The first details of the 2019 Edinburgh Art Festival were released earlier this year. And having studied the programme we have chosen our own highlights.
The Edinburgh Art Festival runs from 25 July to 25 August and most if not all of the exhibitions are free. You can get a useful map from the EAF office at the French Institute on George IV Bridge.
We would be delighted to know your choices or best things to see too! Do leave us your suggestions in the comments section below.
Two of Edinburgh’s most exciting new spaces, Collective and Edinburgh Printmakers, will host their first Festival exhibitions in their new homes having transformed historic spaces in the city into major year-round contemporary art centres. Both have lovely restaurants/cafés to tempt you as well as the art.
Deer Dancer is an ambitious cross-artform project by Finnish-English artist, vocalist and musician Hanna Tuulikki presented by Edinburgh Printmakers from their fabulous new creative hub housed in the former North British Rubber Company building in Fountainbridge.
The project, which investigates deer mimesis within traditional dance, will be realised as an audio-visual installation, incorporating innovative music, costumed choreography on film, and visual scores, presented alongside a new series of prints commissioned as part of a printmaking residency at EdinburghPrintmakers.
In their first Festival showing in their new space on top of Calton Hill, Collective presents Migratory Motor Complex by 2014 Turner Prize nominee James Richards in one of Edinburgh’s newest contemporary art galleries breathing new life into Edinburgh’s City Observatory, previously closed to the public for over 100 years and which reopened in late 2018.
Richards’ exhibition features Migratory Motor Complex (2017), a six-channel electro-acoustic installation that explores the capacity of sound to render artificial spaces and locate sonic and melodic events within them.The work is tuned in situ, with Richards reacting to the acoustic contingencies of the City Dome to create a cinematic and multi-sensory experience.
Gateway by Portuguese sculptor Joana Vasconcelos is a major new addition to Jupiter Artland’s landscape and comes hot on the heels of their 2018 gallery exhibition, presenting an intricately designed pool set within a landscaped formal garden and accompanied by a delicate glass dome space.
Shaped from over 11,500 hand-painted and glazed tiles traditionally manufactured in Vasconcelos’ native Portugal, the swathes of brightly coloured motifs span social histories and collective narratives, journeying through sacred geometries to the zodiac and beyond.
Intimate at The Fine Art Society mounts a group exhibition of portraiture, depicting sitters with whom the artist is close.
Comprising works from the early 20th century through to pieces by contemporary artists including John Byrne, Jennifer McRae, Norman McBeath, Niall McDiarmid, Ishbel Myerscough, Eduardo Paolozzi.
Alongside sculptor Nicole Farhi is presenting Writing Heads, a sculpted and painted a series of 25 busts of 20th century novelists and playwrights, from Françoise Sagan to Muriel Spark and Samuel Beckett.
Farhi models her figures as a response to their identity and work, sculpting her feelings towards the figure as much as their recognisable qualities.
The City Art Centre presents the first major survey devoted to the work of one of Scotland’s most celebrated artists, Victoria Crowe. Embracing every aspect of her practice, Victoria Crowe:50 Years of Painting includes over 150 paintings, covering her whole career to date with student paintings to the more recent landscapes and portraits. This exhibition traces Crowe’s rise to prominence with subjects from the Scottish borders to Venice. Each floor has its own colour key and there is a new film which you can watch beforehand to set the scene.
Victoria Crowe said: “This exhibition spans a long period of my work as an artist — a chance to see the threads of ideas and their development over time. The exhibition will trace many concerns in the work, from starting points in sketch books through to finished works, commissions and the fruits of recent residences. As a gallery, the City Art Centre has been very supportive of Scottish artists, as its collection confirms, and I am delighted to be holding this major retrospective within their galleries.”
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
