Top Five Shows of 2006

Devil In The Detail: The Paintings of Adam Elsheimer, RSA Building, Edinburgh

Undoubtedly the best exhibition of the year, Devil In The Detail, was all but ignored by the public. This stunning gem, an art historical groundbreaker, was hidden away under the hyped-up festival blockbuster, Ron Mueck, and the visitor figures make for depressing reading. While the Mueck publicity machine persuaded almost 130,000 people to part with their money, it was a different story for Adam Elsheimer, attracting a meagre 10,000 paying guests.

Apart from its relegation to the dingy lower galleries, this show was perfect. For the first time ever, here was almost every painting that the 17th century German artist produced in his tragically short life, brought together from across the world. His tiny oil paintings were like precious jewels, rich in colour and perfect to the smallest detail. Although he died at 32, his influence on European art has been enormous, and this exhibition showed us why. Chances like this only come around once in a lifetime.


Douglas Gordon: Superhumanatural, RSA building & Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh

Still open till January 14, Scotland’s first Douglas Gordon retrospective is everything we hoped it would be. The Glasgow-born artist arrived from New York amid a whirl of excitement and transformed four Edinburgh buildings into netherworlds of mystery and revelation. Gordon revisits Scotland’s richest veins of literary and philosophical thought with a flair for showmanship worthy of Houdini.

Along with celebrated works such as 24 Hour Psycho, Gordon brought the eerily compulsive Between Darkness And Light (After William Blake), a film installation which gets good and evil well and truly tangled up. New works include Cranach’s Tree, which further muddies the moral waters with dark historical references.

In Gordon’s hands, the heavenly neoclassical rooms of the RSA have been reborn as a film noir purgatory of paranoia and dislocation; this is a ghost ride for the thinking person, perfect for Edinburgh’s dark winter days.


Doves And Dreams, Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow

The Hunterian put on a heartbreaking show as part of this year’s Mackintosh Festival, examining the other half of the famous Glasgow Four. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s sister-in-law, Frances Macdonald, was married to his friend, J Herbert McNair, and the two, until this show, were rarely more than a footnote to Mackintosh’s story.

Putting the pair under the spotlight with both exhibition and accompanying book, the Hunterian made a valuable contribution to Scottish art history. But this was no dry academic exercise; it was a tragic tale of innocence, love, destruction and despair as the two lived out their lives as artists in turn-of-the-century Glasgow and Liverpool.

Frances’s talent shone from her paintings, illustrations and metalwork, while McNair stumbled along behind her, dragging her eventually into poverty and isolation. It really was enough to make you weep.


Luke Fowler: Pilgrimage From Scattered Points, Modern Institute, Glasgow

The young Glasgow artist added to his impressive track record this year by screening a masterful documentary about Cornelius Cardew and his legendary Scratch Orchestra. The revolutionary organisation, founded in England in 1968 to make noise in all its shapes and forms, lived for four remarkable years of experiment and controversy, ending in bitter collapse.

Fowler’s tender film transformed the barest scraps of archive material into a rich feast of sound and pictures, matched with intimate and honest interviews. His inventive editing was a perfect complement to Cardew’s anarchic music, creating a collage of sound, film and animation which was constantly bursting with energy. It’s no surprise that Pilgrimage From Scattered Points went on to show at Tate Britain soon after its launch at the Modern Institute.


Ice Blink by Simon Faithfull, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh

Of the three contemporary artists in this year’s best shows, all make film and video (accompanied by other media). Video dominated Simon Faithfull’s small but perfectly formed show in Stills Gallery, the result of a residency in Antarctica.

Whether through drawings, text or video, what came across most powerfully was Faithfull’s restless attempts – faced with infinite expanses of whiteness – to anchor himself in space and time. Humour combined with awe, and also with long stretches of boredom, in a mix of works which lassoed the sublime and made it personal.

Also unforgettable was Faithfull’s wind-battered video of an abandoned whaling station in South Georgia, colonised by an aggressive community of seals. The show reminded us that there are lands we haven’t conquered, and places on earth where human beings are still nothing more than a tiny, disappearing speck in an infinite stretch of white.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 24.12.06