NEW GALLERY IN FINE FORM
Since the Union Gallery left Broughton Street, locals have had to look elsewhere for contemporary Scottish art close at hand.
A new addition to the choice of nearby venues has been the Lennon Gallery on Hamilton Place, which opened in February.
Normally, it is a showcase for the multifarious output of its owner Alan Lennon who sculpts, paints and produces photomontages.
However, it has always been his intention to run joint exhibitions here from time to time and the first of these opened on Thursday during a brief interlude in the monsoon.
The show features eight artists (including Lennon) and their very different approaches to the human form. This review will focus on one work by each.
We begin with Joyce Gunn Cairns, whose prolific output will be familiar to many readers already. Here, it was ‘Head’ which caught the eye – a work in which the candidly fleshy hues of skin, the feline turn, are in tension with a remarkable large, red nose. Is she suffering from a cold? Has she been hit? The defensive shoulder, the figure’s mottled and bruised nakedness, her faraway gaze suggest alternative explanations. An ambiguous, vulnerable beauty survives.
Mary Trodden’s ‘Sycorax’ resembles a cross between a May Queen and Godzilla. She advances between buildings, perhaps between worlds and dimensions, apparently holding the fate of the planet in her hand like a fizzing bomb. Sycorax was the name of Caliban’s unseen mother in The Tempest – a dangerous witch and native of the enchanted island. Here she is depicted with considerable humour, and an array of suggestive bric-a-brac which begs more questions than it answers.
I enjoyed Shelagh Atkinson’s ‘Music with Viola’ for its slightly murky, suggestive abstraction. ‘My use of colour reflects an abundance of seeing, the experience, the felt force in these environments,’ she writes. Sure enough, the instrument’s woodiness and the music and the musician’s movement emerge through the vigorous fluidity with which she applies her paint.
I admired and was horrified by Mel Roy’s ‘Separation from the Abomination’, one of five in a series of Anabaptist-themed oils. This is the most violent, although it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on. Roy says she’s interested in ‘pictures with emotion, often without a clear narrative, where the figure although changed is less perfect, more real and although altered, unadulterated’. Whatever is unfolding here, it’s hard to imagine the menacing dark, twisted form, distended tongue and apparent upward rapture portend anything pleasant.
‘The Prince’ by artist-duo VALTD combines spray paint, acrylic, diamonde dust, digital paint pen, graphite, hand-made paper, archival board and UV coating to good effect. The Young Pretender’s preening theatricality is caught as if in a stage mirror, his struggle for political popularity scurrilously compared to Marilyn Munro enjoying an upward blast of hot air. The original work’s courtly formality is further subverted by the apparent addition of graffiti. For all its energy, exuberance and irreverence, this work is a surprisingly thoughtful piece which rewards a second and third look.
Caroline Campbell’s ‘Untitled IV’ defies analysis, but is memorable in a timeless, mad, Manx kind of way. ‘At times I revel in the darker qualities of life,’ she writes, ‘a necessary part of living and an equal to positivity, co-dependent. I try to respond to the beauty I find in this contrast and interplay between dark and light, ambiguous and sometimes humorous’.
Alan Lennon is, not surprisingly, well represented in this exhibition, particularly by his satisfyingly rounded, sculptural figures in oil. For the most part, they appear solemn, sensitive, silent against unearthly skies and empty landscapes. In such company, ‘The Owl’ is rather unusual. That slightly pompous, upturned head, that cat and pea-green boat, the act of painterly substitution are slyly allusive, funny and intriguing.
For me, the highlight of the show is Ingrid Nilsson’s ‘Non-Speaking Part’. The same figure appears in two other portraits here (for example as ‘The Young Queen’ top-right), both depicted square-on. Here, though, she is in motion, turning towards the viewer. Is she a participant in some macabre masque, or some horribly silenced victim? It’s unclear, but there’s a vivacity to her morbid features which makes the image vibrate with unresolved contradictions. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.—AM
The Contemporary Figure continues at the Lennon Art Gallery (83 Henderson Row) until 28 August (Mon–Sat 11am–5pm, Sun 1-4pm).