Jim Lambie

Jim Lambie’s current retrospective opens with a deceptively simple installation. Shaved Ice, 2012–14, is a crop of brightly painted ladders, all extending from floor to ceiling; a mirrored panel fills each space between the rungs, distorting the reflected room and the visitors in it. It’s a trippy transformation that offers the perfect segue to the hypnotic floor-bound installation Zobop, 1999, which starts at the lower landing of Fruitmarket’s main staircase and proceeds to blanket the entire top floor. Composed of concentrically laid strips of Technicolor vinyl tape that follow the outlines of the gallery’s floor plan, Zobop looks like a Lynda Benglis latex pour crossed with a Bridget Riley canvas, and the work’s effect—even though it has been reprised numerous times since its 1999 debut in Lambie’s first solo show—somehow manages to remain fresh.

Zobop is enjoyable enough on its own, but at Fruitmarket, it also plays up the psychedelic tendencies of Lambie’s sculptures, many of which similarly transform quotidian objects into minor fascinations, ranging from a tinfoil mask lined with men’s underwear (The Kid with the Replaceable Head, 1996) to a piece created out of record-album covers taped together into a serpentine accordion (Stakka, 2000) that writhes over the surface of Zobop. The exhibition is rife with allusions to music and, by extension, to Lambie’s involvement with Glasgow’s music scene, which offers a context for understanding his duct-tape-covered shirts and glitter-bombed turntables. But biography is gravy here. At its best, Lambie’s work is mere play, pure color, unabashed love of junkyard-bound material; it embodies a formally restrained exuberance that feels almost incidentally enriched by a wry (and no doubt intentional) relationship to histories of abstraction and the readymade.