The Skinny 100: The Exhibitionists

We’ve organised exhibitions, off and on, since 2008 when Edinburgh’s Bongo Club kindly gave us the space to run a monthly programme displaying our Showcase artists in the live arena. For the first show, painter Rabiya Choudhry created an intricate mural in the cafe that was erased (painted over) at the end of the month-long residency. She was followed by artists including sculptor Scott Laverie (who staged an intervention with the cafe tables, replacing them with cast concrete structures embedded with TVs showing a stop motion animation) and painter Fraser Gray, who sprayed photo realist portraits and rainbow stripes around the cafe walls, windows and doors. The last show in the space was Jock Mooney, who displayed original drawings and a video piece, the first of his now award-winning collaborations with animator Alasdair Brotherston, Throw Me To The Rats.

After that, we started running an annual award in conjunction with RSA New Contemporaries, picking a winner from each year’s display of Scottish art school graduates to support and promote through our print, online and in the form of a bespoke exhibition. As we hit 100, this seemed like a good time to catch up with past winners and see how they’re getting on now.

The programme started in 2009 with Euan Taylor, whose Inefficient Solutions persona and Cloud Muncher, a large orange sculpture of a crane, caught our imaginations and led on to an early career retrospective in the now-defunct Roxy Art House in 2010.  Says Euan, “It was great to have those sculptures assembled in the same place, especially now they're broken up into wee bitties. Now I’m working with Tin Roof Dundee Arts Collective – we provide cheap studio space. I live in Monifieth, where things are a lot less rosy and a lot more gritty.” Euan is also co-curator of Gallery, A New Contemporary Space, which offers micro exhibitions in a DJCAD locker.

In 2010 our winner was the inimitable Omar Zingaro Bhatia, who led us on a merry dance organising a show for him. A year’s work ultimately culminated in Glasgow’s Briggait in 2011, with F I G M E N T S, a two room glass-fronted exhibition featuring his Spuriosity Shop of autobiographical trinkets alongside a new video work and the first outing of collaborative venture Omarina, an alliance between Omar and fashion designer Marina Maclean. The opening night featured an extravaganza of performance art, Balkan musicians and DJs. Says Omar, “F I G M E N T S was a great success. Working with The Skinny allowed me to put on a solo show extravaganza on a scale that even the most successful of recent graduates could perhaps only dream of. Since then, highs include a writer's residency in Transylvania in 2011 and 2012; I just love it there. The greatest highlight was when I was invited to the far north of Hungary to paint a 19m long mural in a Roma/Gypsy village. The idea is to lift a community out of poverty through the creation of Hungary's first 'Fresco Village.' I lived there for 2 weeks with my assistant and it was a truly extraordinary experience.

“Now you'll find me hanging out with anarchists and other assorted fringe-societies. I'm working with my brother Ally Bhatia on a collaborative animation called The Time Travel Inn. It'll be fun to see my artworks make the leap into motion. I’m also working on a comic called Omar's Guide To Shadowy Organizations which will be coming out soon. Next year I’ll be doing my first mural in Scotland as part of Leith Late's Shutter Project.”

In 2011 the prize went to painter Stephen Thorpe, whose beautiful, enormous painting at New Contemporaries alluded to a temporally ambiguous fresco hacked from a sacred wall and redisplayed in the galleries of the Mound. We found him a gallery space in Edinburgh’s Whitespace, where he presented The Poetics of Space, a series of new works on a smaller scale that drew critical acclaim, and the sales which are crucial for an artist at the beginning of his career. Says Stephen,“The exhibition was great to put together – the opening night was packed and I sold works too. Can't ask for much more than that.

"Since then, I worked as the Assistant Curator at Summerhall, (where I also had a studio) which is a fantastic venue with a very strong visual arts programme headed by Paul Robertson. I had a solo exhibition at Summerhall in the Library Gallery over the summer, where I presented an entirely new body of work which was slightly experimental for me, in terms of subject and to some degree materials. It was a really great space and the show was well-received. Soon after that I also had work displayed at Saatchi Gallery in London which was a true high point for me." Stephen is now in London, studying for his MA at the Royal College and working towards exhibitions in Hong Kong, the USA and London. 

In 2012 we began a collaboration with Glasgow’s CCA, co-presenting the award with them to give recipients the unparalleled exposure of an exhibition in their Intermedia gallery space. The first winner from this phase of the programme was choreographer, dancer and performance artist Romany Dear. Her short residency, Dance is a Language We Speak, was a sell-out throughout its run, the improvised piece performed by Romany and her troupe of dancers inspired by the physical languages of hip-hop and Olympic athletes’ warm-ups. Mesmerising and confrontational, the nightly queues of visitors around the balcony, eagerly hoping for a gap on the guest list, demonstrated the extraordinary popularity of the work.

“It was really amazing to have free access to a space for a whole month and to spend it working with a group of incredible women creating and exploring movement ideas together," says Romany. Still in Glasgow, she's busy developing multiple projects. “Earlier this year, I spent some time working in colloboration with Dominic Paterson, creating a performative lecture that was based on a workshop with Yvonne Rainer that we both attended in 2011. I was also part of The Glasgow Weekend, curated by Sarah Lowndes and BQ Gallery for the Berlin Art Week in which we reworked a version of the piece When I Move, You Move [first performed in the Intermedia show]." Next up, she's working on another project in Market Gallery with Glasgow Open Dance School, which is run by herself, Ashanti Harris and Julia Scott. "We’ll be facilitating six weeks of exciting dance and movement related workshops, classes, talks and other things across the three spaces in Dennistoun. More info on all this will be out and about soon."

In 2013 the prize went to Alexander Millar, a GSA graduate who will be showing in Intermedia in February, with work created during a recent residency in Marseille. His show, entitled Novella, opens on Friday 7 February, in CCA Glasgow’s Intermedia gallery, and runs throughout the month. Pick up a copy of next month's magazine for full details of the exhibition, then come along and see it. It'll be good.