Art

Visual Arts Scotland’s show at the RSA mixes work in diverse media to impressive effect

With a new exhibition celebrating her work opening in Edinburgh, the Irish designer talks about her love of print, the inspiration of the colours of her childhood and her hopes for the future as her website relaunches

In a film in which a statue of Engels journeys across post-industrial Europe in a flat-bed truck, Phil Collins asks profound questions about inequality and wealth. By Susan Mansfield

Does a lifelike painting make a perfect portrait? The BP Portrait Award show invites us to ponder the question

Margaret Salmon’s films of intimate sexual encounters between three committed couples offer a thought-provoking alternative to the male gaze, while Lorna Macintyre’s photographs are object lessons in subjectivity writes Susan Mansfield

The SSA Annual Exhibition is still offering the art scene something different in its 121st year, writes Duncan Macmillan

Katie Paterson grapples with some of the biggest ideas in cosmology and deep time and offers up work which helps make them more understandable, whether that’s on a beach or in a gallery. Interview by Susan Mansfield

Optical illusions? Surrealist collages? Donegal carpets? You’ll find all these things and more in Scotland’s galleries in the year ahead, write Susan Mansfield and Duncan Macmillan

As First World War centenary commemorations draw to a close, the Outer Hebrides marks a special anniversary, for the aftermath of the war brought a particularly savage tragedy to these islands. On Hogmanay 1918, a yacht packed with returning servicemen sank after hitting rocks less than a mile from the harbour at Stornoway with the loss of 201 lives. For many years, the sinking of the Iolaire seemed a disaster too terrible to comprehend: men who had survived the war, drowned just yards from shore, even as their families joyfully awaited their return. On top of already heavy wartime losses the event would leave no community untouched, yet it was shored up behind a wall of silence. It was 1960 before a memorial was erected near the site of the sinking at the Beasts of Holm.

Sister Wendy Beckett, the Roman Catholic nun who became an unlikely television star in later life, has died aged 88.

It is a city synonymous with the grey hues and imposing architecture forged from its most enduring export.

There were brilliant shows all around Scotland, celebrating the best artists of the past and those pushing boundaries today, write Susan Mansfield and Duncan Macmillan

The Queen’s Gallery shows how Charles II used art to re-establish the might of the monarchy, while Robert Bloomfield’s images of 1950s Edinburgh show a city in transition

As the years roll by and the internet becomes increasingly saturated with camera phone snaps from every corner of the globe, you might expect photography books to fall out of fashion. Curiously, however, these unwieldy, low-tech artefacts now feel more relevant than ever, first as a means of making us stop and think about the art of image-making, and second as a means of drawing our attention to different places and times in a way that’s far more immersive and meaningful than simply scrolling through hundreds of random images on Instagram.

The Scottish Government has recently been consulting on a new draft culture strategy for Scotland. Underpinning this new draft strategy is the idea that there is “no one story of culture in or from Scotland and each individual and community contributes to and shapes their own culture, and society more broadly.”

Intimate family portraits captured at the Argyll home of former Beatle Paul McCartney during the 1960s and 1970s are to go on display in the UK for the first time.

Not so long ago, books on Scottish art were a rare event. Things have changed and so it is a pleasure to be able now to welcome two new books at once. Elizabeth Cumming has written Robin Philipson, a biography of one of the most notable figures in Scottish art of the post-war decades, while Phyllida Shaw has written a biography of Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams, less well-known, but, as she demonstrates, important. The history of Scottish art is still a small world, however, and Cumming has written a foreword to Shaw’s book.