Art of the Sex Pistols set to be celebrated
● Beatles and Monty Python to feature in National Galleries exhibition
Artwork created for The Sex Pistols, Monty Python and The Beatles is to feature in a major National Galleries of Scotland exhibition next year.
Jamie Reid, who created the punk band’ s iconic record covers in the 1970s, comedy legend Terry Gilliam and Peter Blake, who famously designed The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album, will be among the artists showcased at the event.
The show, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, will be the world’s first exhibition devoted to the history of collage in the art world.
Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Juan Gris and Joan Miro will be among the other artists celebrated in the exhibition, Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage.
Due to be staged from June to October next year, the exhibition, which will only be shown in Edinburgh, will feature more than 250 works spanning around 400 years.
Highlights of the exhibition are expected to include a three metre-long folding collage screen said to have been partly made by Charles Dickens, defaced library book covers which saw the playwright Joe Orton and his lover, the actor Kenneth Halliwell, jailed in the 1960s, and work by the feminist artists Linder Sterling, Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilkie.
A spokesman for the National Galleries said: “A huge range of styles, techniques and approaches will be on show, from 16th-century anatomical ‘flap prints’ to computer-based images, work by amateur, professional and unknown artists, collages by children and revolutionary cubist masterpieces by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, and from 19th century do-it-yourself collage kits to collage films of the 1960s.”
Sir John Leighton, directorgeneral
of the National Galleries, said: “Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage will give us an insight into collage as both hobby and high art.”
The National Galleries has meanwhile revealed that it will be celebrating the career of the London-born painter Bridget Riley in a show that will span seven decades.
She is best known as one of the leading figures in the 1960s “Op Art” movement, which emerged from London when artists like Victor Pasmore, Kenneth Martin and Mary Martin began to make use of optical illusions in their work.
Riley made her name in the 1960s by creating black-andwhite paintings based on abstract geometrical shapes.
She began experimenting with optical movement in painting, using squares, lines, circles and spirals. Riley used only black and white at first, but moved on to introduce colour in the mid-1960s.
Experts at the National Galleries say her paintings produce “feelings of movement and dislocation in the viewer and even illusions of colour in her black-and-white works”.
The exhibition will explore how Riley developed “a unique visual language, creating compelling abstract paintings which explore the fundamental nature of perception”.
The National Galleries spokesman said: “Through her observations of the natural world, her experience of looking at the work of other artists and through her own experimentation, Riley has made a deep, personal investigation into the act of painting and of how we see.
“At its heart, her work explores the ways in which we learn through looking, using a purely abstract language of simple shapes, forms and colour to create sensations of light, space, volume, rhythm and movement.”
Other shows in the 2019 line-up include a major exhibition focusing on the work of three of American’s leading 20th-century photographers – Francesca Woodman, Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe. Around 40 works will be on display, including a series of self-portraits of Mapplethorpe as his health declined after he was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. He died in 1989 at the age of just 42.
A retrospective devoted to Portuguese artist Paula Rego will show how she tackled a number of issues in her work, including António de Oliveira Salazar’s fascist regime, the 1997 referendum on legalising abortion in Portugal, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the United States and its allies and female genital mutilation.