Andy Hope 1930 @ Inverleith House

Meeting dinosaurs and partaking in a bit of evolutionary time travel are not everyday occurrences, but according to the work of artist Andy Hope 1930, they really ought to be. Inverleith House plays host to the first UK museum exhibition for the Berlin-based artist, who changed his name from Andreas Hofer in 2010 to create a fictional character for himself. Walking through the gallery, you meet a host of characters, ranging from dinosaurs, cowboys, time-travelling fish and cultural icons such as Linda Lee as Supergirl and French proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel.   

That 30 of the 41 works on display were made in 2012, which makes the exhibition extremely current. The show brings together the artist’s long-standing preoccupation with comics, sci-fi and the natural world. Indeed, he was inspired by a previous visit to the Botanic Garden’s Fern House, thus providing a context for the exhibition and the work F for Fish, where a time-travelling fish has inadvertently ended up as a fossil encased within a section of limestone.

But the piece that really brings the exhibition together is The Educational Dinosaur Movie Hall, in which an audience of prehistoric animals including a Tyrannosaurus rex and a pterodactyl watch an animated film from the 1930s. The cardboard box-sized peep-show installation straddles the boundaries of time and reality, but is also humorous and fun. In this work, Hope 1930 is making the seemingly implausible plausible, questioning if it is so ridiculous for dinosaurs to be watching a B movie from the ‘30s. In the artist’s world of time travel, sci-fi and evolution, anything is possible. [Katie Rice]