This Week in Scottish Art: Silent auction & more

We begin tonight in Glasgow, with the opening of Six Foot Gallery’s Silent Auction. With opening bids starting from £5, there’s plenty of reasonably-priced artwork to select from. The auction will continue until 22 February, with a range of prints, paintings and photographs available to peruse; the opening is tonight (2 Feb) from 6pm.

Next, a pressing reminder for Dundee-based artists – and a forward notice for everyone else – that the Generator Projects’ group show is currently in the midst of its open call. Submissions close this Thursday (4 Feb); after this, Generator will be selecting and curating the exhibition to open on Friday 12 February.

Still in Dundee, it’s the last fortnight of IC-98 at Dundee Contemporary Arts, which runs until 14 Feb. Suggestion: it might be a shout to book tickets now for 12-14 Feb, when the aforementioned Generator Projects’ show overlaps with the largest show to date by the Finnish duo. The main gallery at DCA has undergone the latest in a series of exhibition-specific transformations, but this time it’s with the artist duo’s large scale projections and intricate hand drawings. Across IC-98’s practice, they look to “nature and culture, material and myth, and the individual and the collective.”

Tomorrow night, there is the meeting of the fortnightly reading group Bookmark. Their materials range from texts and screenings on art, culture, politics, philosophy, anthropology and sociology. For tomorrow, Christopher Macinnes’ current show in the CCA – Retina Gothic – will frame their discussion. This exhibition furthers Macinnes’ research into the rapidly dwindling material basis of technological advancement. Discussion begins tomorrow (Wed 3 Feb) from 8pm, and the relevant texts can be found here. 

Collective, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop & Glasgow Print Studio

At 6pm this Thursday, 'micro resident' of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop Katrin Hanusch presents her practice and some of the outcomes of the residence so far. Usually London-based, Hanusch considers in her work the beauty of broken structures, or missing information and miscommunication. Not so easily situated in painting, drawing or sculpture, her works veer between the labour-intensive and the gestural. No need to book, free and all welcome.

Staying in Edinburgh this Thursday, from 7-9pm there’s a screening and discussion event in Collective Gallery, programmed by artist Kathryn Elkin and Peter Taylor, Director of Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. This is part of three events on the topic of expansive understandings of artworks; the themed screenings continue on Sat 6 Feb and Thu 11 Feb.

In Glasgow, it’s the first Thursday of the month, so there are new exhibitions in the Glasgow Print Studio in Trongate, with Sarah Wright’s Fresh Starts on the first floor and new featured artist Ross McAuley on the ground floor. For Fresh Starts, Wright creates a new body of work on recently-emerging themes in her practice. She often looks to found materials in newspapers and fashion magazines as part of an interest in the rhythm and subjective language of pictures. On Thursday from 6pm, Wright will preview a new installation that involves partitioning the space as part of choreographing a series of new photoetchings, photocopies and digital prints.

New shows at Tramway, Mary Mary & Celine

Glasgow is also busy on Friday, with openings in Mary Mary and Tramway, and performance in new space Celine. Mary Mary’s new group show sees artists considering fragility and delicate forms, titled Geographies of Dust and Air. Emphasis is shifted from form to “light, shadow, transparency”, with a selection of slight and pared down works from five internationally-based artists. The show continues until 19 March.

At 7pm on Friday, there is a performance by Glasgow-based artists Gordon Douglas and Georgia Horgan in Celine. So far, Celine have mostly coupled emerging artists with internationally renowned artists; this time Douglas and Horgan have been grouped with Alex Bag, whose video work deconstructs conventions of television and mass media culture, with a strong sense of humour. With some parallels to Bag’s work, Douglas and Horgan will perform 'I Wonder Who’s Been Around Here Long Enough to Know', which comes from an interest in “notions of reproduction, documentation and cultural inheritance in performance art and education.”

And also from 7-9pm, Tramway previews its new exhibition from Richard Slee, titled Work and Play. Now established as one of the most important British ceramic artists, Slee pushes at the moveable boundaries of the medium. It is his radical work produced over the last 10 years that is showcased in Tramway, in which he has explored new materials, processes and subject matter, looking towards “commonplace tools, sports equipment and everyday objects,” integrating unique ceramics and readymades.