picks October 07, 2022

Hannah Wilson

Scene: a tightly cropped shot of a man, music fading out. The quiet draws attention to a small gesture, perhaps a look off camera, that betrays an unguarded vulnerability. These sequences, often found in auteur filmmaking, provide the inspiration for Hannah Wilson’s new suite of paintings on view in robert’s tenement space as part of “The Folder.” The works invite the viewer to identify with defeated men, their gazes averted, faces covered, minds elsewhere. The titles mix fact and fiction, with actor and character names alongside each other. Head (Theodore) (all works 2022) centers on the catlike

picks August 26, 2022

Miyako Ishiuchi

The walls of Miyako Ishiuchi’s first solo show in Scotland are painted in alternating sections of ultramarine and silver, a reference to the stylings of the Yokohama home where the photographer first set up a darkroom in 1975. This studio finds a suitably dynamic correlative in this deceptively simple exhibition, which brings together three bodies of work—ひろしま/hiroshima (2007–15), Mother’s (2000–2005), and Frida (2013)—across three rooms. The scattered hang invites comparisons between the series and heightens the ethereal, disembodied quality of the photographs, which catalogue the personal

picks May 06, 2022

Jennifer Bailey

Jennifer Bailey’s subdued exhibition “Small Room” conveys the everyday solitude of art practice. Photographs of Tupperware pasta, coins, and mundane studio objects speak to domestic penny-pinching and part-time gigs. The room is dominated by four large and imposingly blank stretches of polyester fleece that almost resemble mattress protectors. Mounted on the adjacent walls, two scale models call to mind miniature high-street shop fronts. Renfrew Street, 2013/2022, houses some dirty glasses, while Art Room, 2001/2022, contains a plastic bag with two oranges, which both appear surreally oversize,

picks April 16, 2022

Erica Eyres

The women posing in the paintings in Erica Eyres’s exhibition “Another Dirty Room” meet my gaze with a glazed look of their own. Most appear in some stage of undress in a domestic setting, lying provocatively on a velvet sofa or sprawled across a bed. The images, gleaned from 1980s-era pornography, are deftly rendered in oils. Three intimately cropped smaller works have the feel of an amateur peep show, while the larger pieces exude a more glamorous, airbrushed appeal. The models all share certain generic features––white skin, red lipstick, painted nails, fake tits––but the title of each work

picks March 10, 2022

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain

In this compelling, dreamlike presentation, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain examines institutional power and imperial systems of representation to draw out their connections to anthropogenic decay. The show projects a ruinous future, montaged from the present. The two-screen film installation An Experiment with Time, 2022, nods to a 1927 book by J. W. Dunne that speculated on parallel timelines. Ní Bhriain applies the same strategy she used to create Reports to an Academy, 2015, in which slow panning shots survey spaces altered with CGI to look flooded with water. Here, the deluge envelops a German anatomical

print March 2021

Walter Price

The paintings Walter Price showed in “Pearl Lines” are a joyous combination of the carefree and the committed. Their sensibility is earnest, and their carnivalesque style engaging without looking labored. Price finds redemptive qualities in the most apparently dashed-off and blasé decisions. He takes risks. Figurative detail competes with compositional expediency, and at their best the paintings edge into abstraction and sit back, relaxed. Scrapped and scattered marks read both descriptively and as gesture, as in Different day, same confusion (all works cited, 2019), where daubs of orange and

print May/June 2020

Aman Sandhu

The title of Aman Sandhu’s solo show “SO GLAD” was derived from a phrase the artist scrawled in green spray paint across the freshly stuccoed walls of Market Gallery: SO GLAD TO HAVE SEEN THIS. The graffiti functioned as a preemptive commentary on the exhibition itself: Suggesting a self-satisfied aside or maybe an Instagram caption, it loosely anticipated how a majority-white art scene might mark its support for work by an artist of color. This hyperbolic sarcasm drove home both Sandhu’s satirical intent and his interest in the pitfalls and tropes surrounding the act of exhibiting as a POC

picks February 25, 2020

Marine Hugonnier

Marine Hugonnier’s new works, shown in multiples, initially read as simple facsimiles of elegant advertisements from a well-known 1971 Pan Am rebranding campaign designed by Yvan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar and shot by Magnum photographers: alluring pictures of Argentine sunsets, the Hawaiian surf, and a South American rainforest overlaid sparingly with Helvetica type. The people shown in these large-format C-prints are backlit and anonymous: This could be you. A closer look reveals distortions and dips in resolution, variations in texture and hue resulting from a process in which Hugonnier

print November 2019

Patrick Staff

Patrick Staff’s reimagining of Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 play, The Prince of Homburg, was a compelling balance of nocturnal confusion and daylight insight. A carceral video installation incorporating sculpture and photography, it adopted the dualities of the original text––freedom/imprisonment, sleeping/waking, dream/reality––to map the limits of individual agency and autonomy in the current political moment.

The two rooms of the exhibition––one light, one dark––laid out this dialectical commitment. The Appetite (all works 2019) consisted of a barbed security railing lining both rooms, with

picks May 01, 2019

Michael Fullerton

At the back of Koppe Astner’s new space south of the river, an electric current runs across a wall of compact discs. This current, in Michael Fullerton’s Chattanooga Nuclear Genocide (all works 2019), slowly and invisibly corrupts the data on the discs, rendering them unusable. Indeed, an abiding theme in “Tales from the Anglosphere” is that of loss—of friends and memory, both digital and human. Each work on view is accompanied by commentary in the press release, penned by the artist, which provides a disorienting mix of historical information and methodological explanation. The effect is to

print April 2019

Victoria Morton

In comparison to Victoria Morton’s past exhibitions (her 2010 solo show at Inverleith House in Edinburgh, for example), the paintings in this presentation, “Treat Fever with Fever,” felt less schizophrenic, less overtly agitated by implicit figuration. They were also unaccompanied by the installation elements and photography often associated with Morton’s oeuvre. The works, all oil on canvas or linen and varying dramatically in scale, were sensitively installed so as to bring out the formal relations among them and command attention to detail. Each painting retains a strong sense of the hand or

picks January 31, 2019

Bedwyr Williams

Between living in rural Wales and representing his country at the Venice Biennale in 2013, Bedwyr Williams is well placed to feel the full force of the nightmare of art-world mores. This is evident in his shrewd suite of thirty-eight line drawings for “Adjunct Curator,” which satirize various art-world personas. In our modish times, I can only wish you luck in dealing with the grinning “curator with chummy youth leader vibe,” the glazed solemnity of the “boring artist with an interesting name,” the grimace of the tote-bag-toting “toddler faced art fanatic” or the bespectacled smugness of a

Calum Sutherland