Pack up the suitcase – off by SquEasy Jet to Glasgow to visit the daughter………..a great excuse for gallery visiting. My other half says my tail goes up and my nose goes down. He calls it my ‘truffling mode’ as yet again I become insanely happy and overcome with the need to dive into every gallery and exhibition space and emerge triumphant with an armful of flyers and yet another couple of ‘must sees’ that I didn’t know I had to see until then….
This weekend’s out of body experience was a visit to the Glasgow Gallery to look at the Peter Howson’s. The man is a legend in my book but this was a lesson in how even the strongest work in the world just cannot survive a fairground hang of row upon row of works. His strong line and strident colour became something quite other here- a sea of colour and movement; as though a single new surreal work had taken over the gallery space. Which in a way I suppose it had.
Next- a trip to 103 Trongate, the new home of the Glasgow Print Studio. What a space- every print maker’s fantasy football team. The ultimate Lottery own goal – which it is- huge amounts of dosh and a printer’s palace on three floors to show for it. All housed in Glasgow’s brand new Centre for Creativity. Surely the last dying breath of a pre-recession lottery funded era now moribund and gasping in the corner somewhere out of sight.
Into the car with the daughter and back to Edinburgh. We head straight to the friendly face of The Fruit Market Gallery. Always great shows and a fabulous place to take friends not much versed in all of this. No pretensions – just explanations, and books to sit and read and videos of the artist to listen to and watch.
Eva Hesse; Studiowork. ‘ Rather than being simply technical explorations these objects radically put into question conventional notions of what sculpture is.’ So says the catalogue.
No they don’t. Her finished pieces do.
‘Materials testing’ is what we called it at college and as such they are interesting in that one feels somewhat voyeuristic. I am sure Eva would have been horrified to see bits and pieces found in her studio after her death given huge white gallery space. They seem to flop like little dabs out of water in the spotlights and float away into the great white haze………sad to have been unable to meet our expectations.
