PAST ONLINE EXHIBITION: THE UNSEEN MASTERPIECE

From one passionate advocate of art education to another…. Yesterday’s artist Bob & Roberta Smith is a seasoned cultural campaigner whose lockdown instagram has posted a daily ‘art task’ alongside regular footage of Bob in his new shirt emblazoned with the legend ART IS YOUR HUMAN RIGHT. 

Today’s artist, Ryan Gander, is equally committed to the cause. A couple of months ago, as lockdown took hold, he sent out an instagram message offering ‘free tutorials’ for final year BA and MA students to discuss their work via email. The response was so overwhelming that he had to enlist the help of other artist friends including Ahmet Ögüt to fulfil the demand. It’s a fantastic gesture of generosity that fits the times.

Today’s entry is a new work made by Ryan over the past weeks which turns the formalities of educational assessment inside out. Ryan’s I can not yet even describe it to myself, takes the form of a stack of ‘A’ Level Art and Design exam papers for the year 2027 written, as he puts it “from the perspective that the world is populated by artists that understand, and are honest about, their own impetus for making artworks”. It’s a wry (and occasionally biting) satire on the fallacy of pursuing success for its own sake. 

Ryan was the fourteenth artist to make a work for our Billboard for Edinburgh project, in the autumn of 2011.

Following yesterday’s fallen star by Ceal Floyer we arrive today at Alec’s Finlay’s sky-reaching installation for Jupiter Artland A Variety of Cultures. If Ceal’s work channels the poetic potential of ordinary things, Alec Finlay’s embraces poetry itself as an inherent part of everyday life. Which makes sense, as he is first and foremost a poet, as indeed was his father Ian Hamilton Finlay whose work appeared as part 40 of this sequence.

This work in particular owes something to another artist/poet - the 18^th century visionary William Blake - whose tiny engraving of a ladder stretching to the moon (I want I want’) has inspired so many artists down the years with its sense of deep yearning for the things that lie beyond reach. Like Blake, words and images are almost always linked for Finlay - shifting between observation of what our eyes tell us to be true and we see in our hearts and minds. In this case we are faced with an orchard of native fruit trees, “an essay in eco-poetics”, as Alec describes “to grow season by season, gradually transforming ladders with fruit trees into fruit trees with apples”. As such it is work that seems intensely hopeful – a vision for the future – which won’t be fully realised for another 20 years. It’s the kind of optimistic commitment to future generations that has become part of the message at Robert and Nicky Wilson’s Jupiter Artland, and which feels more necessary now than ever. We are lucky to have them in Scotland.

This week Alec was announced as one a recipient of the 2020 Cholmondeley Awards for poetic achievement. Congratulations Alec.
Photography: Hannah Devereux

And so, at the end of the 8th week of  The Unseen Masterpiece, we move from a photogram made in collaboration with nature, to the work of an artist whose greatest achievement was a unique partnership where art and nature co-exist. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills (often described as the greatest Scottish artwork of the 20th century) is the summation of his life’s work – a gathering of his ideas expressed through nearly 300 sculptures which reveal themselves alongside the planting of a classically-inspired poet’s garden.

Ian took part in our very first exhibition in 1998, and we’ve made six subsequent solo shows, including a glorious collaboration with Inverleith House and the Scottish Poetry Library to celebrate his 80th birthday in 2005. Ian attended the opening of that exhibition, just a year before his death, in his (best) wellies.

Little Sparta continues in his memory, looked after by the Little Sparta Trust and cared for by gardeners George Gilliland and Lynn Maclagan. It is open according to Ian’s wishes, from June until September, but not this year. This week the gates should have been opening the start of a new season, but instead George and Lynn took a few hours to make the short film that appears here. Thank you, both.

Without ticket sales Little Sparta is without any revenue and needs the help of anyone willing to support it.

The work shown here is a poignant, and timely, reminder of the brevity of the human experience. As the late Tom Lubbock wrote, in in his obituary of Ian in The Independent:

“In Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden at "Little Sparta" there's a small upright stone, like a milestone or a gravestone, standing by a path. Inscribed on it are two lines of words: MAN / A PASSERBY. In the abstract it means, presumably: humans come into the world, and vanish from the world, but the world was there long before them and will be there long after. Humans only pass through, pass by. But by setting these words on a stone by a path, the work fixes its general mortal reflection on to you, the viewer, as you experience it. You stand in front of it for a time. Then you pass by. It feels like disappearing. Our greatest living artist is dead: his work survives him. It continues in the world… the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay is a wonder of its time.”

