David Batchelor - My Own Private Bauhaus at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

There are a selection of artists who produce work that always manages to delight me and fill me with joy. David Batchelor is one of them. No matter how bad a day I have been having, seeing his work makes me smile, cheers me up and makes me feel more positive. Simplicity is underrated. An enjoyment of colour, form, shape and surface is what I get from looking at the work. I cannot help but feel an urge to go to the studio and make work. Thank you David Batchelor - you are a star! May my own work move people and bring happiness to others in the way that your work does for me.

'My Own Private Bauhaus’ is an exhibition that marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus by Walter Gropius in 1919.  It is, in Batchelor’s words ‘a phrase that has been hanging around the studio for a few years’ and pays tribute to the movement through Batchelor’s personal appreciation of the square, circle and triangle.

Since he began working with colour, over 25 years ago, Batchelor’s installations, sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs have been characterised by simple shapes and regular forms. But, unlike the pure geometry of the Bauhaus, Batchelor’s forms are, he says ‘often damaged, bent or broken; and the colours, while vivid, are neither pure nor primary.’ Batchelor’s work pays tribute to the geometric abstraction of the 1920s, but is also characterised by improvisation, informality, humour and what Batchelor describes as ‘a distrust of formal ordering systems and regulated theories of colour’.

My Own Private Bauhaus is the artist’s collective title for a wide variety of small sculptures, paintings and drawings that sit together on long, shallow, wall-mounted aluminium shelves. Made from plastic offcuts, shards of glass, found objects, metal mesh, tin tops, timber, concrete, gloss paint, spray paint and adhesive tape – individual works are arranged in irregular rows. Together they represent the diverse output of Batchelor’s practise and the interconnected nature of his colour-based work, whether it is two- or three-dimensional. 

The exhibition also includes a number of large paintings made using poured commercial paint on aluminium panels. These Colour Chart paintings become virtual sculptures with precariously colourful, off-circular forms balanced atop schematic, plinth-like bases. In turn; several smaller sculptures in the exhibition, made from the discarded tops of the tin cans from which the paint was poured, refer back to the paintings.'

https://www.inglebygallery.com/exhibitions/7132-david-batchelor-my-own-private-bauhaus/overview/

Callum Innes: Works on Paper 1989 – 2012, Ingleby Gallery

Callum Innes: Works on Paper 1989 – 2012

Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

 

28 April 2012 - 14 July 2012 

Callum Innes’ works in oil paint on canvas grace the walls of many museums worldwide, and have been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications for over two decades, but for just as long he has made many, though much less frequently seen, exquisite and surprising series of works on paper.

An individual series of Innes’ watercolours were exhibited at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1997 and another in New York and Basel in 2011, but the Ingleby Gallery’s exhibition for Spring 2012 is the first ever survey to look in detail at this aspect of his work across a period of nearly 25 years.

In all his work Innes brings the potential of alchemy to abstract painting, applying and dissolving pigment, painting and un-painting, holding a line between control and chaos. In his works on paper these possibilities move effortlessly from one work to the next, building up a body of closely connected series.

At the heart of this exhibition are three new such series: a line of five pastels, treated like a kind of reverse sculpture, with fat sticks of chalky pigment ground back to dust and worked into thick pages of handmade paper; a sequence of 18 watercolours in which pairs of pigments are dissolved into each other, layer over layer, into veils of translucent light; and a series of ten tall, vertical sheets of waxed butcher’s paper, carrying oil paint dissolved into skins of solid and liquid colour. This exhibition matches these major new series with selected works from the artist’s archive, showing a rare consistency and continuity of ideas and application.