Edinburgh Art Festival
Established in 2004, the Edinburgh Art Festival is the newest major addition to Edinburgh's August Festivals line-up, but it filled a longtime gap. Visual art somehow seemed obscured by the creative mayhem of the rest of the festival before the galleries clubbed together and launched their own festival within the Edinburgh Festival.
Details of the 2013 Edinburgh Art Festival will be announced later in the year.
Highlights from previous Edinburgh Art Festivals
- Exhibitions by British sculptors include Anish Kapoor’s first solo exhibition in Scotland; David Mach at City Art Centre; Tony Cragg at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; and Thomas Houseago at the Royal Botanic Gardens.
- Solo exhibitions by leading international artists including Robert Rauschenberg at Inverleith House; Ingrid Calme at The Fruitmarket Gallery; and Anton Henning at Talbot Rice Gallery.
- Historical exhibitions including The Northern Renaissance: Durer to Holbein at The Queen’s Gallery; and two major portraiture exhibitions: 500 Years of Scottish Portraiture at Bourne Fine Art; and The Queen: Art and Image at the Scottish National Gallery; as well as a collection of work in glass at the newly re-opening National Museum of Scotland
- Exhibitions by the established and emerging British artists including Elizabeth Blackadder, John Byrne, Tamsyn Challenger, Chris Drury and Stephen Sutcliffe.
Edinburgh Art Festival commissions:
(Made with support of Scottish Government's Expo funding)
- Turner Prize Winner Richard Wright's "Stairwells Project", which involved painting the spiral stairwell of the former orphange building which is now the Dean Gallery
- Turner Prize Winner Martin Creed's Scotsman Steps Project, a reclaiming of the historic artery between Old and New Town Edinburgh
- "Solar Pavilion" by Karen Forbes - a temporary festival venue and installation in St Andrew Square
- Edinburgh Art Festival App Watch the Water
EAF Modus Operandi
Generally, the EAF encourages artists to submit work through "open invitation". It states:
"The EAF is unlike other visual art festivals in that it does not commission the exhibition programme. Instead it encourages the development of a broad range of ambitious, high quality, visual art initiatives through a process of open invitation followed by rigorous selection"
Past Edinburgh Art Festivals have included off-beat events in and out of galleries such as late night culture crawls, experimenta, and art installations as well as numerous exhibitions of local, national and international artists and groups. Both commercial and public galleries have participated.
Past Edinburgh Art Festivals
- Edinburgh Art Festival 2010 programme announced
- Edinburgh Art Festival 2009 gets underway
- Edinburgh Art Festival 2008 programme
