This new exhibition will bring together significant works that explore the history of Scottish Art. A Window into Scottish Art will shine a spotlight on the character, inspiration, and talent of Scottish artists and provoke new ways of defining their achievements.
The works will include paintings, drawings, sculpture and collage by artists such as George Jamesone (1587-1644) known as ‘the Scottish Van Dyck’, through to the Glasgow Boys and Girls and the Scottish Colourists (Peploe, Fergusson, Hunter, and Cadell). Twentieth-century figures such as Eduardo Paolozzi and John Bellany will join contemporary artists such as Caroline Walker, Barry McGlashan, and Iman Tajik who will further explore the contrasting sides of the Scots psyche.
The exhibition is drawn from two collections that complement one another: The Ingram and Fleming Collections. The Ingram Collection is now recognised as one of this country’s most significant, and publicly accessible, collections of Modern British Art, and the Fleming Collection is considered the finest collection of Scottish art outside public institutions.
Developed in partnership with the Sainsbury Centre, the exhibition brings together exciting historical, modern and contemporary works from the Fleming Collection and additional lenders, spanning over one hundred years of social transformation, innovation and individualism.
With works by mid-twentieth century greats, such as Joan Eardley, Margot Sandeman and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, shown alongside contemporary artists including Caroline Walker and Sekai Machache, Scottish Women Artists aspires to serve as a ‘curatorial corrective’ for the historic absence of women artists in academic narratives and artistic institutions.
To complement Eardley’s paintings from the permanent collection held in Perth, the exhibition will bring together some of her most iconic works from the National Galleries of Scotland, the Royal Scottish Academy, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, the Fleming Collection and the University of Dundee. The exhibition will offer visitors the opportunity to see some of Eardley’s most significant works, including her bold atmospheric paintings of the sea and her iconic paintings and sketches of children in the Townhead area of Glasgow.
Dislocations is a group exhibition featuring the work of contemporary artists, with loans of work by Ian hamilton Finlay from the Fleming Collection. The artists included here reframe the ways we inhabit, perceive and represent the natural world. They direct our attention to sites, spaces and experiences often overlooked in traditional landscapes and question what belonging in or to such places might look like beyond attempts at mastery or idealisation.
Featuring 27 works from the Fleming Collection, this exhibition celebrates work from the four key Scottish Colourist artists, alongside artists who were early influencers of their work.
The only festival to celebrate biography and memoir, the Boswell Book Festival is one of the most prestigious cultural events in Scotland. This year, a series of short talks under the theme of Scottish Portraits as Biography, will be presented throughout, partially hosted by Fleming Collection Director James Knox, along with James Holloway, former Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and David Eustace, internationally acclaimed Scottish photographer.
The Glasgow Girls and Boys were a group of radical young artists, who rebelled against the jaded Victorian passion for highland scenes and story-telling pictures. With thanks to additional loans from private lenders and the National Galleries of Scotland, this display of the pivotal, late 19th century group of artists will highlight their talent and breadth of work. Kirkcudbright, the Artists' Town, was itself a home and inspiration to a number of the Glasgow Girls and Boys, including E A Hornel, Jessie M King and George Henry.
Art has rarely been more needed than during this time of a global pandemic. Presciently, in 2018, the Sheffield Millennium Gallery staged an exhibition of works from the Fleming Collection, the Ingram Collection and the Jerwood Collection, which explored, largely through work chosen from the 20th century, art’s capacity to stir our emotions from deepest despair to unbridled joy. Its title, 'Darkness into Light', summed up today’s febrile mood, which is why the Fleming Collection has reprised an online version of this exhibition.
A lecture by Duncan Macmillan, Emeritus Professor in the History of Scottish Art at the University of Edinburgh where he pioneered the teaching of Scottish art as a university subject. This is the first event in a year-long collaboration between the Paul Mellon Centre and the Fleming Collection that will focus on aspects of Scottish art, both current and neglected. Recently, the Fleming Collection gifted its specialist library to PMC as a contribution to building an unrivalled resource for British art studies open to all.
Last year, on the advice of the Fleming Collection, Scotland House London chose the work of an emerging Scottish artist to hang for a year as part of a new award in support of contemporary Scottish talent. This award was given to Brandon Logan, a graduate from Edinburgh College of Art who showed work in the Royal Scottish Academy’s 'New Contemporaries’ exhibition in early 2020. Logan creates abstract wall hangings that explore broad themes of time, labour and tradition in the context of his place of birth, Orkney.
Please join us for a webinar on the 3rd February to hear the artist in conversation with James Knox, Director of the Fleming Collection, and to see some of his artwork.