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16 August 2016 Adam Barclay

UNIONGallery, 4 Drumsheugh Pl, Edinburgh
Exhibition continues until September 12
Open Monday to Saturday 10.30am – 5.30pm

The UNION Gallery had their first solo exhibition launch at their new premises on Drumsheugh Place this week, and what a strong first impression it was! The new space, previously a low ceilinged charity shop, is unrecognisable as a classic Edinburgh gallery, resplendent with cornicing and high ceilings! It makes for a fantastic space to show off the works of award-winning water-colourist Jenny Mathews in her third solo exhibition.

The pieces on display are varied in style and dimension but all share a distinctly high quality and impressive artistic feel. With several pieces having been reserved even as they were being hung, it was obvious that Jenny’s work is in high demand. Large works to tie whole rooms together were displayed, alongside horizontal sets, unusual for the artist, and smaller high-detail pieces. Jenny studied botanical illustration under Dame Elizabeth Blackadder and the inspiration is clear in her work, supremely detailed botanical images but with a clear style of her own.

17 July 2016

When Alison Auldjo began converting a former charity shop into the second incarnation of the Union Gallery, removing a lowered ceiling and turning a pokey back storage room into a well-lit stairwell, she knew exactly the picture she wanted in the space. It was Phil Braham’s Ophelia Bathing, a painting she had seen in the Scottish Gallery a few years ago, when it was ‘best in show’ but went unsold. “I went to see him to tell him about the new place, ‘Phil, come and see the space, you will see exactly what I mean about your painting’,” she said. The work  uses a backdrop from the Water of Leith; Ophelia is bathing, not drowning, It is unobtrusively thought-provoking: the bather’s shoulders above smooth water, calmly swimming a ladylike breast-stroke, in a moment of reflection, before Hamlet stirs things up.

Auldjo put a second considerable picture by Braham in the window of her gallery for its reopening a few weeks back. The work, 21st Century Sublime, shows rolling hills around a Scottish valley cloaked in misty skies, the kind of view you’d find coming down from a Munro, but Graham’s last touch was to put a fighter jet flicking across it. “We have all seen scenes like that in the Highlands. It’s eery, it’s quite bleak, but it’s beautiful,” said Auldjo. My first ill-thought guess is Glencoe; but it’s more the gentler landscape of Aviemore, where two low-flying planes roared past on a recent walk, their sound gathering behind them.

When Auldjo closed the Union Gallery in Broughton Street, after seven years on a wonderfully prominent corner of one of Edinburgh’s couthiest streets, I had wondered if she would really be back. There are too many stories of galleries that seem to wilt under pressure: in Edinburgh the old Doggerfisher, the recently downsized Ingleby Gallery, in London the impact of skyrocketing real estate. I’ve heard old dealers lately saying traditional Scottish art markets are dead, and artists facing hard times, though that is not exactly new.

12 August 2015

Word of mouth is the happy fall back for exploring Edinburgh’s festivals, when thousands of shows shovel their star ratings at you in a noisy clamour for time and attention. So when a Scottish artist and retired teacher, asks what’s interesting in the Edinburgh Art Festival this year, we talk MC Escher and John Bellany – and I tell him to go see Audrey Grant’s show, at the Union Gallery in Broughton Street.

The exhibition is not actually in the festival. Established galleries in the city have to opt in financially to get a mention there and some have declined to do so. But that does not prevent them showcasing their top offerings. Grant, though just turned 50, is an artist to watch, and the word of mouth on her work is very good.

For customers of the Union Gallery, and of Painter and Hall, who now represent her in London, Audrey Grant is also an artist to buy. By opening night, of 18 paintings in the exhibition, all but three or four had sold. Her last exhibition at Panter and Hall has now entirely sold out; she will go back to Pall Mall, with a solo exhibition in the gallery’s larger upper space, and who knows if she’ll soon be lost to London entirely.

Introducing Grant’s exhibition two years ago, the critic Jan Patience wrote how she scratched her head for days to articulate how the works affected her; I did the same. The solitary figures she paints carry an immediate, accessible charm. These still waters run deep; scratch the surface, absorbing, grave, thought-provoking. They are from an artist in a later-life career, making a series of interesting shifts through different degrees of abstraction.

Sunday, 9 August 2015

If you have time to take in only one exhibition this summer, Audrey Grant’s at the Union Gallery is a strong contender for your attention.

Spurtle has covered Grant’s work several times before (see 4.3.13) , on each occasion admiring her humane but unflinching studies of the human form. She dwells upon its external and internal flaws, its dislocations and imbalances, finding in these imperfections a kind of vulnerable beauty, even nobility.

Such themes are in evidence again here, although this time often referenced through the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, whose lines are sometimes quoted in the paintings’ titles or scratched onto the surfaces of the works themselves.

Before going any further, let me urge you to get close to Grant’s work. Much of the pleasure it gives comes from the energy with which the paint has been applied – thick, delicious swirls and drips and daubs. This is textured in every sense.

Sunday, 12 July 2015

As its name suggests, Summer Cocktail comprises an invigorating blend of styles and strengths which leave one feeling slightly less in touch with the day-to-day world on the way out than one did on the way in.

This reviewer’s favourites included Lucy Jones’s ‘Blue Bear Café’: a familiar Canonmills scene here fragmented, refracted and reassembled as collage, monoprint and wax.

For all its apparent disjointedness, there is a solidity about its blues and blacks and central door recess which is particularly satisfying.

Drummond Mayo’s ‘Meditation’ is similar, at first glance, although here the viewer must settle for an effect which is far less resolved. That familiar point one often reaches with Mayo’s works, when a step back and a refocusing of the eyes reveals some hidden image, eludes on this occasion.