This intriguing ensemble is called ‘Gorlitzer Bahnhof’. It is by the contemporary Scottish artist Gardner Muirhead and appears as part of his exhibition Leitmotif which previewed in the Sutton Gallery this evening.
Muirhead incorporates Japanese woodblock printing into his work, mixing it with found images, photography and lino printing.
His, says the gallery’s programme, is a ‘tightly considered approach to colour, surface, balance and space, which reflects [Muirhead’s] interest in modernism, typography, German cinema and Cold War aesthetics’.
There are few explicit messages in the work. It is as much about the subtle relationships of composition as about persuading one of anything.
In a sense, it expresses in two dimensions the complexities of Berlin’s four. Amid that city’s clash of history and contemporary capitalist power and counter-culture, he rummages for clues, assembles aesthetic structures which are strangely formal and fragmentary at the same time.
It’s an interesting approach which I admire, occasionally delight in, but cannot quite embrace wholeheartedly after just one visit. I suspect this exhibition takes a little work, a little more exposure to its underlying logic before the pfennig finally drops. I’m definitely going back.
Leitmotif will continue at the Sutton Gallery, 18a Dundas Street, until 30 May.
