CultureLabel: A Very Scottish Collection

It doesn’t take an expert to see that the contemporary art coming out of Scotland is some of the finest in the world. Why, anyone rolling along to the city’s whitest walls of a Friday evening mainly to avail themselves of the free booze could tell you that. A typical run-down of creative hotspots worldwide might read ‘New York | London | Scotland’ – and in fact this is exactly the line-up carried by online retailer CultureLabel.com, which has just launched its Scottish Collection.

A partnership between Creative Scotland and CultureLabel, The Scottish Collection is a curated selection of contemporary art and design from a diverse range of organisations across Scotland, with many original and limited edition works on offer. Buyers can browse the works by city, gallery, artist, medium, size, colour and price. Many of them are available to buy through the Own Art scheme, making it easy and affordable to start collecting or just to spruce up one’s home a bit.

Participating organisations include heavyweights like Fruitmarket Gallery, Dundee Contemporary Arts and Streetlevel Photoworks, but also newer faces – at least to the realm of e-commerce – such as iota, Patricia Fleming Projects and online gallery Artpistol. Examples of sterling design will also be available from the likes of Brazen Studios and Craft Scotland. Coming from a country of astonishing range and breadth, choice will not be something the collection is short of. After all, Scotland is surely the only land in the world where one can take in some first-class visual art or design and a pizza crunch in the same evening – sometimes even enjoying the two simultaneously, if we’re honest.

In this vein the collection packs big names alongside talented emerging artists and designers – much like the Scottish art scene itself. Launching with almost 200 works, the selection will be regularly refreshed with new stock – which is frankly a relief, with some Scottish cities nigh-on spewing out Turner Prize contenders. 

Winner of the 2004 Turner Prize, Jeremy Deller features in the collection as one of the works selected by Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. For the Festival’s 2012 edition Deller installed a huge bouncy castle of Stonehenge on Glasgow Green, instantly beckoning all the school children in Glasgow to its slippery surfaces, where they made fools of all the adults who had forgotten how to stay upright. A print of the installation, titled Sacrilege, will be available to purchase on CultureLabel.com.

Other highlights of the collection include work by internationally acclaimed artists Martin Boyce, Rachel Whiteread, Harland Miller, Callum Innes and Elizabeth Blackadder, along with emerging talents like Patrizio Belcampo, Katie Rowlands, Martin McBride and Martin Sloss. If you fancy investing in some future Turner Prize winners (seriously, spewing them out) but don’t know where to start with looking round galleries, CultureLabel is the place for you. With all the works in the collection selected by industry experts, the hard work has really been done for you – and the legwork too. Yet another reason not to even leave the house – though we have to warn you, you’ll be missing out on a nice warm beer and a slice of heart attack.