Art review: Margaret Hunter at Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr

Margaret Hunter by Re-Statement a near full-size replica of the mural Joint Venture, which is painted on the Berlin Wall. Picture: Iain Forest Photography

Margaret Hunter: Duality Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr ****

The work of Scottish artist Margaret Hunter bridges a series of dualities: abstract and figurative, structured and expressive, painting and sculpture (she works with aptitude in both), as well as her two countries of Scotland and Germany. This major exhibition in her native Ayrshire is a rare chance to see an extended selection of her work in Scotland, drawn from across her 30-year career.

Hunter trained at Glasgow School of Art in the early 1980s, the same era which produced the New Glasgow Boys: Peter Howson, Adrian Wiszniewski et al, and it’s interesting that, as they were making waves in the art world with a bold, figurative language rooted in the male, Hunter, in Glasgow then in Berlin, was evolving her own language focusing on the female.

This exhibition offers a chance to understand more about how that language evolved, and how she has worked in it for three decades, deepening and exploring it across a range of media. It’s a practice which begins with drawing (there is a rare chance here to see her drawings and “Small Ideas” in which she works out concepts and compositions), and in which the figure – most often a single female – becomes the vehicle for meaning: personal, emotional, political.

Her practice also reflects her own extraordinary journey. Hunter went to art school in her early thirties, a newly divorced single parent. Seeing the work of German artist Georg Baselitz for the first time on an art school trip to Amsterdam, she was so profoundly affected by it that, on completition of her degree at GSA, she resolved to study with him at the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin.

Having fought to overcome bureaucracy and secure her own funding, she arrived in Berlin in 1985, a divided city with its own powerful sense of duality. Struggling to learn German, she became an onlooker in her new country and drawing became her primary mode of expression. Gradually, she synthesised her GSA training in life-drawing with the influences of Baselitz and German art, and drew further inspiration (as Baselitz had done) from the tribal art in the Museum of Ethnography, and from her own memories of the time her family spent in Northern Nigeria when she was growing up. Within a few years, she was showing her work in the UK and Europe (the Maclaurin Galleries was one of the first galleries to show her) and her work was being purchased for major collections.

The figures in her paintings combine the elemental simplicity of primitive art with the movement and psychological realism of Western figures. Women at different stages of life, they are invested with significance, expressing internalised emotions. They are symbolic, but never only that, always grounded in the real world.

Placed in structurally strong compositions, they are often caught between expressive freedom and the bonds which tie them to people and places. Hunter works with thick layers of paint, revelling in the paint itself, scraping it off, painting over it, scratching into it. She works instinctively, but is always interested in what lies beneath.

Her wood sculptures – she makes the early cuts with an electric chainsaw – are robust and thoughtful, again combining the totemic presence of tribal statues with a more western sensibility, entering a dialogue with the artists who have worked this field before her. Some of her sculptures have cutaway sections at their core where something valuable and secret is lodged, or have marks on their surface like the scarification practised by tribal women. Again, they seem poised between stillness and movement: the figure in Cycle, strains upwards to grasp hold of a wheel, a whirling lifeforce; Dancer, a young woman, shy but at the same time proud of her new womanhood, seems poised as if to step off her plinth.

The story of Hunter’s adopted city soon became bound up with her work. Living in the affluent West, she was constantly aware that her city was an island surrounded by barbed wire and armed sentries. Staying on in Berlin with her German husband, she witnessed first hand the days of jubilation when the Wall came down, and the more complex emotions which followed as East and West tried to adjust to life as a reunified city.

When she was invited to make a work for the Wall itself, on the 1.3 kilometre stretch now preserved as the East Side Gallery, she created Joint Venture, an ambitious painting 7 metres long by 3.5 metres high depicting two heads laid horizontally with connecting lines between them. A pivotal work in her career, it illustrates the uneasy partnership of East and West, and the pressure on individuals to bend and fit themselves into this new chapter in history. She created a replica of the work in her studio 20 years later which was shown at the RSA Annual Exhibition in 2010 and forms a centrepiece to this show.

Hunter’s artistic career is not a linear development through a succession of styles, but a consistent deepening of the same furrow, a circling and returning to key concerns and motifs. In 2000, she began to paint in Mallorca and has continued to work there periodically, producing works which draw on the colours and light in that country: amber, sienna, gold. Paintings such as Elsewhere, Warm Wind and Whiling Time have a greater sense of ease about them, a stillness ruffled only by warm Balearic winds.

If one were to name particular qualities in her later work, one might talk about stillness and depth. In Clashach, painted two years after her husband’s death, the two figures are drawn so close they occupy almost the same body. It’s a painting where profound emotions are contained within a structure of colours, where dualities and difficult things seem to be. In Distant Intimation, the canvas is dominated by an upturned triangle, the form which has come to represent knowledge and learning in Hunter’s work, but the female figure sleeps peacefully along its horizontal side.

Her works are about the human figure, but they are also about humanity, about how we accept duality, whether that of self and other, or those dualities which are contained within ourselves. She makes, as Sandy Moffat, one of her teachers at GSA wrote back in 1992, “works of great power and vitality, which not only confront the precariousness of our times but assert human values above all else”. They carry a powerful message for the times in which we live now.

Until 8 October. Margaret Hunter will lead a guided tour of the exhibition on 7 October at 2pm