with freedom of mark-marking.

Born in 1912 in St Andrews, BarnsGraham went to Edinburgh College of Art before moving to St Ives, in Cornwall, where she became lifelong friends with Bernard Leach, Robert Borlase Smart and Ben Nicolson, with poet WS Graham and Barbara Hepworth, alongside many other artists and writers. Overlooked during much of her lifetime, as were many twentieth century women artists working in an art world dominated by men, she once recalled being unwilling to let Nicolson know where she had been sketching in Italy because “it would be me that would be told I was influenced by Ben.” She was once mistaken by a leading London gallerist, despite talking with him on art for many hours, as “the wife of Willie Barns-Graham.”

But Barns-Graham persisted, her evolving work from her 40s onwards traced in this exhibition from the wonderfully free and fluid forms of the late 1950s work inspired by her trip to the Balearics to the intensely colour-saturated discs of her midcareer, the textural collages of her 70s and the late printmaking with the Graal Press, well into her 80s.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: A Journey Through Four Decades, The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh, 0131 558 1200, www.scottish-gallery. co.uk 30 Oct–26 Nov, Mon–Fri, 10am–6pm; Sat 10am-4pm