Lucy Skaer
Until July 9; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

It’s over 500 years since someone first said they couldn’t see the wood for the trees. In these postmodern days the phrase rings even truer: bombarded with fragments of information and close-up images, we find ourselves thoroughly dislocated and unable to understand the bigger picture.

In Lucy Skaer’s first major solo show in Scotland, we’re lost in those woods, staring at the trees. In her drawing, Wood And Trees, Skaer has made a repeating pattern of shattered wooden hurricane wreckage, lurking like abstract wallpaper behind a group of tree trunks.

Born in Cambridge, Skaer trained in Glasgow School of Art’s celebrated Environmental Art Department. In the 10 years since she graduated, Skaer has been picked out for a regular stream of commissions and exhibitions including the British Art Show, Beck’s Futures, the Saatchi Collection and the Venice Biennale. Her work is ubiquitous, but we’ve never seen anything like a survey show.

The Fruitmarket’s exhibition changes that, bringing together art made by Skaer since 2001, and adding two new specially commissioned installations. With the exception of one or two recent tangents, Skaer’s work has followed a clear path, finding ever-more fiendish ways of challenging us to take apart the process of our own looking.

That’s an artistic challenge that’s been around for a very long time, and Skaer acknowledges her debt to art history, with, for example, a dramatic re-working of Hukosai’s famous wave. The once colourful motif is now a dark grid of spirals, only decodable bit by bit, with your nose to the paper and your memory trying to hold it all together over time.

There are two core themes in Skaer’s drawings: the physical breakdown of the process of looking, and the distance between real, human experience and its cold pictorial reflection. In this second case, Skaer owes an unlikely debt to Andy Warhol. The hand-drawn pencil greys of Wood And Trees may not bring Pop Art to mind, but the decorative wreckage of its background does.

Warhol famously took photographs of disasters from newspapers, and with repetition, and a few big and bold tricks, he turned them into pretty pop art icons. Like Warhol, Skaer sources her images from the mass media, their shock value already worn thin before she administers the final anaesthetic.

Skaer’s best-known (and in my opinion her best) drawings combine brutal images of corpses with elegant wine glasses and ancient vases. The result is strangely exquisite, the bodies distanced from their violent deaths in riots and war by their reduction to flat, decorative patterns. Corpses are a favourite of Skaer’s because they are already empty images of the human beings they once were. The best of these drawings, such as The Problem In Seven Parts, are sadly not included in the show.

Skaer’s recent drawings pursue a more formulaic approach; photographs are divided up on large grids, and redrawn using cryptic systems of spirals, squares and stripes. These densely drawn images, of whale skeletons, a battleship, police horses, prison cells and more, are hard to read; your eye roams around looking for a way in, trying to keep a grip on what it has penetrated. Often the blank spaces turn out to be the most instructive parts.

Skaer is becoming ever more enthusiastic about systems, even naming her drawings using subsystems, but for me, her earlier drawings were more powerful. They seemed to grow organically, shifting effortlessly between modes, far from a world of mathematics or scientific explanations. They combined numbed horror with a lyricism which is absent in her newer drawings.

That lyricism has re-emerged in Skaer’s sculptures; her new installation, Room Of Lines, will stay with you, however exasperated you become. Skeletons from a medieval danse macabre (the dance of death) are hidden inside plaster urn shapes, their profiles extrapolated through 180 degrees until they are impossible to make out. Their secret dancing figures, present but not visible, mock you from beyond the surface.

These and other sculptures cleverly shift the boundaries between the image and the object, opening up a new front in Skaer’s battle against the passive gaze. Just when you thought looking at art about looking at art was passé, Skaer makes it worth doing all over again.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 01.06.08