| On Friday 26th August at 2pm, Richard Demarco will speak with friends and associates about his exhibition ‘Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys on The Road to Meikle Seggie’ at The Axolotl Gallery. He will discuss how his drawings of Edinburgh and Scotland and what he calls ‘The Road to Meikle Seggie’ leading from Scotland into Europe have inspired his career as an artist. He will also speak about the ‘Event Photography’, a new genre of contemporary art. This has enabled him to be inspired by the physical reality of Joseph Beuys making art works in Scotland and in Germany.
The exhibition is therefore in two parts.
1. This part consists of Richard Demarco’s limited edition prints. They all are inspired by the theme of The Road to Meikle Seggie which leads not only through that landscape of Europe which he has invited artists to explore on their way to the Edinburgh Festival. They are all the artists that Richard Demarco has worked with who have been prepared to follow him in the footsteps of Roman Legionaries, medieval saints and scholars, Celtic missionaries and pilgrims, and also in the footsteps of farmers, cattle-drovers, shepherds and fishermen who have earned their living from the very stuff and substance of Scotland, its landscape and seascape, its market towns and villages such as Cupar in Fife.
2. With regard to this part, Richard will speak about Joseph Beuys in relation to Buckminster Fuller and Lady Rosebery, Kurt Schwitters, Marina Abramovic, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh Collins, Jimmy Boyle, Tadeusz Kantor, Paul Neagu, Ainslie Yule, Alistair McLennan, George Wyllie, Dawson Murray, James Howie, Robert McDowell, Gunther Uecker, Arthur Watson, Sandy Moffat. Richard will also refer to educational institutions such as Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice, the Foksal in Warsaw, the National Film and Theatre School in Lodz, and exhibitions such as ‘Strategy: Get Arts’ and The Royal Scottish Academy’s ‘Ten Dialogues – Richard Demarco: Scotland and the European Avant-garde’ and Richard Demarco’s current exhibition of The Demarco Archive in relation to the Edinburgh Festival’s new and largest-ever venue at Summerhall – until recently Edinburgh University’s Royal Dick Veterinary College.
Richard Demarco will speak as an artist who makes art with pen and ink, pencil, watercolour and his camera and by teaching. There is a particular section of the exhibition devoted to Edinburgh’s Old Town made manifest through the physical reality of Edinburgh’s Old Town small and secret spaces, the Wynds, Closes, Vennels, Alleyways and Courts which remind him of the townscape of the Italian villages from which his Italian forebears began their long journeys via France and Ireland to Scotland.
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