Visual Art
14th June 2023
People get nervous about the very notion of data; some assume it can only be used in scientific, and business applications – is that at all a sustainable view in the digital age and the new world of AI? In her project ‘Bit Parts’, Elke Finkenauer shows us how data is the artist’s necessary friend, the work ‘focusses on human and creative, rather than technical, challenges to data: acknowledging subjectivity, working with idiosyncrasy, and keeping questions of means, as well as ends, alive.’
30th March 2023
Nights when people, places and stars align to create an unforgettable experience very rarely happen. A few weeks ago I attended a unique event in The Revelator in the historic Barclay Curle Shipyard. In this extraordinary space – a handmade Wall of Death – I watched a live gig from the band The Tenementals and listened to a rectoral speech from RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch. Nights like this are never to be repeated.
10th February 2023
The City of Glasgow bought Salvador Dalí's 'Christ of St. John of The Cross' for its Museums and Galleries collection in 1952. A high profile and controversial purchase, the painting has been attacked and seriously damaged on at least two occasions by visitors to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery. Where did Dalí get the idea for the work and what were the methodologies of his execution of it? Dmitriy Soliterman investigates.
23rd January 2023
Billed as 'groundbreaking', the Edinburgh City Art Centre exhibition, Glean - curated by Jenny Brownrigg - gathers the work of 14 pioneering early 20th century women photographers and filmmakers. Sara Stevenson reviews it for The Drouth, and considers it an 'impressive achievement'.
12th January 2023
A meditation on those places where you can learn to see things and make things, and mess around with materials and forms and colours, usually for no particular purpose other than what Murdo Macdonald calls here a 'true education'. What will come of it, what has become of it?
20th October 2022
Born and raised in Glasgow, the only child of a Russian emigre, painter Yusef Szafki was much influenced by literature in his visual artwork. In an endlessly creative life, he published two literary works, including one on engaging with the Russian/Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol (60’ N (1996) ). Arguably the bold dreamlike, exaggerated style of Szafki’s work is influenced heavily by Gogol’s character, and his writing in such famous stories as ‘Diary of a Madman’ and ‘The Nose’. Johnny Rodger reviews this retrospective as the first exhibition to attempt a survey across his life’s work, and appreciates Szafki's experimentation and his ever-developing concerns with form, tone and texture.
3rd June 2022
A new book 'Glasgow Cool of Art: 13 books of fire at the Mackintosh Library' takes a personal, artistic, intellectual and critical view of the two fires in Mackintosh's masterwork. It attempts to square the trauma that the fires caused by looking at the effect on a wide range of people -adults, children, citizens, academics, artists, architects, and as Murdo Macdonald notes in review, addresses the challenge of the international worth or otherwise of that great building.
22nd April 2022
POSTING MAY DAY: The story of International Workers’ Day through Trade Union Posters by LORNA MILLER
The Story of May Day as the celebration of International Workers Day, and specifically the organisation of the Glasgow May Day festivities over the last few years, is told by artist and political cartoonist Lorna Miller in a wonderful insight into her work in creation of posters for Glasgow Trades Council.
HOWSON’S INFERNO
by
GREG THOMAS