Tag: The Scottish Gallery

The Scottish Gallery presents Victoria Crowe ‘Decades’, celebrating the artist’s 80th year

For Edinburgh Art Festival 2025, The Scottish Gallery presents Victoria Crowe Decades, celebrating the artist’s 80th year. This exhibition showcases a powerful collection of new works, that reflect over six decades of Crowe’s dedicated artistic journey.

Decades invites viewers into a deeply personal world, where themes of life, nature, and memory intertwine with the landscapes, portraits, and experiences that have shaped the artist’s path.

Victoria Crowe’s first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery took place in 1970, and since then, she has worked in partnership with The Gallery for over five decades.

Victoria Crowe said: “As I approach my 80th birthday, I have created a new body of work that looks back to move forward, which I hope offers a nuanced look at my artistic progression and approach over the years.

“By weaving together the strands of memory, place, and emotional depth, I have revisited past explorations whilst still engaging with ongoing concerns.”

Decades will be a powerful reflection of the Victoria Crowe’s life and work which will be held over two floors of The Scottish Gallery and Dovecot Studios will continue the celebration with a thoughtful curation of her collaborative relationship with the world-renowned weaving studio.

“Crowe’s outstanding body of work reflects not only the evolution of her artistic vision but also the deep connection she shares with life, memory, and nature. As The Gallery celebrates her 80th year, Decades serves as a powerful reminder of the enduring relevance of art and stands as a testament to Crowe’s dedication, vision, and ever-evolving creative spirit. It is a privilege to stand alongside her as we share this new chapter.” — Christina Jansen, The Scottish Gallery

NOW | New Horizons

Recent residencies, including time spent in Orkney and at Dumfries House, have further shaped the artist’s work as has the heightened awareness that lockdown brought to our consciousness.

Her recent work has explored the familiar landscape psychologically transformed, a transitional place in the ecologically changing world. Crowe’s exploration of new horizons, both physical and conceptual, culminates in a series of striking new works capturing the liminal quality of twilight and the resonance of time’s passage.

THEN | Decades

  • The Kittleyknowe Years. The journey begins in 1968 with the artist’s first landscape sketchbooks capturing the emotional resonance of life in the Pentlands. For over two decades, the artist lived in the remote landscape of Kittleyknowe, where intimate observations of nature were paired with the intimate portrayal of her neighbour and shepherd, Jenny Armstrong.
  • Portraits. The exploration of psychology and the inner life are essential to her portrait work. Crowe’s work investigates not only the physical likeness of subjects, but their unspoken emotional experiences—highlighting themes of loss, love, melancholy, and memory: what lies beneath the surface.
  • Venice. For 12 years, the artist had a studio in Venice, a city rich with history and fragile beauty. These paintings delve into the artist’s response to grief, finding parallels between the endurance and survival of Venice and the inner sense of continuum.
  • Plant Forms. From botanical studies to symbolic references in art history and herbal medicine, Crowe’s plant studies offer a meditative look at the passage of time and the fragility of life.

Dovecot Studios & The Scottish Gallery | Victoria Crowe

2025 presents a unique opportunity to engage with the breadth of Victoria Crowe’s remarkable career. This summer, The Scottish Gallery is partnering with Dovecot Studios to present Shifting Surfaces, an exhibition that invites audiences to explore the inspiration and collaboration behind Crowe’s textile masterpieces.

The show spans her iconic Large Tree Group (2007) to the recent tufted rugs from the Orcadian Series (2023). Shifting Surfaces delves into the connection between her paintings and woven interpretations, highlighting her exploration of light, landscape, and memory.

This exhibition will be open from 26 July to 11 October 2025.

Jock McFadyen: Lost Boat Party

SCOTLAND’S Dovecot Studios, in partnership with The Scottish Gallery, will mark the artist, Jock McFadyen’s 70th birthday year with an exhibition of recent paintings which describe the romance and grandeur of the Scottish landscape, alongside the urban dystopia for which the artist is known.

The exhibition runs from 11 June – 25 September 2021.

Christina Jansen, director of The Scottish Gallery, said: “McFadyen paints the exterior world with a cool detachment that carries an emotional punch, and Lost Boat Party perfectly describes his approach – floating through the landscape to find and show the strange enigmatic portion only seen when looking for something else.

“The painting, Lost Boat Party, is a monumental work, depicting a seaside funfair which appears to have detached itself from the land and is slowly drifting out to sea. The metaphor for the human condition is unavoidable, and many of the paintings in the exhibition describe the sea with all its implications of threat and indifference, as well as painterly possibility.”

Over 20 large paintings will feature in Lost Boat Party, highlighting McFadyen’s understanding of the sublime landscape tradition.

It is no accident that the artist was taught by a generation of abstract painters whose presence is felt in these paintings, describing the contemporary world; paintings such as Mallaig and Estuary Music are almost minimalist, and all the paintings – save for one which has a tiny figure, difficult to find at only half an inch tall – are void of human presence, instead inviting the viewer to inhabit the haunting and occasionally hostile panoramas of land and sea before them.

Over the last seven months, Dovecot has collaborated with McFadyen to make a new artwork inspired by his paintings.

The Mallaig Commission will be unveiled at the exhibition, along with documentation of the collaboration. In working with Dovecot, McFadyen joins a roster of Royal Academicians, including David Hockney, Graham Sutherland, Barbara Rae and Chris Ofili.

Naomi Robertson, Master Weaver at Dovecot Studios, explained: “Our initial aim was to explore the beauty in the paintings. We have experimented with how to amplify the complex undertones in Jock’s use of paint through the blending of yarn as well as the innate sensuality of the textile surface.

“The way in which the final work absorbs light emphasises a depth of colour that is just not possible with paint.”

The exhibition forms part of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2021 programme and is the second in four UK exhibitions celebrating the artist’s impressive 45-year career.

Lost Boat Party follows Jock McFadyen goes to the Pictures at City Art Centre, Edinburgh and will be followed by exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London in early 2022 and a full retrospective at The Lowry in Manchester.

McFadyen’s career has included solo shows at the Imperial War Museum, Camden Art Centre, The National Gallery, Talbot Rice, and the Pier Arts Centre. In 1991, the artist designed sets and costumes for Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s last ballet The Judas Tree at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

McFadyen’s work is included in over 40 public collections, including the V&A, SNGMA, Government Art Collection and Tate, as well as corporate and private collections in the UK and abroad.

A monograph on the artist was published by Lund Humphries in 2001 and in 2019 a second monograph, written by Rowan Moore, was published by the Royal Academy. McFadyen was elected to the Royal Academy in 2012.

Dovecot Studios: The Lost Boat Party exhibition 11 June 2021 to 25 September 2021