To support Little Sparta visit www.littlesparta.org.uk/support-us

The link between James Hugonin’s multi-coloured abstract painting and this small black and white photograph by Thomas Joshua Cooper is not immediately obvious, at least visually, but both works come from artists who share a spirit of unusually single-minded determination. In James’s case, the holding of knowledge and intention across the year or more that it takes to make a painting, with Thomas, the resolve to seek out his subject at, quite literally, the ends of the earth.

The two artists have known each other for years, having both shown with the Graeme Murray Gallery in Edinburgh in the 1980s but, despite sharing a similarly uncompromising attitude, the means by which they make their work could hardly be more different: James staying resolutely close to home, working intensely in the studio, and Thomas travelling the globe in search of his images.

Thomas is a self-described ‘expeditionary artist’ working exclusively with an adapted wooden box camera from 1898 and crossing the world in search of the pictures he will make, their location always chosen on the basis of a rigorous conceptual premise, rather than the sense of how the place might actually look. When he gets there (and bear in mind that in the case of some of his more extreme examples the journey to make a single picture may take many weeks) he makes a single exposure, one image which may or may not succeed. There’s a perversity to this which suggests that despite using the tools of photography he’s not really a photographer in any conventional sense, rather he’s a kind of artist-explorer driven by faith and (wilful) determination. 

Alongside major expeditionary series, such as the 30 year project ‘the World’s Edge - the Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity’ recently exhibited to huge acclaim at LACMA, Thomas has also always made works closer to home in his adopted Scotland. The image shown here , selected by Thomas for ;The Unseen Masterpiece, is one of these, part of an on-going exploration into the peregrinations of early Scottish and Irish saints. Like all of his work it is exquisitely printed and toned by his own hand in his Glasgow darkroom – the point at which the picture is truly ‘made’ - black and white giving way to shades of dark and light.

It’s no surprise that the meditative pull of Agnes Martin’s light-filled abstractions carry significance for an artist like Callum Innes, but the reason for following his work with hers in this sequence is as much personal as art historical. The very first time that I saw a full exhibition of Martin’s exquisitely lyrical paintings, as opposed to a few works here or there in various museums and collections, was in Callum’s company on an unforgettable trip to Dia Beacon in February 2002. We were with another friend, the artist David Austen, and made the trip up the Hudson on the Poughkeepsie train from Grand Central on a day so cold that icebergs were visible floating downstream. We only had one hat between the three of us and so took it in turns to have a moment of warmth. At Beacon we were met by the painter Winston Roeth who, through a curator friend at Dia, had arranged an out of hours visit to the museum. The four of us wandered those amazing rooms in total isolation. It was an extraordinary experience. 

We have been lucky enough to include Agnes Martin’s work in a number of exhibitions over the past two decades, including a glorious & archetypal painting(such as the one shown here) in the 2002 exhibition Abstraction which paired antiquities with great abstract paintings. Agnes Martin’s work appeared with an exquisite Babylonian duck from around 2000 BC.

Some years later, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art unveiled a collection of Agnes Martin’s paintings as one of their ‘Artist Rooms’. On the same evening as we opened an exhibition of Callum’s work at our gallery and hosted a dinner in their joint honour in Callum’s top lit Edinburgh studio. It was a fine evening, although in retrospect I may have made too great a claim in my speech for Agnes Martin being Scottish… her people having originally hailed from the Isle of Skye. The same is true of Trump, so maybe such claims should be left to lie.

There’s a point, almost exactly half-way through John Smith’s film The Black Tower, featured in yesterday’s Unseen Masterpiece, in which representation gives way to abstraction as the blackness of the tower eats its way across the screen towards a rectangle of total darkness. In art historical terms it feels like a reference to Kazimir Malevich’s black square of 1915.

Malevich’s iconic painting was first exhibited in Petrograd in 1915 in the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings an exhibition which also included work by his disciple Nikolai Suetin – another key member of progressive UNOVIS group, which dedicated itself to promoting Suprematism in all its possible forms. Today’s work, a Suprematist collage by Suetin, takes us back to that time, but also  looks back over John Smith’s shoulder to the white collaged rectangles of John Stezaker’s Tabula Rasa – and further back in this sequence to the ‘Found Monochromes’ of white rectangles photographed in city streets by David Batchelor, which featured in his friday film a few weeks ago. It was alongside these in the 2007 that we first had the pleasure of showing this work by Suetin as part of our sequence Eight Days.  More recently it was one of the stand out works in the National Gallery of Scotland’s 400 year history of collage during last summer’s Edinburgh Art Festival.

