Art review: Richard Forster | Ruth Claxton

Published on Friday 17 October 2008 16:25

Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

THE Ingleby Gallery's move to new premises was one of the key focuses of the summer's Edinburgh Art Festival. Tucked tight against Waverley Station, on the site of a former nightclub, it seemed an unlikely location for a shiny new art venture, but it worked.

While the building was a success, the focus on the architecture inevitably overshadowed the contents of its opening show. So, as the fuss dies down, it's time to see if the programme can match the bricks and mortar. The gallery has a steady roster of artists and an established clientele, but the challenge the Ingleby has set itself, against what has now emerged as increasingly uncertain times, is to expand its audience and its exhibitions programme. For that it needs new blood and new perspectives.

If the second show at the gallery is anything to go by, we might be optimistic. Richard Forster is a serious artist in his late thirties who has garnered attention and support, but has deserved a bigger platform for his work for some time. Forster has just been nominated for the Northern Art Prize, a Leeds-based mini-Turner with decent prize money and much less tabloid exposure. He has grabbed the opportunity of his first solo exhibition in Scotland with a project of awesome intensity: creating 45 small seascapes by working seven days a week for the past four months.

At first sight, this is a monotonous experience, a room punctuated by uniform dark postcard-sized drawings. Up close it is staggering; an act of insanely detailed labour in which each image is unique. Some drawings are of photo-realist clarity; others are blurred and uncertain. Unlike the unlimited field of the seascapes by the US artist Vija Celmins or the sea horizons favoured by the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, Foster has captured the sea's edge. It's the bit where the dynamism and the definition of waves or tide begin to collapse into an uncertain latticework of foam, the place where all that romantic energy dissipates.

The sea is ancient. Sugimoto photographed it because he was trying to capture some kind of primal experience of vision, the ocean as an eternal place. But it is also frightfully modern. French painting moved outdoors and towards the sea when the railways began to take artists from the Paris ateliers, first to Brittany and then to the south. Forster is from Saltburn, in Cleveland, a model English Victorian coastal resort, with a famous pier, built by the man who founded the Stockton to Darlington railway.

Looking at these pictures time collapses. You think you might be looking at some ancient French daguerreotypes, but at the same time these are images that could only really be captured by modern digital photography. And if that is the case, they provoke the question: why on earth spend four long months painstakingly transcribing them by hand?

In Gallery II, in what is emerging as the Ingleby's project space, Birmingham's Ruth Claxton has created a simple yet delightful show with nothing more than a handful of postcards and a carefully wielded scalpel.

There's a bit of a vogue for this kind of making and remaking of images from existing ones. But Claxton's focus is tight. She has taken reproductions of historic figurative paintings and sliced them to explore the idea of looking and being looked at; what fashionable theorists once called "the gaze".

Thus St John the Evangelist is at the centre of a dizzying psychedelic wheel. Franz Hal's Man Holding A Skull is bound to his doppelganger at the eye sockets. There's a deep anxiety here in these images of revelatory vision, blindness and perception, conveyed to us through figures from the past when images moved much more slowly.

This is a good serious pairing of artists that probes the problems and rewards of looking and making in the current times when some of our models for art making are positively ancient and can't seem to compete with the speed of the digital.

But one shared complaint: Forster is known for large scale sculptural works as well as drawings, and the difference between his sharp-pencilled drawings and his neon bright three-dimensional work at first glance can seem quite unbridgeable. Claxton is best known for her work in sculpture, using ceramic figurines and elaborate mirrored displays. It would have been intriguing to see how both these artists related their 'drawings' with their three-dimensional practice. The gallery space, in any case, is crying out for some muscular or messy sculpture.

• Until November 22 www.ingelbygallery.com