Art reviews: Petra Bauer | Modern Masters XVIII | Olivia Irvine

The Petra Bauer exhibition at the Fruitmarket provides a powerful snapshot of a feminist organisation at a certain point in time, but it already feels outdated writes Susan Mansfield

Petra Bauer: Sisters! Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★

Modern Masters XVIII, Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★★

Olivia Irvine: Enclosed Spaces, Linlithgow Burgh Halls ★★★★

In 2011, the Swedish artist Petra Bauer made a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the work of Southall Black Sisters, a feminist organisation founded in 1979 to advocate for the rights of Black and minority women in Southall, London. The film, which is in the University of Edinburgh’s collection, is currently being shown in the Fruitmarket Gallery’s warehouse space, in (as everything is these days) “an immersive installation”.

Now, I don’t want to sound curmudgeonly, but some chairs, a circle of red carpet and a reading table do not an immersive installation make. This is a film screening in a gallery, leading to the claim that this is the film’s “first major exhibition”, although it is nearly 15 years old. But let’s talk about the film.

Over nine days at SBS’s headquarters, Bauer observed the team answering the phone, having meetings, eating lunch and later attending a fundraising party at which founder and director Pragna Patel makes a rousing speech. There are a lot of lingering shots and ambient noise.

Long-standing staff members unroll old banners and realise they are as relevant now as ever (“You wonder where all those years of consciousness-raising have gone!” one says), while the next generation of support workers talk calmly on the phone to women who are suffering domestic abuse. Some sections are staged or scripted, probably in order to preserve the anonymity of the women they work with.

The quiet, day-to-day activities of the organisation - preparing reports, writing to newspapers, filling in case forms - contrast with the black and white archive photographs of protest marches on the walls. It turns out that, these days, fighting for social and political change involves a lot of paperwork.

Bauer calls the work a “collaboration” with SBS, so there is no independent authorial voice. From the office conversation, we learn about the challenges the group was facing: finding funding in a political climate which claims racism is dead; battling the withdrawal of legal aid; existing as a secular space in a time of growing religious fundamentalism.

Fifteen years on, everything has changed again. Movements like MeToo and Black Lives Matter have left no one in any doubt that racism persists, and that women need safe spaces and specialist support. The agenda has shifted, and with it the battles an organisation like SBS needs to fight. While Sisters! is a powerful snapshot of an organisation at one point in time, it is already more part of its history than its present.

Detail from St Andrews November Afternoon, 1981, by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham | Contributed

Meanwhile, the Scottish Gallery starts the year with another Modern Masters exhibition, now in its 18th iteration, bringing together groups of works by Scottish artists, past and present. This show features works by Joan Eardley, Pat Douthwaite, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, James Morrison, Kate Downie and Victoria Crowe, among others. It’s a rich mix, including a few names which might be new to many, such as Frances Thwaites, an early Scottish abstract painter.

It can be a frustrating show to navigate: many more works are listed than there has been room to hang, and the hang changes as works are sold, meaning it can be difficult to match what is on the list with what is on the walls. Better just to stick with what is in front of you, which is pretty darn fine.

There are several rarely seen works by Joan Eardley, including Grey Beach and Sky (1962), a wonderful late Catterline painting in which everything on land seems to tilt towards the sea in a winter storm, A Field by the Sea, in which a forest of grasses gives way to a glimpse of turquoise, a vibrant pastel drawing titled Child in a Red Jersey, and Port Dundas, Glasgow - a rare urban landscape without figures.

Douthwaite continues to be revealed as an artist of considerable power with paintings such as Woman in a Fur Coat, the stylish figure with the coat and big glasses a waspish self-portrait, and prints such as Woman with Bird Vase. There is always more to discover in her work.

Contrasting aspects of Wilhelmina Barns Graham are featured: a bold late screenprint, November II (1991), all rich colour and gestural marks, and Water Symphony (1995) which marries strong aquamarine shades with an overlay of finely drawn lines. James Morrison’s magnificent Blue Quinag captures a sky so vast it dwarfs even the mountains.

There’s a darkly glittering painting of rocks at Catterline by Lil Neilson and a lovely expressive early lithograph, Fifeshire Farm, by Elizabeth Blackadder. Not to mention Robin Philipson’s wonderful Mexican Altar, which glows in hues of red and pink.

Here Comes Sally by Olivia Irvine | Contributed

Edinburgh-based painter Olivia Irvine’s marriage of expressive colour and dream-like figurative composition calls to mind aspects of Philipson’s work. Her solo exhibition looks superb in the spacious, well-proportioned rooms of Linlithgow Burgh Halls.

Irvine often begins a painting by putting down a ground of strong, abstract colour, then overlaying it with drawings of figures or objects. Sometimes she works and reworks, leaving traces of previous marks, and adds sections in egg tempera or acrylic spray paint (she also has an interest in frescoes).

Her subjects are often children, and her works have the strange specificity of dreams or memories: finely captured detail - the fabric of a dress, the check on a picnic blanket - sit alongside indistinct faces or areas of unresolved background. Her scenes are domestic and often happen, as the title suggests, in boundaried spaces: gardens enclosed by bushes, parks with railings, the claustrophobia of a dining table.

She can work equally effectively in large and small formats. Bequest is a very large painting showing a group of figures around a table on which ornate objects have been laid out - a house-clearing? An inheritance being divided? Dimity is very small, a bedroom in which the bed is only partly visible, with just a hint that it might have an occupant.

What games are the children playing in Here Comes Sally? What stories are they telling in Confabulation? These things are left to the viewers’ imagination, as are the dramas played out at the picnic in Harvest or in the ornamental garden in Posterity. Yet they reel us in, invite us to think about our own memories. She treads a fine line, giving us just enough to hold the ambiguities together. This is skilled work, and interesting too.

Petra Bauer: Sisters! until 23 March; Modern Masters XVIII until 1 March; Olivia Irvine until 18 May