One of the chief pleasures of working on The Unseen Masterpiece over the past weeks has been the opportunity to invite contributions from artists whose work we love and who have played some part in our exhibition programme over the past 22 years. John Stezaker’s 2013 Billboard for Edinburgh was one of our favourite manifestations of that project and his response to being involved in the present sequence has been as generous as it is appropriate.

“I relish this opportunity to do something in relation to the Balzac short story. It is a story which has haunted me and my work for years. One series of collages which is more associated with my reading of the story in terms of the negotiation of the space between the seen and the unseen is the Tabula Rasa series. Much of my work as you know is about seeing things where there is nothing - faces in masks etc. So, there is much that applies in Frenhofer’s blindness, or is it the others’? which seems so pertinent to what we are confronting at the moment and to the power of the unseen.”

Stezaker has made these Tabula Rasa collages since the mid 1980’s, intervening into images of landscape, or film stills, with a distorted white rectangle reminiscent of a cinematic projection screen, to offer a new take on the original blank state of childhood and intellectual innocence. The five new works made for this sequence follow on from the burnished rectangle of Ben Cauchi’s ambrotype published yesterday – “the what’s there and what isn’t” as Cauchi put it – posing the question not just of what we see, but of how we look.

For the past thirty-five years Garry Fabian Miller has made photographic images without a camera, working entirely in his darkroom using the techniques of early nineteenth century photographic exploration to experiment with the possibilities of light, as both medium and subject. His earliest camera-less photographs looked closely to the pioneers of the medium in the 1830’s, passing light through translucent objects, principally leaves, seedpods and flower heads and using them as transparencies through which light passed onto light-sensitive paper.

From this starting point, essentially rooted in the natural world, he has continued to explore a more abstract form of picture-making, albeit with nature as a continuing presence in horizons and edges, and the movement of light. This rootedness in place owes a great deal to Garry’s life lived on Dartmoor in the remote south west of England and his daily routine of watching the rising and the setting of the sun.

We’ve worked with Garry since the very early days of the gallery, making six solo shows in 20 years, including most recently Blaze which marked the end of an era as analogue photographic materials become extinct in a digital age. Dwindling supplies of paper and chemistry, and the increasingly fugitive nature of his life-learnt methods, saw Garry embracing the perversity of his position in a final blaze of picture-making glory, which filled our gallery with light and colour in the winter months.

The work shown here as the 30^th step in The Unseen Masterpiece was made just before lockdown. This week’s film of the artist in his darkroom and studio was filmed by Sam Fabian Miller, the artist’s son, over the course of last couple of weeks. Thank you, Sam.

The idea of the confrontational self-portrait, and of such images as fragments of much larger stories, has found a new champion in recent years in the photographs of the South African artist and self-described ‘visual activist’ Zanele Muholi, whose extraordinary series ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’ – ‘Hail the Dark Lioness’ is one of the most compelling and politically powerful bodies of self-portraiture made anywhere in recent years. These too use everyday objects and props, or materials as they refer to them, to explore themes of labour, racism, Eurocentrism and sexual politics - layering the imagery with meaning and association, with the ultimate tool being their own body:  “The black body itself is the material, the black body that is ever scrutinised, and violated and undermined”.

Like yesterday’s artist Oana Stanciu, Zanele Muholi took part in our 2019 exhibition ‘Sometimes I Disappear’. The first major UK survey exhibition of Zanele Muholi’s work was scheduled to open at Tate Modern in late April but is currently postponed, awaiting the museum’s re-opening.

In the summer of 2008 we celebrated the gallery’s 10^th birthday by moving premises from the Edinburgh townhouse in which the gallery was founded, to a 6000 sq ft warehouse at the back of Edinburgh’s main train station, a property we inhabited until 2016. Our inaugural exhibition in the new space was a first ever UK exhibition of work by the American artist Kay Rosen. She titled the show HUEN, a word that doesn’t exist, except as an invented amalgam of two others - hue and hewn - a typically precise gesture of imprecision to describe a body of work ‘shaped from colour’. 

