The Launch of Lowsalt Gallery

This looks like a fairly serious springboard by grassroots artists for grassroots artists

Feature by Fraser Cardow | 16 Apr 2006
Roughly four million people crammed into Lowsalt in the Saltmarket last month for its inaugural exhibition. There wasn't even any free booze, which begs the question, why?

It's an 'artist initiative' being run by three Glasgow based artists, final year Art School Painters Beccy Anson and Chloe Brown and Krisdy Shindler from the MFA course. They've thrown their doors open to proposals. This opening entitled Cum TOgether gorged on the talents of five artists from far and wide, and was the launch of the hilariously tactile Pop-up Radical Porn magazine.

This is a show of far reaching styles. The art at Cum TOgether has depth and variety, with paintings, drawings, magazines and installations of light, video and sculpture. The space manages to be simultaneously sparse and at the same time heavily populated with character.

The show is full on, funny and vibrant. From its red lights and 'Cum TOgether' creamed onto the front window, to the variance of porn and suggestion, it's far from gratuitous. The masochistic pigs suspended in what amounts to a worrying little torture cellar continued the ill humour started by the rest of the skewed body-manipulation images. Bristling with colour and texture, it drew a similar crowd.

Running for three months until June and still taking proposals onboard, the programme isn't set yet but this looks like a fairly serious springboard by grassroots artists for grassroots artists. With the generally low level of emerging artists getting displayed in town this looks promising. A good-sized gallery split over two floors, it's well located to soak up the art market and get some deserved and prolonged attention for the plethora of shiny new artists getting involved.

A proposed showing from a Munich collective and work coming in from the many foreigners based in Glasgow promises pedigree and there is an excitingly fresh feel to the organiser's enthusiasm. This seems to be based around a confidence and optimism from the Lowsalt initiative about the ability of young artists to produce genuinely respectable shows, and the ease with which it can be done.

The shows will be changing each fortnight or so, and their ideas for the bastardization and use of their wee gallery sound hot. It's open Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 9 till 5. The next opening is on April 6.
St Andrews Street, Saltmarket.
lowsaltglasgow@yahoo.co.uk