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Modern art in Glasgow is taking a literary turn with a new exhibition

‘Country Grammar’, a new exhibition of Glasgow artists at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, takes it names from a work by Sue Tompkins. Tompkins is a wonderful shape shifting artist whose work is impossible to pigeonhole. She is an inspired performer, a poet and a visual artist. She was a singer and a writer with the much-missed Glasgow band, Life Without Buildings. She is an improviser, a mercurial, energetic presence and – in the context of this exhibition, which advertises itself as a drawing show – she makes drawings.

Tompkins’s drawings are made with a typewriter. You might find another word to describe them: concrete poetry, text pieces; it doesn’t really matter. When Tompkins performs her work live, she reaches across many oral traditions: punk, English folk song and good old-fashioned religious preaching. Her subjects are immediate yet elusive: love, sex, everyday conversation, abstract repetitions and incantations.

When you see her works bashed out on yellowing paper, on that piece of discredited old technology, the manual, ribbon typewriter, what does seem to matter is their physical shape: the interaction between the words and numbers and the shape they make on the pages.

Columns of figures lurch and fall. Repetitions create great blocks of type, which are eroded by the fading ink of her machine. Works and ideas slip and slide across paper, like they do in the mind. But they are given a particularly visual form.

Words and numbers have a long history in art. Francis Picabia painted an arithmetical sum as an act of dry irony. Joan Miro included a column of figures in his painting in an attempt to get beyond the conventions of representation in painting and as a reflection on his own failed career, totting up numbers as a book-keeper. Tompkins seems to use them for their immediacy, for their swiftness of communications.

‘Country Grammar’ features seven artists. It’s a show about the role of drawings, but it is also a catch-up with series of youngish and influential Glasgow artists, increasingly admired here and abroad.

Sue Tompkins’s twin sister, the Beck’s Prize shortlisted Hayley Tompkins, goes from strength to strength. A new series of abstract works on paper mixes loose blocks of colour with suggestive line. Images seem to appear – I can see perhaps a book, an open door, a crossroads – and disappear back into pure abstraction.

ate Davis’s work Three Forms Study is a complex installation: a drawing of a plinth, a plinth itself and the drawing of an ancient sculpted head from the Burrell Collection. It raises questions about the nature of drawing, the idea of modelling and display and perhaps, too, of the representation of women. The ancient head appears to be hollow behind her lovely hairdo: an empty vessel.

Gregor Wright has produced a wall of small drawings: punkish, brusque and blunt, unresolved equine figures, body parts and weird geometries that might be working drawings for sculptural works.

Alex Frost, who has a concurrent show of new work at Stirling’s changing Room, shows two of his vast systematic portraits which use a grid and his own system of pencil symbols – stars, circles, crosses and dashes – to produce photo-realist portraits. One is a portrait of fellow artist Karla Black; the other is of the artist himself. Frost’s work draws contrast between systems and accidents, the modular and the hand-made. In his self-portrait you can’t see his face: just his coat and his ear.

Sally Osborn, who has recently been pushing the boat out on odd ways of making drawings – watercolour on broken crystal was particularly memorable – shows a loose series of figurative drawings and abstract works on tissue paper.

Kevin Hutcheson has been making work using books and bookishness for some time now: sculptures made from paperbacks, drawings and collages that call upon book illustration and the graphic style of pulp fiction. His recent works show libraries and readers. An archive photo shows a reclining women absorbed with almost comic sensuality in a tome. In a sense Hutcheson is drawing nothing, we can see the moment of absorption perhaps, but we can’t see the content, that visual information which runs exclusively between the readers and the book. He has literally drawn a blank. This is a good, confident show, slightly blighted by the rather grim setting, which is without any daylight. Lest you protest that ‘Country Grammar’ might have too wide a definition of what makes a drawing, it’s best to count your blessings. The Royal Academy’s recent drawing show, curated by Allen Jones and David Hockney, included a video of cardiac surgeon Francis Wells, who as a means of swift communication during surgery, is wont to draw using his forceps as a pen and patient’s own blood as an inkwell.