It’s not often that an artist appears with a genuinely new way of making abstract art, but Brandon Logan (b.1996) did precisely this with his degree show from Edinburgh College of Art in 2019, and just four years later he has cemented his growing reputation with his first museum show in 2023 - at the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, in the Orkney Islands where he grew up, and where he has since returned to live and work.
Logan’s ‘paintings’, as he describes them, have a sculptural presence, hanging away from the wall on raised batons. They acknowledge the place that he’s from, finding their colours in the streets of Stromness and the Orkney landscape, and nodding to the islands’ rich traditions of weaving and tapestry, but as he says:
‘I always think of them as paintings because I have a specific interest in what paint can do. I’m obsessed with the simple transformation of fluid, liquid colour, to solid, that can take place in my hands. It is like magic to me every time’.
It is a distinctive process which involves the flooding, sealing and fusing of warps of string using the gradual application of layers of paint. The string support allows for colour to be suspended within, resulting in works with an open, fretted structure and an innate delicacy.
Ingleby presented a solo show of Logan’s work, Dog Rose, from 27 January - 9 March 2024. The exhibition built on the body of work exhibited at the Pier and presented what the writer Cal Flyn has described as ‘a strangely affecting practice’, that somehow connects the history of minimal abstraction with a sensibility born of, and belonging to, the Scottish islands.
As Lou Selfridge writes in Frieze, "To forge a new minimalist medium is no easy matter, with artists courting the risk of gimmickry or banality with every addition to the field’s productively limited set of techniques. What Logan has achieved with the innovative works collected in ‘Dog Rose’ is all the more impressive because of this. These paintings are a meaningful addition to minimalist vernacular, seemingly pulled off with a nod and a wink."