Rosen’s love of colour is second only to her love of language and much of her work harnesses the power of both to make us see things we would otherwise miss. Today’s selection for The Unseen Masterpiece Blurred is a typical combination of simplicity and nuance - her 2004 comment on the fudge of party politics in an era of political sameness, realised originally as a wall painting  in 2004 (now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales).

Kay also took part in Gravity’s Rainbow in 2011, already mentioned in this sequence as an exhibition about found colour, or in her case, a combination of appropriated colour and words, taken from the pages of paint charts on the basis of their quasi-poetic names. The resulting wall painting was presented as a modernist abstraction in stripes of green, brown and russet with an evocative, if slightly ridiculous, new title created when the names of the paints used were gathered together in the appropriate order – Mud Hut between Willow Tree and Apple Tree beside Rocky Road separated by Hedgerow from Copper Canyon.

From Ian Davenport’s candy coloured stripes we arrive today at the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s Everyone Gets Lighter, a rainbow coloured neon arch most recently installed on the side of the Kunsthalle Helsinki alongside Rondinone’s exhibition of the same name, as part of the Helsinki Festival last autumn. The phrase itself is taken from a poem by the poet John Giorno who died of a heart attack, aged 82, a few weeks after the exhibition opened. As his New York Times obituary observed, Giorno may have first found fame as the subject of his lover Andy Warhol’s 1963 movie Sleep, but it was as a beat poet determined to “shake poetry loose of the page and embed it more deeply in the fabric of everyday life” that he will be remembered. And as the husband of Ugo Rondinone.

In common with the last few artists in this sequence, Rondinone is another great colourist, using the possibilities of both colour and material with diverse delight. The knowledge of Giorno’s death brings an inevitable sadness to this otherwise upbeat selection, but that is typical of Rondinone’s world in which a note of melancholy frequently underpins an apparently cheerful first impression. Rainbows were everywhere in his Helsinki exhibition, as they are now in these days of honouring the bravery of health workers around the world. The latest iteration of his 6 year project Your age and my age and the age of the rainbow stretched floor to ceiling across some of the gallery spaces with literally thousands of children’s drawings of rainbows. That connection to the present moment is perhaps one reason why Ugo suggested this work for The Unseen Masterpiece, as well, of course, as it being a tribute to his partner of the last 22 years.

In much the same way as yesterday’s artist Margaret Mellis scoured the beaches of Suffolk in search of material for her driftwood assemblages, David Batchelor has spent his working life combing urban environments for what he calls the ‘found’ colour of the modern city. His eye is drawn to the things that others throw away or dismiss - the plastic produce of pound shops and the recycled off-cuts of contemporary life.

In the short studio film released today (to mark the end of week 4 of the Unseen Masterpiece) David refers to the genesis of a photographic series begun in 1997 in terms that could be applied to almost all his working methods: “The Found Monochromes are a series of photographs where I went out into the streets around Kings Cross, where I lived at the time in London, and looked for blank, white rectangular panels on walls, on doors, on windows, so they’re like the monochrome in art, like Rodchenko or Robert Ryman, but actually inadvertent and found in the street of the city rather than in the more rarefied world of art”.

David balances a deceptively casual approach to art making in both two and three dimensions with a reputation as one of our most considered writers on the subject of colour’s place in the modern world - his book Chromophobia has been in print for over 20 years and is currently available in 7 different languages. We’ve worked with him since he took part our exhibition Thread in the summer of 2006 at which time we also installed his hanging Candelas – light sculptures made of recycled plastic bottles – around the city for the duration of the Edinburgh Art Festival. Last summer we hosted a solo exhibition My Own Private Bauhaus celebrating his long relationship with colour through the circle, the triangle and the square.  

The first time we presented Frank Walter’s work, in the spring of 2013 (the first time his work had ever been publicly shown) we did so in an exhibition titled Songs of Innocence and Experience, alongside the Texan shrimp fisherman; Forest Bess, and the Cornish fisherman turned scrap merchant; Alfred Wallis. Both, like Walter, were untrained artists of uncompromising vision who chose to live and work outside the boundaries of conventional society. Both made work that now holds an important place in the history of 20th century art.

