Alasdair Gray

Stand F32 –

Henry Coombes: Coombes was born in London in 1977 and completed his BA at Glasgow School of Art in 2002. He represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2007, in which he premiered his second short film ‘Gralloch’, which has since screened at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Susie Q, Zurich and the Milan Film Festival. He is currently in post-production with a new short film, ‘The Bedfords’, which is supported by Scottish Screen and will be developed into a feature length film for completion in 2010.

Henry Coombes’s work is concerned with investigating the entrenched political, cultural and class connotation of the traditional media in which he works. Oil paint and watercolour are used to seduce the viewer into familiar and wholesome images, which on closer inspection reveal a dark and subversive subtext.

Kate Davis: Born in New Zealand in 1977, Davis completed her BA Printmaking in 2000 and an MPhil in Art in Organisational Contexts in 2001 at Glasgow School of Art. Recently she has exhibited at Galerie Kamm, Berlin, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow and completed a three-month residency at Cove Park, in Argyll and Bute, Scotland and a six week residency at the Banff Institute, Canada. Forthcoming projects include a group show at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, and in 2009 with Hayward Touring.

Davis’ scrupulous pencil drawings and paintings exploit overlapping imagery to create a weightless lyricism. Visual similes and metaphors slide in and out of view, teasing the eye with incongruous metamorphoses of nature and culture, abstraction and representation, beauty and catastrophe.

Alex Frost: Born in London in 1973, Alex Frost studied fine art at Staffordshire University (BA 1995) and Glasgow School of Art (MFA 1998). Recently he has exhibited in solo shows at Tramway, Glasgow, Sandra Burgel, Berlin, Milton Keynes Gallery and Artsway, Hampshire. His next solo show opens at Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow in October this year, which coincides with the launch of a publication on Frost’s practice, charting its development over the last four years. The same month his commission for Art on the Underground’s exhibition ‘100 Years, 100 Artists, 100 Works of Art’, will be exhibited at A Foundation Gallery, London.

Frost lacerates the sensual anxiety of architectural and sculptural archives. Scorning monstrous lampoon, his drawings and sculptures rediscover the play, gusto and timbre of the preliminary stages of modernist art and design, the multifaceted spatial imaginaries of paper architecture and jewel-like decorative materials used in Art Nouveau model making.

Alasdair Gray: Gray was born in Glasgow in 1934 and studied Design and Mural Painting at Glasgow School of Art from 1952-57. Since then he has exhibited widely across Scotland, particularly in his home city of Glasgow, where he has also undertaken several mural commissions for many of the city’s churches.

Throughout his career, Gray’s work in art and literature have been interwoven paths, overlapping in form and content. In his books, word and image are juxtaposed and combined to form epic narratives that have been compared to the work of fellow artist-writers, such as William Blake.

Fiona Jardine: Jardine was born in Galashields in 1970. She gained a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee in 1998 and a MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2003. Forthcoming projects include a solo for ‘Nought to 60’, at the ICA, London in October 2008, a residency at Studio Voltaire (Sep-Oct 08) and a group show at the Print Studio, Glasgow. Jardine lives and works in Glasgow.

Thresholds, monuments and associated graveyard symbols such as skeletons and crosses appear in the recent pencil drawings, wall paintings and sculptures of Fiona Jardine. These pieces are often fashioned from physically light materials such as papier mache and expanded polystyrene and partially acquire their air of weightiness through their outer coating of brown or black gloss paint. The unctuous shine of these sculptures reinforces the spareness of her drawn work, equivalent to a bracelet of bright hair encircling a skeletal wrist.

Alan Michael: Born in Glasgow in 1967, Alan Michael gained a BA in Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone College, Dundee in 1996 and an MA (Fine Art) from Glasgow School of Art in 1998. Recent exhibitions include Tate Triennial, London, David Kordansky, LA, The Showroom, London, Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin and Modern Art, London. Future group shows include ‘Legend’ at Domain de Chamarande (nr Paris) and the Print Studio, Glasgow

Executed in oil and acrylic on canvas, Michael’s paintings form a skewed but precise idiolect of cultural references. Photographs, prints and art-world reproductions are meticulously studied and fascistically transformed – duplicated, rotated, spliced and inter-married. His iconic hybrids encompassing Lucian Freud, Horst, Balthus, Andrew Wyeth and – more recently – Lynne Ramsey’s film Morvern Callar are doppelgangers of both hegemonic and sub-cultures, middlebrows and avant-gardes.

Craig Mulholland: Craig Mulholland was born in Glasgow in 1969. He studied Drawing and Painting at Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1991. Recent exhibitions include ‘Grandes et Petites Machines’, Sorcha Dallas/Glasgow School of Art touring to Spike Island, Bristol, 2008; ‘Hyperinflation’, Tate Lightbox, London; and ‘Bearer on Demand’, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. Mulholland was a recent recipient of the Scottish Arts Council/Scottish Screen Artists Film and Video Award. Mulholland lives and works in Glasgow.

The dominant concerns within Mulholland’s recent work have centred on Foucauldian theories of power - ‘the political dream of the plague […] the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life’. The artist’s ‘anxious impudence towards technological and bureaucratic advance’ simultaneously hints at inherent paradoxes and contradictions within his work, such as his own participation in the neo-liberal culture industry. The thwarting of radicalism by collusion is an enduring interest, obliquely considered throughout Mulholland’s practice. These interests have manifested themselves through a prolific body of work across a range of different media.

SUPPORTED BY THE SCOTTISH ARTS COUNCIL, www.scottisharts.org.uk