Edinburgh Art Festival 2018 programme unveiled

Edinburgh Art Festival returns in July, uniting many of the city’s leading galleries, museums and artist-run spaces in a celebration of the best of Scottish and international visual art. Over 36 exhibitions will be spread over more than 25 venues across the city, including the newest arts spaces opening in the capital this year: the new site for Ingleby Gallery in the freshly refurbished Meeting House of the Glasite Church and Collective’s restored City Observatory building on Calton Hill. 

“Our Festival’s origins lie in the strength of Edinburgh’s year-round visual arts scene,” says Sorcha Carey, EAF's director. “As we enter our 15th edition, this year’s partner exhibitions continue to demonstrate the ambitious and inspiring programming that has shaped our festival from its inception.”

Significant solo presentations by female artists

A timely celebration of contemporary female artists is at the heart of this year’s EAF with a wide selection of women holding solo shows throughout the city. At Fruitmarket Gallery, Berlin-based British artist Tacita Dean brings an exhibition that’s said to concern “the manner in which [she] has explored narrative, the imagination and the collective effort of artist and audience in film, theatre, drawing and photogravure.”

Fresh from representing the UK at the Venice Biennale, sculptor Phyllida Barlow opens Jupiter Artland’s tenth anniversary programme with quarry. Comprising of three pieces, each embodying Barlow's trademark textural surfaces, the sculptural structures will be grouped so that “two trunk-like columns erupt from the landscape and cradle their own 'skyframe'”; completing the trio of structures will be a mountainous flight of ruined steps.

Phyllida Barlow in her studio

Joining Barlow at  Jupiter Artland  is Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, who’s famed for her large-scale surreal works constructed from domestic objects. Her solo show, Gateway, will take place in the indoor galleries, and will include Carmen Miranda, her huge stiletto shoe sculpture formed from stainless steel pans and concrete.

Scottish artist Lucy Skaer brings her major solo exhibition The Green Man to Talbot Rice Gallery, which will feature newly commissioned work alongside recent work never before seen in the UK. Over at The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, meanwhile, the vibrant figurative paintings of Victoria Crowe will be on display, specifically her portraits of subjects from the worlds of art and science.

A mint-fresh collection of work by Crowe, titled A Certain Light, which, as the exhibition title suggests, is concerned with the variability of light in the natural world, will also be on display at The Scottish Gallery. Also at The Scottish Gallery, you’ll find solo exhibitions of Bodil Manz’s porcelain vessels and Catherine Martin’s unique kumihimo braided metal pieces, which will help mark the centenary of female suffrage.

Meanwhile Jenny Saville’s career, which spans quarter of a century, will be the centre of the third NOW exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which will also feature work by Sara Barker, Christine Borland, Robin Rhode and Markus Schinw.

Reappraisals of 20th century Scottish artists

Edwin G Lucas - Caley Station

EAF’s wide and varied programme also includes interesting reappraisals of 20th century Scottish artists, a highlight of which looks to be An Individual Eye, the first major reappraisal of the boldly experimental work of autodidact painter Edwin G Lucas (City Art Centre). Assemblage, an exhibition focusing on Scottish artists’ contributions to Cubism and Surrealism should prove similarly eye-opening (The Fine Art Society in Edinburgh), and another unmissable exhibition looks to be The Wild Days, which explores the abstract, highly gestural work done by painter John Bellany during the 1980s.

Large-scale historical and survey shows

As ever, EAF have also made room in its programme for historical shows, which this year includes Canaletto & the Art of Venice at The Queen’s Gallery, which we're told represents the largest survey of Canaletto in Scotland, and Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master at the Scottish National Gallery, which considers the great Dutch artist’s influence on UK painters and the British artistic imagination.

Coming to Scotland for the first time will be the gloriously opulent work of Raqib Shaw. The Kashmiri-born artist’s work will be hung in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art alongside two paintings from the gallery’s collection which are said to have greatly inspired him: Joseph Noel Paton’s The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849) and Lucas Cranach’s An Allegory of Melancholy (1528). Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art also host a survey of the great German Expressionist artist Emil Nolde with show Colour is Life, which comprises of around 120 of Nolde’s paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints.

Group Exhibitions featuring leading international artists

Travelling Gallery at 40

The third instalment of NOW takes place at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; the 40th anniversary of the Travelling Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in a bus that has been part of Scotland's art landscape since the 70s, is celebrated at this year's EAF; and Jacob’s Ladder (Ingleby Gallery) celebrates “mankind’s relationship with space and our enduring attempts to fathom the unfathomable” through work by artists like Alijca Kwade, Cornelia Parker and Katie Paterson.

Other highlights

Numerous site-specific pieces have been specially commissioned for this year’s EAF on the theme of “humanity’s universal connection to nature, the elements and our environments”. Included in the lineup is print work by New Delhi artist Ravi Agarwal (at Edinburgh Printmakers); sculptures by Birthe Jorgensen, Santiago Poggio and Scott Rogers (Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop); Ollie Dook's first outdoor work, Of Landscape Immersion, reflecting on contained boundaries inspired by zoo enclosures (Jupiter Artland); and Scottish Painter and ECA graduate Rabiya Choudhry's new piece, the first in a series of flag artworks to be flown from a newly installed pole at Rhubaba studio.

In terms of photography, City Art Centre chart the development of fine art photography in Scotland from the 19th century to present day using its own collection; Stills Gallery will present a two-part exhibition of the photographs of artist Gunnie Moberg alongside archive material and films by the great Orcadian filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait; and exhibition Planes, Trains & Automobiles at the National Galleries of Scotland explores how photography has been used to chart the technological innovations created by humankind's desire to travel.

There’s also a host of work by emerging artists on display throughout EAF. Rolling group show DOZEN at The Number Shop sees a pair of the studio’s resident artists presenting work each week for the five weeks of the festival. Lucy Wayman's sculptural work is on display at the Dovecot gallery, while new work from Robert Powell will go on display in Between The Lost Places at The Fine Art Society in Edinburgh. And Edinburgh College of Art will welcome visitors to their campus for a special Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition of new work from the college’s postgraduate students studying Contemporary Art, Illustration, Interdisciplinary Creative Practices and Art, Space & Nature.

All in all, it’s a huge collection of art coming to Edinburgh, allowing both local art lovers and people visiting the capital during its myriad summer festivals to enjoy an eclectic and thought-provoking range of work.

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Edinburgh Art Festival takes place 26 Jul-26 Aug. For full programme details, head to edinburghartfestival.com