Galleries - March 2015

designs. Arusha also offers the established collector, or the first time buyer, attractive art in many various styles for a range of different tastes and requirements. Both these galleries have already made their own distinctive contribution and impact on the art scene of the Scottish capital. Bill Hare Scottish Extra Further to Bill Hare’s look at two more recent arrivals on Dundas Street, mention should perhaps also be made here of a very interesting looking sale this month at Edinburgh’s leading auction house Lyon & Turnbull . Entitled ‘Decorative Arts: Design from 1860’ it includes a wonderfully austere looking pair of chairs designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1911 – estimated at £10,000-£15,000. Meanwhile it might also be worth thinking about bobbing out of Edinburgh briefly and along the coast to North Berwick where the enterprising Fidra Gallery has got an excellent looking show of Scottish contemporary drawing. Among the artists who very much catch the eye there is the much respected artist Graeme Wilcox with his richly textured and expressive studies of the human head and form. Galleries. Recently there have been two new kids on the block. The Sutton Gallery has brought a wide-ranging international dimension with their attractive exhibitions of the Russian artist Kirill Sokolov, the Japanese printmaker, Yoshishige Furukawa and Iranian master, Hassan Meskinfamfard. Their up-coming programme also includes solo shows for nearer to home, Scottish artists, such as the much too rarely seen Robert Crozier and the powerful work of Joyce Gunn Cairns. Accompanying these exciting exhibitions there is usually a programme of events – including poetry recitals and musical soirées. Across the street there is the new intriguing presence of Arusha Gallery , which, as its exotic name suggests, likes to “surround itself with beautiful images and objects that provide a continual source of inspiration, drawn from the visual and intellectual arts.” That foresaid “inspiration” includes a wide range of artistic practices from architecture and theatre design to music and literature to create a holistic aesthetic vision for a designated environment. Thus, beside putting on their solo and group exhibitions, Arusha Gallery provides a comprehensive portfolio of carefully selected artists for clients with whom they work to grace their private or corporate spaces with appropriate artworks and ANTENNAE 10 GALLERIES MARCH 2015 of armour and defencelessness to life.’ Town imbibed his mentor’s enthusiasm for Sutherland, Moore, Christopher Wood, Blake, El Greco, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso. Self-taught at this stage, Town displayed in dozens of gouaches and drawings remarkably precocious self-assurance as well as dynamic fluency of expression rooted in subtle intimacies of feeling. The range here is revelatory: phantasmagoric nocturnes of lovers ecstatically dancing; austere abstractions of Arcadian goatherds in repose; male figures seen grappling furiously on the ground; tousle-haired youths in Blakean Glad Day pose; murderous assaults on naked women by powerful men, the latter works imbued with fierce Picasso-like vitality surely reflecting the artist’s rawly deliberated responses to a tragically apocalyptic age. Philip Vann Two New to the New Town If London has its Cork Street, then admittedly on a more modest scale, Edinburgh’s equivalent is Dundas Street right in the heart of the capital’s neo-classical New Town. Along both sides of its steep incline, with its grand vista of the Forth in the far distance, there is a lively community of commercial galleries, many of whom list their forthcoming attractions in from left: G raeme Wilcox ‘Pilgrim’ at Fidra Galley Kirill Sokolov ‘Figure’ at Sutton Gallery Norman Town ‘He pretended to be expert’ at The Canon Gallery

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