Like Walter, Alfred Wallis would paint on whatever material came to hand: old boards and pieces of card; using house and yacht paint, with an immediacy and honesty that is rarely found in the work of supposedly more sophisticated painters. These were the qualities that so struck the artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood when they first saw him working at his kitchen table through an open window in the back streets of St Ives in the summer of 1928. When the young modernists returned to London they enthusiastically posted photographs of their own work to Wallis. Unimpressed, the old man promptly turned them over, made a painting of his own on the reverse, and sent them back.

Last week’s sequence ended with Andrew Cranston, this week begins with Andy’s friend, and one-time teacher at the Royal College of Art, Peter Doig. In the summer of 2013, the National Galleries of Scotland staged a magnificent exhibition of Peter’s work and at the same time he was the 21st artist to make a work for the public billboard project on our (then) gallery building with a giant poster of drunk and disorderly figures, dancing and pissing on the side of the wall. It reminded many a passer-by, an audience that experienced our programme solely through the Billboard for Edinburgh, never actually crossing the gallery threshold, of the building’s previous life as the nocturnal landmark ‘The Venue’. Site of many a dodgy club night and deservedly forgotten gig, but also host to some of the great acts of the 80’s and 90s including Sonic Youth, the Stone Roses, Nico and Radiohead.



Peter was born in Edinburgh, and so of course we claim him as one of the great Scottish painters, despite the fact that his family left when he was one to live in Trinidad for six years, before moving Canada where he spent most of his childhood. In truth Scotland has had far less of a role in his life than the Caribbean, especially Trinidad where for the last 20 years he has had a home and studio, but nonetheless his exhibition that summer, appropriately titled No Foreign Lands, felt like the long awaited homecoming.

The theme of burning continues in this week’s final instalment of The Unseen Masterpiece; one of Katie Paterson’s silver Ideas – a series of unrealisable artworks, created, says the artist 'to exist in the imagination'. Except, with Paterson the line between what is and isn’t realisable is a fine one that causes constant surprise. Many of her projects seem unfeasible, for example: a candle that burns with the scent of a journey from earth into deep space, or a necklace of fossils spanning the history of the world from its first creation, and yet working with scientists and researchers, she consistently finds ways to bring an elegant simplicity to the most complex concepts. One of those that seemed least likely on paper, but which is fast becoming one of the century’s favourite examples of forward-thinking environmental art, is her 100-year project Future Library.

A newly commissioned film marking the first five years of the Future Library project was recently launched on-line by the National Galleries of Scotland, and the Future Library Trust, after the premature closure of Katie’s exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. This film (A Future Library : A century unfolds) is now available to watch on-line via the National Galleries of Scotland website and Katie's artist page. A new film made by Katie at home to round-up week 1 of The Unseen Masterpiece, is viewable below.

Roger Ackling (whose work preceded this in the current sequence of THE UNSEEN MASTERPIECE) made a 50-year career by burning tiny marks onto the surface of objects with a magnifying glass. It was a form of creative, meditative transformation, staying still and channelling the energy of the sun. Alexander and Susan Maris’s act of burning The Truth in Painting was made in a different spirit, but with no less conceptual and reflective motivation. The artists took two copies of Jacques Derrida’s 1978 text to the wilds of Rannoch Moor– one of which they had read, one they hadn’t - and burned both, capturing the ashes and mixing them with acrylic medium to make pigment with which they painted two simple monochromes, in subtly different tones of grey. We exhibited these in 2009 alongside works by Francis Alys, Callum Innes and Cornelia Parker in an exhibition that took its title from Alys’s work Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing: an exhibition about creative destruction and   transformation. The writer Colm Toibin encountered them on our booth at Frieze art fair in London that same year and later described them in a very engaging blog about the mysteries of conceptual art for the London Review of Books, a link to which can be found here.

The sequence began where we left off - with Marine Hugonnier, the artist whose exhibition closed prematurely at the gallery in Edinburgh a few weeks ago. That presentation showcased her most recent Travel Posters, but for The Unseen Masterpiece we delve into her archive for a note of unbridled optimism in a previously unpublished photograph from 2001 which (like all photographs) captures a fragment of the past, whilst simultaneously offering a quite literal glimpse of the future – Towards Tomorrow – an image photographed across 53 miles of the Bering Strait, over the international date line, to a place where it is always tomorrow.
The exhibition that had to close early was our first solo show of Marine’s work, although her relationship with the gallery goes back to 2007 when she took part in our year-long sequence Eight Days, and in the summer of 2013 she became the 20th artist to make a work for the public art project Billboard for Edinburgh that ran on the outside of our building from 2008-2016.