The National Galleries of Scotland launched its largest exhibition to date this summer with the opening of GENERATION (28 June 2014 to 25 January 2015), the centrepiece to a landmark celebration of 25 years of contemporary art in Scotland. The work of more than 100 artists will be shown at free exhibitions at over 60 venues around the country.
At the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art there are room-sized installations by Ross Sinclair, Graham Fagen and Simon Starling as well as a diverse range of work by artists such as Charles Avery, Kate Davis, Lucy McKenzie, Victora Morton, Jonathan Owen Julia Roberts and Alison Watt. Newly commissioned installations by Claire Barclay, Toby Paterson, Ciara Phillips and Alex Dordoy express different approaches to sculpture, painting, printmaking, and collage.
Video and film works include Henry Coombes’s ‘The Bedfords’, Roderick Buchanan’s ‘Soda Stream’, and Torsten Lauschmann’s ‘At the Heart of Everything A Row of Holes’.
Douglas Gordon’s celebrated ’24 Hour Psycho’ is amongst the video works on show. Gordon takes Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film ‘Psycho’ and slows it down so that it runs for 24 hours. Although the plot of ‘Psycho’ is a familiar one and can anticipate what will happen, in Gordon’s version the future never seems to come.
At the Scottish National Gallery we are greeted by Karla Black’s new sculptural hanging of draped materials in pastel shades, ‘Story of Sensible Length’. Also on show is a room of ‘Exposed Paintings’ by Callum Innes, video projections by Rosalind Nashashibi, a film of the passing of time in everyday life, and Martin Boyce’s ‘Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours’.
The latter depicts a dark urban park lit by trees made from fluorescent tubes. David Shrigley’s three portofolios of woodcuts surround sculptures of 10 pairs of black boots of various sizes on plinths of varying heights.
‘L’Homme Double, a sculptural installation by Christine Borland, shows 6 clay portrait busts by 6 different artists, of the notorious Nazi war criminal Joseph Mengele. Each artist was given the same information on which they were to base the portrait, and it is fascinating to see how the busts are all different, and how the artists perceived Mengele.
Steven Campbell’s ‘On Form and Fiction’ is an immense installation of ink and acrylic drawings, benches and music.
At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery visitors will have the opportunity to view a recent film by Luke Fowler which builds a portrait of the Marxist historian and activist E.P. Thomson using both newly shot and found film footage.