For a snapshot of where Scotland is at in contemporary art, there’s one place to be this month and that’s the Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries 2022 exhibition in Edinburgh.
In the RSA’s galleries on Princes Street, it features the work of 57 artists selected from undergraduate degree shows across five art schools.
Now in its 12th year, the beauty of New Contemporaries is that a group of selectors visit shows in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and Elgin and cherrypick emerging artists to exhibit at this prestigious venue.
As ever, there’s a diverse array of painting, sculpture, film-making, photography, printmaking, installation, performance and architecture on offer.
Artists who caught my eye included sculptor Dylan Esposito, whose clever, playpark-style sculptures with titles like Round Peg In A Square Hole play with ideas around literal interpretation of familiar phrases.
Artists such as Lauren Ferguson, with her epic, intricate and beautiful pencil drawings of boats and tree trunks, debunk the myth that drawing and painting is on the slide. Her work is off-the-scale impressive.
Ellen Mitchison’s large, distorted and colourful depictions of women’s bodies tangled in a vivid heap leap out at you while Fanny Arnesen’s quietly brooding paintings of trees and forests had me leaning in and smelling the canvas for a whiff of forest floor.
Rachel McClure, 56, a GP and graduate of Moray College of Art, has made thoughtful sculptures, photographs and recordings inspired by lockdown walks in Elgin.
McClure and 25-year-old Arnesen, a Swedish artist who studied at Glasgow School of Art, were both awarded £10,000 as part of the 2022 Glenfiddich Residency Prize.
New Contemporaries runs until April 3.
Fire Station Creative in Dunfermline is a dynamic arts centre offering up a lively programme of exhibitions and a great wee cafe bar.
Its latest show, Mythical Political, brings together well kent and not-so-well kent figures from the Scottish art scene. David Mach, Liane Lang, Jim Lambie, Adrian Wiszniewski, Alison Harper and Sandy Moffat are showing alongside Splint, a new collective of women artists.
The exhibition is the brainchild of Turner Prize-nominated Mach, who is from Fife.
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