Protest, Renaissance Beauty and New Contemporaries: This week in Scottish Art

There are new exhibitions opening across Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as interesting events and a worthy petition.

Feature by Adam Benmakhlouf | 11 Mar 2015

Before getting to this week’s openings and talks this week, take a few seconds to sign the petition of the current Glasgow School of Art Master of Fine Art students who are protesting against a 47% reduction in their studio access. Read more and sign here. Kicking off this week's exhibitions, this is the last week of Skinny Showcase winner Rachel Levine’s show in the CCA intermedia gallery. With this show, Levine presents objects that are poised to frustrate easy perception or understanding. The title Soft Chaos, as explained in our chat last month, is all about “something much more niggling than chaos … The space of inbetweenness.” Soft Chaos will close this Saturday, 14 Mar.

This Wednesday, 11 Mar, is a free lecture by Farah Karim-Cooper on Painted Ladies: Renaissance Beauty and Cosmetic Practices at the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre in the Scottish National Gallery. Karim-Cooper will discuss the beauty ideal in early modern Europe and England, and she draws an interesting parallel between the ingredients of the cosmetics of the time and the materials that were used at the time to paint portraits of these made-up faces. It's a free event, from 12.45-1.30pm, and there is no need to book.

Also taking place on Wednesday, at 7pm in the Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Kathryn Elkin will mark the final week of the GSS exhibition “Till the stars turn cold” with a performance in collaboration with musicians Christopher Haddow, Vic Henderson, Eilidh Rodgers and Emer Tumilty. By doing so, Elkin returns the collaborators from her video work featured in the exhibition to the gallery. This is intended as part of “a never-quite-arriving performance, thematically covering observed and unobserved behaviours, and forms of afternoon erratic speech made behind closed doors, amidst continual restarts and alternate versions.” The exhibition itself will close this Saturday. 

In Edinburgh from this Saturday, the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition will be open to all and sundry. It’s a convenient opportunity to see who the society has deemed the crème de la crème of the past year's art graduates. Always exciting, we got some hints about what’s coming your way, which you can catch up on in our rundown of some of the most exciting exhibitors. New Contemporaries is open til 8 April and entry is £4 (£2 concession).

In Dundee this Friday, from 6-8pm in the Hannah Maclure Centre, is the opening reception for the show Decoding Space. Taking its beginnings as the interaction of art, performance and technology, there is a strong multidisciplinarity to the range of artists who are included. Independent games development studio Quartic Llama are showing work alongside internationally renowned and adventurous artists’ group Blast Theory. This Friday, there is a live performance by the dance company Small Petit Klein. The exhibition continues from 16 Mar - 10 Apr. Also opening this Friday is Jessica Ramm’s show at the Tramway in Glasgow, from 7-9pm – read more about the show in this month’s events guide.

Finally, this Monday sees the third in the series of five one-night exhibitions by recent graduates of Glasgow School of Art Painting and Printmaking at the Old Hairdresser’s. This time, it’s Fran Caballero’s turn, with his large-scale takes on still life painting. There’s a flat brightness to the work that pares down the figurative elements to become graphic, allowing them to be arranged amongst outright abstract elements and pattern, or masked off, all the while the paint variously flat and textured to create complex surfaces. With the excllent title of Gjallarhorn and the 10 Fight Losing Streak, the exhibition is open from 6pm on Monday 16 Mar.


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