Gallery Exhibitions at the 2023 Art Festival
Edinburgh Art Festival is the UK’s largest annual festival of visual art, and returns from 11 – 27 August 2023. Founded in 2004, it works with local and international partners to present an ambitious and meaningful programme of exhibitions, events and projects across the city. You can read about this year's commissions/events here. The partnerships at the core of our festival are also reflected in the rich programme of exhibitions developed for the festival each year by their partner Galleries. Presented across leading national institutions, internationally recognised contemporary art galleries and artist run spaces, it offers a chance to discover work by some of the very best historic and contemporary artists from Scotland, the UK and beyond. So, let's take a look at some of the exhibitions taking place in galleries around Edinburgh this August.
City Art Centre: When the Apple Ripens: Peter Howson at 65: A Retrospective
This major retrospective of Peter Howson showcases over 100 works, spanning more than four decades. It illustrates the breadth of Howson’s practice, from the early monumental paintings of Glasgow vagrants, through the harrowing times spent in Bosnia as a war artist, his Biblical subjects and his more recent visceral responses to the Covid pandemic and the ongoing Ukrainian war.
Dovecot Studios: Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception
Through more than 70 paintings, tapestries, textiles, sculptures and photographs, this exhibition offers a fresh history of Scottish art, shining a light on 45 diverse women artists – from engravings by Scotland’s first professionally trained woman artist Catherine Read to a specially commissioned tapestry from contemporary practitioner Sekai Machache – alongside artists including Phoebe Anna Traquair, Bessie MacNicol, Joan Eardley, Elizabeth Blackadder, Rachel Maclean and Alison Watt.
Edinburgh Printmakers: Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I
This unique presentation of screenprints is the first part of an exploration project discussing the topics of racial identity, inequality and care through the Black Feminine Lens. Working across printmaking, video and performance, Charles explores the rhythms, movement, and the body language of women of colour.For this solo exhibition, the artist has composed a new series of screenprints that explore and convey the gestures of being judged, analysed, and satisfied within a format of a salon. Charles considers the salon as a space of escape and support, which will be driven from one-to-one conversations with Black creatives as jumping off points.
Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop: Sebastian Thomas: A New Face in Hell
For A New Face in Hell, Sebastian Thomas draws inspiration from the mythological fable of the Golem, a being constructed of inanimate material that often ends up becoming uncontrollable. Amongst layered ceramic grids, poured foam panels and laser-cut shapes are a host of cast metal body and face amalgamations. Through this build up and transformation of materials Thomas’ work attempts to set the stage for a retelling where reality and narrative merge, a breeding ground for semi-fictional objects, places and protagonists.
Fruitmarket Gallery: Leonor Antunes: the apparent length of a floor area
Portuguese, Berlin-based artist Leonor Antunes engages with traditions of modernist art, architecture and design through sculpture made and displayed with the specifics of a given place in mind. Antunes’ vision for her exhibition at Fruitmarket turns around a cork floorpiece engraved with a pattern taken from the work of Marian Pepler, an architect and designer who is known for the modern rugs she produced in the 1930s. The exhibition is curated by Briony Fer and includes existing work as well as the new floor, and extends through all the spaces of Fruitmarket – the airy modernism of the Exhibition Galleries and the rough materiality of the Warehouse.
Inspace: Martin Disley, Theodore Koterwas, Everest Pipkin: The Sounds of Deep Fake
When is a voice authentic? Whose voice is it? This exhibition, curated by the Institute for Design Informatics, brings together work from the artists Theodore Koterwas, Everest Pipkin, and the creative research studio, Unit Test, among others. Working with sound, voice, and emerging technologies, this exhibition asks what it means, personally and politically, to synthesize, clone, and manipulate voices, to bring together humans and speaking machines, and to literally put words into others’ mouths.
National Galleries of Scotland: Grayson Perry: Smash Hits
Popular and provocative, Grayson Perry makes art that deals with difficult and complex ideas in an accessible and often funny way. He loves taking on big issues that are universally human: masculinity, sexuality, class, religion, politics and more. Smash Hits is the biggest ever exhibition of his work, covering the whole of his 40-year career. On view will be subversive pots, brilliantly intricate prints, elaborate sculptures, and huge, captivating tapestries – all imbued with Perry’s sharp wit and social commentary.
National Galleries of Scotland, Modern One: Alberta Whittle: create dangerously
This immersive exhibition is the largest showing of Alberta Whittle’s work to date. Through poetic and symbolic artworks, Whittle addresses colonialism, the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, and the climate crisis. She highlights Scotland’s complicity in white supremacy, promoting compassion and collective care to resist racism and anti-Blackness, and offering a message of hope for a world outside these damaging systems.
National Museum of Scotland: Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania delves into the most important and pressing issue of our time, humanity’s damaging relationship with planet Earth. This is felt especially deeply in Australia and the Pacific Islands where sea levels are rising due to climate change and the oceans are filling with plastic. The exhibition considers our relationship to the natural environment through contemporary responses to climate change and plastic waste by Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: Keg de Souza: Shipping Roots
Plants have always traversed seas, intentionally and inadvertently. In Shipping Roots, artist Keg de Souza draws on RBGE’s collections to tell tales of eucalyptus, prickly pear and ‘alien’ seeds, tracing legacies through the British Empire and specifically linking Australia, India and the UK. These stories relate to the artist’s own cultural removal, drawn from her lived experiences as a person of Goan heritage whose ancestral lands were colonised, to living as a settler on unceded Gadigal land in Sydney.
The Scottish Gallery: Wonder Women: Dame Elizabeth Blackadder (1931-2021) | A Celebration
For Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, The Scottish Gallery presents Wonder Women, a series of solo exhibitions celebrating three remarkable artists. This exhibition, held almost two years after Dame Elizabeth Blackadder’s death, highlights work from seven decades of the artist’s career, working in partnership with the RSA, Dovecot Studios, Glasgow Print Studios and Phaidon Publishing.
Stills Centre for Photography: Markéta Luskačová
This summer Stills presents the first exhibition in Scotland dedicated to the work of Prague-born, UK-based photographer, Markéta Luskačová. The exhibition includes work made over a 40 year period, and concentrates on Luskačová‘s photographs exploring the lives of children, an interest of hers which permeates almost all of her work. There were several years when this was the main subject of her photography, as seen in the series Citizen 2000 (1986-2000) and in her work from the 1960s onwards, including her documentation of Pilgrims; Juvenile Jazz Bands in the North of England; Durham Cathedral and Chorister School; London markets; Chiswick Women’s Aid; and carnivals in the Czech Republic.
Talbot Rice Gallery: Jesse Jones: The Tower
Jesse Jones’ The Tower is the second part in a trilogy beginning with Tremble Tremble, which was commissioned for the Irish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2017. Based on the writings of medieval female Christian mystics, The Tower explores the women who were burned as heretics even before the first witch trials in the 17th century. It looks to a moment of radical potential in a durational performed installation.