This year, 2024, sees Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery turn 50 and to celebrate it is presenting a programme that brings the very best of Scottish, British and international visual art and culture to inspire and energise audiences for free, as always.
The first of the year’s major exhibitions is from Glasgow-based artist Martin Boyce who last showed at Fruitmarket in 1999 and whose sculptures rework the textures and forms of the built environment. Using the iconography of the everyday alongside the formal and conceptual histories of art, architecture and design, Boyce creates poetic landscapes which merge interior and exterior spaces. This exhibition brings together works from 1992 to the present in a celebration of Boyce’s work that offers the chance to explore the development of his artistic sensibility and sculptural language.
Boyce, who was born in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire in 1967, studied at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating with a BA in environmental art in 1990, then an MFA in 1997. He won the Turner Prize in 2011 and since 2018 has been professor of sculpture at HFBK Hamburg.
This exhibition extends throughout the Fruitmarket, in the Exhibition Galleries and the Warehouse. Rising to the challenge of making a new exhibition in a familiar place, Boyce has created a different atmosphere for each space.
First, there is an installation that uses the existing architecture of Fruitmarket to create a new structure in which to display a series of wall based works, from very early graphic text works to more recent painted panels. This leads on to a small room in which models and materials relating to Boyce’s history with Jan and Joël Martel’s concrete Cubist ‘trees’ from 1925 are shown on a specially adapted concrete table. Boyce’s interest in these trees, the lexicon of shapes, patterns and typography he has developed from them, have been much discussed in essays on the artist’s work, but never before laid out in an exhibition.
Next Boyce re-imagines the space of Fruitmarket’s Upper Gallery, with a number of works brought together in an atmospheric new combination. From the immersive beauty of the very recent Future Blossom (For Yokeno Residence) to the subtly subversive interventions of the Ventillation Grills series, the works combine to make a space somewhere between inside and outside.
Finally, the Warehouse, where sculptures gather as though recently returned from or about to go out on exhibition. Familiar works are shown in unfamiliar ways in this specially-designed installation as Boyce plays with ideas of storage, granting us access to a part of the exhibition or art making process that is not normally seen, and questioning how things slip into and out of mind and memory.
A new book to celebrate this exhibition, with installation imagery and new writing from writer, novelist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell and curators and writers Katrina Brown and Penelope Curtis is in the making.
Exhibition dates: 02 March – 09 June 2024
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 