The show the critics loved but the crowds shunned

Published on Saturday 13 January 2007 00:16

IT WAS hailed as a long overdue show by the man described as Scotland's most successful modern artist.

But it has emerged that Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon's first solo show in Scotland in 13 years has failed to attract a large number of visitors, despite receiving positive reviews from the critics.

Barely 10,000 people will have viewed Gordon's two-month-long "Superhumanatural" exhibition by the time it closes this weekend at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh.

This compares with more than 100,000 people who turned out last summer to see the giant sculptures by Ron Mueck in the same space.

The former director of Glasgow museums and cultural commentator, Julian Spalding, said yesterday: "You don't expect that number for a major show. It sounds as though the public are voting with their feet.

"Reviews can actually have no impact at all. Word of mouth is what actually matters, and if there are more people going to the exhibition at the end than at the beginning."

As part of Gordon's show, the walls of the Royal Scottish Academy building, on the Mound, were painted black to feature film works, including 24 Hour Psycho, Hitchcock's movie in ultra-slow motion.

Films are projected on wall-sized screens of ponderous elephants or of conductors' hands.

The exhibition also includes a new work in which a dead tree has fallen on a smashed mirror. Other works are showing at the Royal Botanic Garden.

Until 8 January, 8,259 visitors paid to see the exhibition, which opened on November 2. Student trips and lectures will take the final number to 10,000 by the end of the run, the galleries said.

The Ron Mueck show took place over the peak Festival time and was much easier to understand for the general public, a spokeswoman said.

A better comparison was the show of the Renaissance artist Adam Elsheimer, whose small-sized paintings attracted 10,193 visitors.

"This is a show by a cutting-edge artist and it is always difficult to judge how the general public will perceive it," the spokeswoman said.

"It has certainly raised the profile of the NGS's display of contemporary art in Scotland."