Exhibition of the week Edinburgh Art Festival 2018
Various venues around Edinburgh (0131-226 6558, edinburghartfestival.com). Until 26 August
The Edinburgh Art Festival is always a “pleasingly disparate” affair, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. The latest instalment of the city’s annual visual arts programme, now in its 15th year, takes in a wildly diverse array of museum shows, special events and smaller exhibitions in unlikely venues across town. The programme is as “amorphous” as ever, and is all the better for it. This year’s festival features excellent exhibitions devoted to Rembrandt and the dazzling paintings of the German-danish expressionist painter Emil Nolde; a “spectral” film by Bill Viola screened in the “sepulchral shadows” of St Cuthbert’s Church; objects from the University of Edinburgh’s collection, including a written request from James VI and I for “the fairest and bravest hound” for his hunt; and even magic shows organised by political artist Ruth Ewan and “socialist magician” Ian Saville (look out for the Class Struggle Rope Trick). Coherent it isn’t, but this festival is “full of wonders”.
Unfortunately, the wonders are few and far between, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. There are some terrific things here, including a “superb” show by the contemporary artist Tacita Dean at the Fruitmarket Gallery, and a riotous unofficial exhibition themed around the anti-putin dissident band Pussy Riot at Summerhall. Yet overall, this “plodding” programme is distinctly lacking in the “wild spirit of spontaneity” that makes Edinburgh’s Fringe so exciting. Indeed, much of what we see here is just downright bad. Worst of the lot is a show at Edinburgh College of Art devoted to “the rights and wrongs of anthropology departments still owning nonEuropean skulls collected in the 19th century”; it isn’t so much art as “ethical hand-wringing”. Ultimately, you can’t help feeling that art is an “afterthought” at the Edinburgh festivals.
For all its faults, this year’s art festival “shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand”, said Alastair Smart in The Daily Telegraph. An undoubted highlight is a show devoted to the late Scottish artist John Bellany’s paintings of the 1980s: created in the wake of his wife’s death, they transform “personal torment” into “first-rate art”. Elsewhere, I’d recommend a visit to the Dovecot, which plays host to an exhibition charting the 140-year history of the department store Liberty of London, and “exploring its place at the forefront of different styles” from art nouveau to psychedelia. There are “a fair few misses”, but all in all, there’s “something for every taste in Edinburgh in 2018”.