The best exhibitions of 2024: Susan Mansfield and Duncan Macmillan pick their highlights

Installation view of Rubbing/Loving Project, 2014-2023 by Do Ho Suh | Neil Hannah / © Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh: “Occupying the entire ground floor of Modern One and beautifully curated by NGS’s Stephanie Straine, this first Scottish show for Korean artist Do Ho Suh peels back the layers of his practice over the past 25 years, revealing something of where the ideas actually come from. One might make a Wizard of Oz analogy, but the effect is completely different: seeing the cogs and engines of the imagination doesn’t close things down, it opens up an entirely new perspective with which to view the rest of the work.” SM

Claire Harkess: Season's Song, Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh “Claire Harkness’s garden paintings are full of garden birds, alone in individual studies or in their natural habitat behaving as they do, waxwings and long-tailed tits in crowds, others alone or in smaller groups. She works in watercolour and in a style clearly inspired by classical Chinese and Japanese art. The way she makes areas of paper an active part of her composition is distinctly oriental, and she also incorporates Japanese script into some of her paintings. A beautiful show.” DM

Martin Boyce, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh “This is Martin Boyce’s biggest show in Scotland for two decades and the first to include a survey element, drawing work from across his career. The artist creates distinct atmospheres in each of the Fruitmarket’s three exhibition spaces, and he has included a collection of drawings and maquettes which demonstrate how he derived his visual lexicon.” SM

Leon Morrocco, Open Eye, Edinburgh “Large paintings of the mountains inland from Nice dominate this show. In them, the artist has caught both the mountains’ grandeur and the way historic human use is intimately integrated with the patterns of their geological structure. There is, however, also delight when, looking the other way, he has captured the light and textures of the city of Nice itself, painting intricate views though ancient passageways and capturing the flat brilliance of Mediterranean sunlight on the tall walls of ancient houses. A tour de force.” DM

Louise Bourgeois, Aberdeen Art Gallery “If you’re afraid of spiders, you’ll need to take a deep breath before visiting the exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’ work at Aberdeen Art Gallery. Part of the Artist Rooms touring programme, the show also draws on additional loans to bring together a significant group of works from the hugely productive two decades before the artist’s death in 2010 at the age of 98.” SM

Discovering Degas, Burrell Collection, Glasgow “This is the first major exhibition in the refurbished Burrell Collection, and it highlights how Degas’s choice of subjects distinguished him from the other Impressionists. There are no landscapes here, no boating parties or lush gardens. He was the artist of city life seen so casually that the traditional rules of composition simply don’t apply.” DM

Geoff Uglow: Beyond the Clouds, Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh “Geoff Uglow uses paint in bucket loads. Some of his biggest works here and the most loaded with paint are of his rose garden in Cornwall. What is impressive, though, is that although the paint is literally inches thick, the image is coherent and the overflowing paint suggests the profligate abundance of roses in full bloom. There is also a group of smaller works here in which he has been more economical with his medium. This is a set of eight paintings done from a studio on Calton Hill looking west along Princes Street. If not thickly painted, these pictures are certainly freely painted and with this freedom the artist captures beautifully the light and atmosphere of this classic view.” DM

Outside the Circle, Cooper Gallery, Dundee “Curator Sophia Hao and her team have brought together a hugely impressive show about stories of resistance and emancipation. A mix of archive material, manifestos, ephemera and artworks, the show begins in the Lower Gallery with Dundee Suffragettes and documentation of 1980s feminist performance works and throughout it manages to balance meaningful stories from a wider world with others which are specific either to Scotland or to other countries.” SM

​Digging in Another Time, Hunterian, Glasgow “In Digging in Another Time, the first Derek Jarman exhibition in Scotland for more than 30 years, the Hunterian’s contemporary art curator Dominic Paterson has brought together works mainly from the last five years of the artist’s life, along with quotations from Modern Nature, his 1989-91 journal, which was also the period in which he made a show for Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre. The result is a much bigger and richer exhibition than the awkward spaces of the contemporary gallery at the Hunterian should by rights be able to contain.” SM

Dürer to Van Dyck: Drawings from Chatsworth House, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh “Rubens and Van Dyck are the two great draughtsmen who feature prominently here. Their drawing styles are very similar and both show all the sweep and grandeur of the baroque. Even so, along within the grand gestures, they kept the fidelity to something actually seen which is the hallmark of Northern art. Altogether this is a magnificent display of drawings by some of the greatest masters of the art.” DM