RSA New Contemporaries 2011

For some it's their biggest opportuntity since degree show. The <strong>RSA New Contemporaries</strong> returns for a third year, showcasing the best of Scotland's young emergent art talent

Article by Andrew Cattanach | 28 Feb 2011

Hand-picked at the art school gates by a ring of Academicians, blossoming emergent artists and architects are taken under the avuncular wing of The Royal Scottish Academy. The grand old institution tempts them back to its hallowed rooms, where they’ll stay for a month, entertaining the RSA’s diverse audience.

But the stakes are high. The veritable bag of sweets comes in the form of a prize fund worth around £10,000 this year, with the finest little urchin among them all receiving as much as £5,000. A pretty tasty offer for anyone looking to finance the next few months of their nascent career. And undoubtedly a pretty good laugh for everyone involved, meeting loads of fellow artists from as far afield as the colonial hinterland of Elgin.

There are one or two familiar faces. We showcased painter, and Glasgow School of Art graduate, Martin Bech-Ravn in these very pages last summer. He paints garish, unpeopled interiors – the aftermath of a playboy’s party abroad, perhaps. Like a hallucinogenic vision of the future, they evoke Philip K. Dick novels, with their unsettling mix of science fiction and psychedelia.

Showing up to five new paintings at the RSA show, Bech-Ravn will focus on similar concerns as before. “They are a bit more painterly than the older work, meaning that I have used a lot of new techniques,” he says. “Still very architectural. Colours are more spot on. There is a lot of play with perspective in these works, it is hard to tell what is close or what is far.”

Another portrayer of bewildering interiors is Gray’s School of Art graduate Stephen Thorpe. Dark, disjointed spaces with partially depicted figures, they could easily adorn the cover of a Bret Easton Ellis novel about nefarious twenty-somethings who really don’t care about much other than their tans. His paintings are both lively and unsettling. “With painting you can do things you can’t do in the 3D world, “ he says of his distorted perspectives.

Edinburgh College of Art graduate Arwen Duncan is looking to cover an entire wall of the consecrated space with custard. A reprise of her degree show work, Arwen sees the RSA as an oversized domestic space, with its picture rails and colourful walls. Exploring themes of housewifery and domesticity, Duncan will aestheticise the comforts of home in the bosom of Scottish art.

Fellow Edinburgh graduate is painter Alex Gibbs. He impressed us last summer with his washed-out landscapes of pastel shades that spoke of loneliness and isolation. Like a pared down surrealist, he took us to places we weren’t sure we wanted to go.

He’s currently doing a residency in Beijing, so won’t be around much before the exhibition opens. Nonetheless, he’ll be showing a few works, including some that have already been seen in the group show CLUSTERBOMB at Wasps studios in Edinburgh. “It's a mix of quite small paintings made specifically for that show and some which were made while artist in residence at Cawdor Castle in Nairnshire several months before,” says Gibbs.

Asides from big cash prizes there’s also a number of non-monetary awards up for grabs, including six months free access to Peacock Visual Art’s digital facilities, one month working in one of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop’s Project Spaces plus free support and free membership, and the holy grail, a guaranteed double spread in the well-respected magazine The Skinny alongside a specially organised exhibition (the kind of stuff dreams are made of). Look out for last year's Skinny Prize winner, Omar Zingaro Bhatia's solo show in Glasgow's Briggait in April.

If you want to see the freshest talent from some of the freshest wee faces in Scotland, then this is where you’ll find it. Now in its third year, the RSA New Contemporaries aims to be the most important initiative for emerging artists in Scotland, offering many their first opportunity to show outside of art school. “The exhibition will be a unique opportunity to see the best of Scotland’s emerging talent under one roof,” says RSA Programme Director Colin Greenslade.

With all the variety of a degree show and the considered selection process of a curated exhibition, RSA New Contemporaries spans an awkward gap. But then again, the first year out of art school is, likewise, an ungainly period, perhaps made all the more bearable with the RSA’s generous patronage. It’s a wholesome, well-intentioned affair that is less an introduction to the art world than a public service. And that’s what we need more of in our current climate of savage cultural cuts: uncynical support for the arts.

  • This article has been amended
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