The Fruitmarket Gallery on Market Street is closed at the moment for a £3.75m refurbishment and expansion programme under the direction of Edinburgh architects Reiach and Hall.
While the gallery is closed you can visit the bookshop pop up in Waverley Mall and you can also take a Night Walk. Fruitmarket Gallery have revived Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Night Walk for Edinburgh, one of the hits of the Edinburgh International Festival 2019.
While walking through Edinburgh’s Old Town, you listen to an artist’s voice and watch magical scenes on a screen in your hand.
A free event, Night Walk for Edinburgh runs from 16 November to 31 Jan. Book now
The gallery will be open again in summer 2020 with new exhibitions including work by Scottish sculptor Karla Black.
Ms Black is based in Glasgow and was nominated for the Turner Prize. In 2011 the Fruitmarket curated her work for solo presentation in Venice at the 54th International Biennale. This is the first time that the gallery has worked with her in Scotland.
There are two major new commissions for the warehouse and upper exhibition gallery being formed in the renovated building and some of Black’s older work will be sited on the ground floor.
In the new work, Black will spread a carpet of coloured powder across the floor in a horizontal work. Using the height of the space she will paint and hang powdered cellophane from the beams, coating the floor with Vaseline to bounce the light around the walls.
The new space will be used for local cultural organisations and will include music, theatre, dance and spoken word performances. The Fruitmarket has commissioned creative responses in writing and dance in 2019, and these will be shown in the New Year.
For Beginning a line beginning a building artist/poet Rhona Warwick Paterson and dancer/choreographer Eve Mutso have collaborated to make a live archive of transition, using poem, drawing, dance, film and performance to respond to the fabric of The Fruitmarket Gallery as it enters into a new phase and a new set of walls. More will be revealed during the redevelopment and when the building is open to the public.
For Writers’ Shift, the Fruitmarket Gallery has invited poets Janette Ayachi, Callie Gardner, Jane Goldman, Iain Morrison and Tom Pow, all of whom have a history of engagement with the gallery, will work together and with Fruitmarket staff on a guided process of writing to record the year of change, reflecting on past achievements and extrapolating directions that the organisation may take in its renewed spaces.
The gallery hopes to build on its past growth from 41,224 visitors in 1994 to nearly 200,000 in 2018.
Fiona Bradley, Fruitmarket Gallery Director, said, “This is an exciting year for us, as we work towards opening an inspirational new space for creative, collaborative working and our refreshed and renovated existing building. We can’t wait to work with Karla Black. There is a defiant force to her work – it is demanding and disruptive as well as beautiful and inspiring. It is because of this that we invited her to be the first artist to work in the newly reopened Fruitmarket: we value artistic experiment and we want her to really challenge the new space. We look forward to sharing her insights with our audience.
As we work towards the reopening of the Fruitmarket we are using poetry, drawing, dance, film and performance to reflect on the spaces of the gallery from the beginning of the development through the refurbishment, marking the transition into the new and renewed spaces.”
Since opening in 1974 the gallery has shown a wide range of artists, championing Scottish and international artists including David Hockney, Jean Michele Basquiat, John Cage, Senga Negudi, Mark Wallinger, Jacqueline Donachie, Louise Bourgeois, Callum Innes, Gabriel Orozco, Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono and Jeff Koons.
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