Art in 2003

This was the year that Monet smashed exhibition records at the National Galleries of Scotland; the refurbished RSA and the resuscitated Stills rose like phoenixes from the ashes, and Tramway 2 narrowly escaped an Icarus-like dive after soaring too close to the sun. This was the year Scotland debuted with style at the Venice Biennale, and produced almost half of the Beck’s Futures shortlist. 2003 marked a century since Whistler’s death, and saw the world’s largest tribute to the artist in galleries all over Glasgow. And it was also the year that Boyle Family put up – in their own words – “as good a Boyle show as you’re ever going to see”.

10 Fresh: Contemporary British Artists in Print, Edinburgh Printmakers
The vibrant Edinburgh workshop put on a show which lived up to its name, by Young British Artists like the Chapman Brothers and Tracey Emin, and by a fresh selection of home-grown talent including Christine Borland and Toby Paterson. The diverse range of work was vigorous, often unassuming and beautifully made, revealing a deep vein of quiet empathy along with the subtlest sense of humour.

9 Whistler Centenary, The Hunterian Art Gallery
The Hunterian boasted seven Whistler exhibitions in June this year, centred around the universally-loved portrait of Whistler’s Mother, its loan a significant coup for the gallery. From paintings to pastels, and from furniture to his mother’s cookbook, there was something for everyone’s taste, but it was Whistler’s prints which stole my heart, in two of the exhibitions, Copper into Gold, and Beauty and the Butterfly.

8 Beck’s Futures 2003, CCA
“Once seen, never forgotten” is the best way to describe David Sherry’s contribution to the prize, a home-video of the artist sewing balsa wood to his feet. There were vibrating mummies, undisclosed exhibits and take-away posters of tropical pupae hidden in the Old Bailey. The prize went to Nashashibi’s film of a Sallie Army jumble sale, and with four of the nine shortlisted artists working from Glasgow, the eyes of the art world have been fixed on the city ever since.

7 Monet: The Seine and the Sea, Royal Scottish Academy
Always a crowd-pleaser, Monet is guaranteed to pull in the punters, but this exhibition smashed all the National Galleries’ previous records, charting almost 160,000 visitors in three months. The Edinburgh-only show focussed on one of the most difficult and prolific periods in the artist’s life, as he worked his way towards the style we all know and love. The walls were a bit too green for me, and the hanging a bit didactic, but it’s churlish to grumble when 80 Monets have been gathered together from all over the world for your delectation.

6 King of the World, The Queen’s Gallery, Holyroodhouse
I was utterly enchanted by the 44-page Mughal manuscript painted for the 17th century Indian Emperor Shah-Jahan, the man responsible for the Taj Mahal. Painted with tiny water-colour brushes by 14 artists, this is the album’s first visit to Scotland and contains sumptuous illustrations of regal ceremony, war and hunting, that you could look at for hours on end. What with the Padshahnama this year, and last year’s exquisite Leonardo exhibition, you really do have to admit that the Queen has some very good stuff in her cupboards.

5 Claire Barclay: Ideal Pursuits, Dundee Contemporary Arts
One of the three key artists representing Scotland at the Venice Biennale this year, Barclay also managed to find time to make a solo exhibition – in situ – at DCA. Her kinky mixes of leather and steel, fur and brass were balanced together tantalisingly like strip tease acts for the intellectually aroused.

4 To the North: Paintings by Jon Schueler, City Art Centre, Edinburgh
The municipal gallery mounted a ravishing retrospective this summer of the American painter who took his Abstract Expressionist enthusiasm to Mallaig in the 1950s, making the west-coast village his second home. Schueler pursued the shifting skies of Scotland’s Highlands and Islands with a style which owed as much to the luminous atmospherics of JMW Turner as it did to his American contemporaries, and the show was a real treat for anyone who’s seen those skies.

3 Sanctuary, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
Another municipal gallery pulled it off this year with a well-timed show, full of breadth and depth, about human rights and asylum. This fundamental, and yet almost unspeakably contentious, issue was addressed with maturity by big shots like Bill Viola (he of the Passions) and Anthony Gormley (he of the Angel of the North) along with a home team of artists including Ross Sinclair and Graham Fagan.

2 Thomas Demand, Dundee Contemporary Arts
There was something about this show that pressed all the right buttons for me. Going to the DCA is always a thoroughly enjoyable experience, and that certainly helped. But Demand’s large-scale photos and films of meticulously constructed paper scenes, often banal but always universally familiar, proved to be an irresistable combination of craft, concept and visual pleasure.

1 Boyle Family, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Thi s retrospective, put together with the help of the famous four, saw the largest number of Boyle Family works ever likely to be displayed together, no mean feat with those big chunks of fragile resin. A huge world map, full of a thousand dart holes marking randomly selected sites, was pieced together for the occasion, and the show’s curators achieved that elusive balance of documentation and art which leaves you feeling totally satisfied.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 28.12.03