The Art Exhibitions Blog

Snow over Scotland. In July. Alright, the real white stuff isn't actually lying on the Pentland Hills at the moment, but there's a taste of winter in store if you go along to see Victoria Crowe: 50 Years of Painting  at Edinburgh City Art Centre. It's a retrospective of the work of an artist who's originally English, but who settled in Scotland many years ago, and whose most memorable works, for us, are her haunting winter landscapes, a subject she's returned to throughout her career. Winters are harsh in Scotland (let's face it, the summers can be pretty miserable too); the days are short, the trees are bare; there can be snow on the ground. It's  Bruegel  or Sohlberg . Crowe made her home in the Pentlands, not so far from the centre of Edinburgh, where she taught art, but when winter comes, the hills can feel remote. In Blue Snow, Fiery Trees , the wood is captured at twilight, the branches illuminated by the setting sun, the frozen landscape glowing b...

Prepare yourself for some sensory overload. Curves, stripes, zig-zags, wavy lines, dots, in black and white or colour. Look at many of the paintings of Bridget Riley and you're unable to escape the eerie sensation that the picture in front of you is in motion, has its own inner three-dimensional life, is not just inert paint on flat canvas, panel or plaster. It's by no means unusual to see selections of Riley's paintings on display, but a blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh brings together 70 years of her pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of abstraction, including a recreation of her only actual 3D work, which you walk into for a perspectival sensurround experience. It's "that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals," as Riley once said. It's a really terrific show, and the thrill of pleasure in the Scottish capital was enhanced by the unexpected lack of visitors on the day we went to see it, with huge empty sp...

What a lot of contradictions in Emil Nolde, and in his art. How could the painter who, more than any other, had his art denounced by the Nazis as degenerate actually be a member of the National Socialist Party? How could a man who professed his Christian values in religious art hold such anti-Semitic views? How could the artist who seemed so at home in the windy, flat farming and fishing country of the German-Danish borderlands be so drawn to the clubs and cabarets of Berlin? And how could the maker of such delicate watercolours also produce violently Expressionist works that were sometimes so crude, so grotesque? All these questions are raised by Emil Nolde: Colour is Life at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Some are answered, but by no means all. Nolde was born in 1867 as Emil Hansen to a German father and a Danish mother. Nolde is actually the name of the small place he came from, which was then in Germany but became Danish after a plebiscite followin...

"What a coarse rugged Way of Painting's here, Stroaks upon Stroaks, Dabbs upon Dabbs appear." So wrote the English author John Elsum in 1700, musing on An Old Man's Head , by Rembrant, as he spelled it. Those Stroaks and Dabbs have been fascinating the British for almost four centuries, as an enticing exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh demonstrates with a stunning array of canvases, drawings and etchings. So many of the works in Rembrandt: Britain's Discovery of the Master have a fascinating story to tell. You'll find anecdote, mystery and drama aplenty, with a touch of forgery and plagiarism thrown in along the way. It's excellently presented, with really informative wall descriptions and plenty of space to appreciate what's on display.  What about the Old Man's Head? Well, the verse accompanies this Portrait of an Elderly Man , painted by Rembrandt in 1667, a picture that spent centuries in Britain but is now back...

Even before the devastating second fire in Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art this summer, the city was making a big deal of its favourite son and perhaps its biggest tourist draw. The excellent show on Charles Rennie Mackintosh Making the Glasgow Style  at Kelvingrove Art Gallery was attracting lots of visitors from home and abroad -- the art-school blaze made international headlines -- when we saw it last week. And there's still a few weeks left to catch this exhibition, which provides an extremely detailed and fascinating overview, with about 250 artefacts, of the influences on the man and his circle, how he came to prominence, and the later years of decline. The reason for the show is to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Mackintosh's birth . He grew up in a Glasgow that was undergoing massive expansion economically and that was increasingly open to the world. As Mackintosh trained as a draughtsman and later studied at the School of Art, Japanese, ...