Art reviews: Pop Life | Ksisha Angelova: The Martyrology of Belarus


Pop Life, City Art Centre, Edinburgh ★★★★
Ksisha Angelova: The Martyrology of Belarus, St John’s Church, Edinburgh ★★★★
Once upon a time, drawing the human figure was the foundation of any artist’s training. Those days are gone, but Euan Gray and Witte Wartena, the curators of Pop Life at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre, have managed to pull together an impressive line-up of 13 Scottish and international artists for whom figurative drawing is alive, contemporary and central to their practices.
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Hide AdThe show comes to Edinburgh after iterations in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, and circles thoughtfully around its theme of art and popular culture. Rather than simply tell us that boundaries between high and low culture are blurring - which, let’s face it, isn’t really news to anyone - it reflects on the different ways artists engage with film, television and particularly music. Many of the artists have made new work for this show.
Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra was in last year’s Venice Biennale. Her detailed drawings fuse together aspects of myth and Latin American folk tradition with references from literature, music and film, sometimes unsettling, sometimes gently humorous. Next to her work is a suite of 16 new drawings by David Shrigley referencing aspects of the figure in characteristically cheeky, subversive ways. His work is so well known and well liked that it surely counts both as contemporary art and popular culture.
Andrew Cranston’s quieter works are tucked into a space off the main thoroughfare. His small ink drawings, like his paintings, carry specific meanings for him, here in relation to his upbringing in Hawick, the music he listened to and the knitwear brands which dominated the town. By contrast, the drawings of Dutch artist Charlotte Schleiffert are big and dynamic; her figures wear masks and headdresses from Africa and Oceania, matched with clothing from Dutch or Japanese street fashion.
Laura Bruce’s impressive portraits of her favourite Nashville stars are each accompanied by a cover version of one of their songs by Bruce’s band, Dangerpony. Mark Brandenburg draws images from his photographs of Berlin’s Tiergarten, a popular cruising spot for gay men; the figures are absent but their presence is implied. Donald Urquhart, the multidisciplinary Scottish artist who was a collaborator of Leigh Bowery in the 1980s and started camp cabaret night The Beautiful Bend, draws in a distinctive black and white style. His drawing Family Circle (doll), referencing both Goya and the popular biscuit brand, is particularly striking.
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Paul McDevitt, another Scot, presents the show’s biggest work, a blast of red and yellow which looks like abstract expressionism but is built up from the marks of graffiti artists and the cartoon logos on delivery vans. He also contributes a series of his Notes to Self, drawings on A4 paper which combine references to modernism and surrealism with scribbled notes and phone numbers. Jamie Fitzpatrick, whose first degree was at Duncan of Jordanstone, is making waves at present with sculptures which satirise statuary with caricature and exaggeration, but drawing is an important part of his practice.
Fiona Michie’s beautiful large-scale pencil drawings reference gothic 19th-century novels and the movies they inspire. Euan Gray looks at how pop culture shapes our view of artists such as Van Gogh by making drawings of actors who have played him, from Kirk Douglas to Willem Dafoe. Witte Wartena’s series Show Business for Ugly People freezes the frame on politicians who court public favour on TV shows, from Boris Johnson on Have I Got News For You to Donald Trump on WWE Wrestling.
All in all, it’s a rewarding, thought-provoking show which conjures something new round every corner, while still creating groups of works with plenty to say to one another.
Meanwhile, in St John’s Church at the other end of Princes Street, a remarkable exhibition of figurative works is driven by a very specific purpose. As the political situation worsened in Belarus, artist Ksisha Angelova stopped drawing and painting saints and turned her attention to the country’s political prisoners, whom she regards as modern day martyrs. She has now drawn around 1,000 of them, and 200 of these drawings now form an exhibition which she hopes will tour Scotland.
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Hide AdUnder Alexander Lukashenko, sometimes referred to as Europe's last dictator, attending a pro-democracy march or giving money to the wrong kind of political cause is enough to lead to a trumped up charge and a prison sentence. The people in these paintings are students, journalists, an optician, an accountant. As a direct outcome of her project, Angelova must now live in exile in Poland.


Many of these small portraits - painted on wallpaper to suggest the domestic and clipped to wire mesh - have been based on photographs obtained from their families. They look fresh and alive. Some look sombre. Others are smiling. One plays a violin, another hugs a golden retriever. Many are very, very young.
Apart from human rights activist Ales Bialiatski, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, they are not famous. In this country, we know nothing of them and their predicament. Since they were first imprisoned, some have been tortured, some have died, a few have been released. Angelova’s project is an archive of ordinary lives which might not otherwise be recorded. This show is as poignant and vital and necessary an exhibition as you will see this year.
Pop Life until 9 March; The Martyrology of Belarus until 31 January
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