Art

As Glasgow International brings contemporary art to 78 venues across the city, Toby Paterson talks to Susan Mansfield about his contribution to the festival, along with his concerns that the city’s problems need more than a can-do attitude

Glasgow’s biennial festival of contemporary art, which runs from 20 April until 7 May, promises a mixture of international talent and grassroots energy. Scotsman art critic Susan Mansfield picks her highlights

The work of a pioneering Scottish photographer who is celebrated in the Far East has been “forgotten” in his home city, it has been claimed.

Glass is as versatile an artistic medium as it is beautiful, but we often think of it as a material for creating functional objects.

Jenny Saville has come to occupy something of a mythical place in the history of contemporary art in Scotland: her degree show work from Glasgow School of Art was bought by Charles Saatchi, then came London, New York, and representation by Gagosian. New paintings are snapped up by private collectors for eye-watering prices.

Open Studios North Fife has now launched their event for 2018, and with 74 artists and designer-makers taking part, it’s a great chance to see behind the scenes of artists’ workspaces all over the region – who knows, you might even pick up a piece or two to take home. The event runs during May Bank Holiday weekend – 5, 6 and 7 May – when the studios are open from 10am-6pm each day.

According to the late American artist Lee Lonzano, Kaspar Konig, a German museum director, had once said to her “You are a good painter and a nice girl.” “Wrong on both counts!”, she claims to have retorted, “I am a very good artist and not a nice girl.” Whatever else, Lozano had attitude, and from about 1960 her principled pugnacity drove her career through a decade of remarkable creativity. In the end, however, turning her life itself into art in a search to bypass the artwork became self-defeating. She withdrew from the art world. She lived on until 1999, but by 1972 her career as an artist had ended. Slip, Slide, Splice at the Fruitmarket gives a good introduction to her work, even if there is an inherent paradox in reincorporating this rebel into the art world she rejected.

The 25 best new buildings in Scotland have been revealed by Scotland’s top authority on architecture.

Rachel Maclean’s Venice Biennale film seems more timely now than when it was first shown, while Calum McClure is establishing himself as an important painter

They offer a window into the world of the European art elite in the late 19th century and how one Scottish city played an increasingly important part in it.

The art of both Barbara Balmer and John Byrne is marked by fine draughtsmanship and occasional brushes with the surreal

A campaign has been launched to save a historic railway landmark that inspired the Trump-owned Turnberry Hotel.

The major exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh at the moment is entitled A New Era, and it tells the story of how the art landscape in Scotland was changed utterly in the years between 1900 and 1950 by the seismic impact of cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism and everything that followed. In that short space of time, the defiant naturalism of the Glasgow Boys gave way to the pure, joyous abstraction of Allan Davie, but in the early 1960s, at the same time that Davie was producing some of his most exuberant, out-there canvases, a young artist by the name of Alexander Moffat was moving in a very different direction. The story of Scottish art, as Bill Hare’s thought-provoking new book shows, is as complex and multi-faceted as we choose to make it.

Margaret Salmon delves into the stuff of everyday life in her intimate films while Glasgow School of Art’s show offers a snapshot of South Africa’s artistic community

Nobody today would comment on an artist’s choice of medium, no matter how outlandish. So it is a little quaint that we still have a society, the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, the RSW for short, devoted exclusively to the practice of one particular medium. But the RSW soldiers on, nevertheless, as it has done for nearly a century and a half. The current exhibition is its 137th. When the society began, oil painting was regarded as the only respectable medium. Watercolour was for sketching only. The painters who favoured its luminosity, versatility and informality fought back by creating their own society. And the distinctive qualities they valued still tell.

Fashion photographer Amelia Allen took off her clothes to document naturism in Britain. As an exhibition of

her work opens in Edinburgh, she talks about how the project changed the way she felt about her body