Art reviews: RSA200 @Glasgow Print Studio | Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 5 | Martin Boyce
Four distinctive artists equal one cohesive show as bicentenary celebrations for the Royal Scottish Academy continue, writes Susan Mansfield
RSA200 @ Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow Print Studio ★★★★
Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 5, Street Level Photoworks ★★★
Martin Boyce: Hang Up the Day Put On the Night, The Modern Institute, Airds Lane, Glasgow ★★★★
The bicentary of the RSA continues to prompt strong exhibitions around the country, like the one created by Glasgow Print Studio featuring four current academicians or academicians-elect: Robbie Bushe, Rachel Maclean, Barry McGlashan and Caroline Walker. RSA200 @ Glasgow Print Studio is a superb line-up of artists distinctive enough to make a varied show, but with enough in common to have a visual conversation.
Bushe, McGlashan and Walker are all painters; Maclean works mainly in film but is a painter by training and shows paintings here. All have an element of narrative in their work, and a strong sense of how to use colour. They have different relationships with imagination and interpretation, and different reference points in art and beyond.
Caroline Walker works most evidently from life. Her interest has long been in women’s lives and roles, looking in recent years at her mother Janet and at the forest nursery attended by her children. She shows two print series, Early Years (2023), softground etchings of the nursery which showcase her drawing, and Nocturnes (2025) which are really studies of light: the pale light from a television, the harsh brightness of an outside light at night, the soft half-light of a baby’s bedroom at midnight.
Light is what it’s all about in her paintings too: in Pottering, Late Evening, March (2020), the viewer is placed in a garden at night looking in at a woman working in a brightly lit conservatory. In the large painting Stock Check, Morning, December (2021), Janet checks the fridge on a gloomy morning. The lights are on, and we can see golden light from windows of a neighbouring house through the tall kitchen window.
Rachel Maclean offers her own exploration of motherhood with a group of paintings and a film from 2024, ramping up the satire to explore the yawning gap between the sugar-coated idealised vision and the more visceral reality. The paintings teem with baby blue balloons, gorgeous pink drapery and doll-eyed women and babies. Faces seem to shift and multiply, larger-than-life bodies flail surrounded by picture-perfect oceans and Disneyfied sunsets. It’s all deeply unsettling, which is no doubt exactly what she intends.
Robbie Bushe’s award-winning painting depicts populated worlds in which buildings open up in cross-sections to reveal people beavering away like ants: a shared house, a school complex, a theatre. The Gated is two worlds: a stately home within formal gardens, which is largely unpopulated, and the busy world beyond the gates where people labour underground.
These fiendishly detailed imagined spaces draw on fiction and memory, making worlds which are part-real, part-fantasy, often realised on an impressive scale. Bushe makes effective use of fields of colour to differentiate areas within busy compositions.
Barry McGlashan creates paintings which are landscapes with evocative titles such as Desolation Song, The Census Taker or Melancholy (The Pier). There’s always an element of narrative too, often a human figure. The mood is often carried by the colour: each work has its own distinctive palette, from pale blues and lilacs to vivid peaches and lime greens, a boldness with colour which calls to mind Van Gogh or Gauguin.
While McGlashan was the big discovery of this show for me, any one of these artists is well worth your time, and all four together is a veritable treat.
The Jerwood/Photoworks Awards commissions new work every two years by emerging UK-based artists working in photography, and the latest recipients are currently on show at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow as part of a nationwide tour. Roman Manfredi and Sayuri Ichida make very different work, but both projects have a strong sense of place.
Manfredi travelled to Napels to make TRA (the Italian word for a state of being between, among and within), after finding a photograph of their grandmother attending what appears to have been a lesbian wedding. The artist refers to the ancient Neapolitan tradition of femminielli (individuals assigned male at birth but presenting female) as well as the less accepted masculille (assigned female at birth but presenting male).
The show brings together a broad spectrum of people living outside binary gender expectations who choose to present their identities in different ways. Some of the portraits are juxtaposed with particular works of art, like the subject who holds our gaze in the same way as a horseman from a frieze in the ruins of Pompeii.
Almost as interesting as Manfredi’s subjects is the portrait of the city, a place which is, itself, “between”, both ancient and modern, traditional and progressive, steeped in the colourful fiesta-like Catholicism of southern Europe. The show culminates in a Super 8 film of a joyous femminelli wedding.
Sayuri Ichida’s Kūseki (Empty Seats) addresses the issue of population decline in Japan, particularly in rural areas, which caused the closing of nearly 9000 schools between 2002 and 2020. Ichida has photographed schools in Niigata Prefecture, the area where she grew up, cut out elements of the architecture and collaged them in images screenprinted on to classroom blackboards (now themselves obsolete).
While a lot of care and thought has gone into assembling this work – a blackboard for each school, an accompanying soundtrack – it makes for an awkward viewing experience. In the fragments – walkways, roofs, windows and so on – a sense of the overall architecture is lost, and the images don’t evoke the theme as resonantly as something simpler, like a decaying classroom or overground playground, might.
Martin Boyce has long been a master of “evoking”, and his new exhibition at Modern Institute, Hang Up the Day Put On the Night, is a masterclass in suggestion and atmosphere.
Boyce, who won the Turner Prize in 2011, has been working for some years with a lexicon of shapes derived from four concrete trees built by artists Joel and Jan Martel for a Decorative Arts exhibition in Paris in 1925. If this show is anything to go by, he continues to plunder them for further riches.
Always attuned to space, he has created two distinct spaces in the Airds Lane Gallery. In the white gallery he plays with ideas of indoors and outdoors: metal sculptures which look almost like trees, a two-panel work on perforated steel which looks for all the world like an ocean horizon framed by willow branches.
Medusozoa Blossom is a kind of a chandelier, with hand blown glass forms in delicate pastel shades; the title refers to jellyfish, as well as flowers. Days of End feels like a nod to his earlier, edgier pieces: a door handle which opens nothing, a keyhole for which there is no key.
In the Bricks Space, leaves are scattered on the floor: folded geometric shapes in paraffin-coated paper, recalling those he made for his Venice Biennale work in 2009. The other pieces are more disparate, drawn from a range of periods: an angled concrete table; a miniaturised model of a Martel tree, with some of its leaves fallen; Dead Star (The Playwright), one of a series of sculptures made with standard lamps which, with only minor adjustments, become astonishingly anthropomorphic.
He is also great at poetic titles: Shipping Lanes Drawn through the Mist, Somewhere it is Fall and so on. It’s an object lesson in how much (or how little) is needed to suggest a place, an atmosphere, an object, leaving our imaginations to do the rest.
RSA200 @ Glasgow Print Studio runs until 28 November; Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 5 until 20 December; Martin Boyce: Hang Up the Day Put On the Night until 31 October
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