Edinburgh Art Festival gets underway - The Edinburgh Reporter

Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) is the platform for the visual arts which sits at the heart of Edinburgh’s August Festivals, this year celebrating their 75th anniversary season this year.

This 18th edition of the festival features new commissions from Jeanne van Heeswijk, Nadia Myre and Pester and Rossi, and Associate Artist Emmie McLuskey programmes new work by Hannan Jones, Janice Parker, Maeve Redmond and Amanda Thomson.

^{Emmie McLuskey (Associate Artist), Kim McAleese (Director Art Festival), Tessa Lynch (artist at Printmakers), and
Nadia Myre (artist at Printmakers). © 2022 J.L. Preece}

Highlights across the programme include retrospectives of work by Barbara Hepworth and Alan Davie, a rare Scottish showing of work by Ishiuchi Miyako and new work by Cooking Sections and Sakiya, Tracey Emin, Daniel Silver, Ashanti Harris, Kirsten Coelho, Studio Lenca, Ruth Ewan, and Celine Condorelli.

Four early career visual artists based in Scotland will take part in ‘Platform: 2022’ – Saoirse Amira Anis, Emelia Kerr Beale, Lynsey MacKenzie, Jonny Walker.

Edinburgh Art Festival will take place from 28th July – 28th August with many events free to attend. More information and tickets can be found at https://www.edinburghartfestival.com/

‘Alan Davie: Beginning of a far-off World’, a centenary exhibition at Dovecot Studios celebrating the work of Scottish artist Alan Davie (1920-2014).

Featuring rarely seen works from each decade of his career, this retrospective is a timely tribute to one of the greatest Scottish artists of the 20th century. The exhibition is curated by artist Siobhan McLaughlin, who graduated from Edinburgh College of Art 80 years after Davie himself.

Alan Davie was a true polymath, working as a painter, jeweller, and jazz musician. Davie built a multidisciplinary practice which led him to seek out the magic in all his pursuits, particularly in painting.

The exhibition features paintings, drawings, and archive material from the private collections of Davie’s friends and peers. Davie’s multidisciplinary approach is demonstrated through collaborations with Dovecot, of which a tapestry Cosmic Spiral and rug Celtic Spirit II will be displayed.

Artist and programmer Emmie McLuskey brings together a series of newly commissioned works for public sites along the Union Canal by Hannan Jones, Janice Parker, Maeve Redmond and Amanda Thomson. Accompanying these works is an online radio and print project entitled Background Noise, featuring local and international contributions.

Collaboration is central to McLuskey’s work – often starting with a shared question, observation or context which is explored more deeply through her practice. Responding to the festival’s invitation to reflect on the geographies of the Union Canal between Lochrin Basin and Wester Hailes, McLuskey has worked alongside the invited artists to raise questions around water, trade, technology, land, environment and their intersections with capitalism.

Commissioned work will take place along The Union Canal.

‘Points of Departure’ a major retrospective of one of the outstanding Scottish artists of his generation, Will Maclean. Maclean’s work is anchored in the history, archaeology, and literature of the Scottish Highlands and the Highland people, as well as his family background and personal associations with the sea.

Perhaps best known for his wall constructions, Maclean is equally at home in sculpture, drawing, printmaking, video and installation. Combining exquisitely hand-made pieces with found or (on occasions) mass produced objects, his work balances between simplicity and complexity and invites the viewer to linger, to admire and to contemplate the universal themes which he explores.

This three floor exhibition at the City Art Centre traces the development of his work from the 1970s to the present day.

To coincide with the festival, Stills presents the first exhibition in Scotland of work by Ishiuchi Miyako – an influential post-war Japanese photographer.

The show consists of a selection of work from some of her most celebrated series including, ‘Mother’s’, the series with which she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 2005, and ‘Frida’ (2012), made at The Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City where Miyako photographed Kahlo’s belongings such as corsets, cosmetics and shoes.

Now in its 8th year, ‘Platform: 2022’ at the French Institute for Scotland offers audiences an opportunity to experience the breadth and vitality of emerging contemporary art practice in Scotland.

Platform: 2022 has been selected by writer and researcher Seán Elder, artist Lucy Skaer, and Director of Dundee Contemporary Arts, Beth Bate.

Over the course of her career, Céline Condorelli has remained committed to the articulation of space, as well as to communicating the methods and labour of transformation – from raw materials, cultivation and extraction, to processes of industrialisation and labour, to the methods of its display, reception and transmission.

‘After Work’ sees Condorelli present a number of key installations and artworks, all altered and adapted to the particularities and peculiarities of Talbot Rice Gallery, which comprises a series of white cube spaces and a 19th century gallery. Throughout the exhibition material transformation will be enacted, documented and playfully insinuated – but not all will be as it appears.

The threshold to the gallery will be activated – dislocating us from one neighbourhood to another, the outside will be brought inside, labour will converse with leisure, the technology of colour will be explored and play will animate the whole exhibition.

More information and tickets for all events that are part of EAF can be found at https://www.edinburghartfestival.com/