Press

It’s all too easy for established galleries to ignore younger artists on their own doorstep. But this show and its 1999 predecessor, ‘Evolution Isn’t Over Yet’, demonstrate the Fruitmarket’s laudable commitment to what’s happening here and now. It’s confidence in commissioning new work for this show from 11 emergent, Scotland-based artists has not been misplaced, showing the continuing strength of work being produced here by artists in the earlier years of their post college careers. But if you go to this show expecting youthful bombast you’ll be disappointed; much of the work here tends towards the thoughtful and reserved. Disregard the idea that art-works should be considered purely in visual terms and have a look at the artists’ statements in the accompanying publication – many provide fascinating insights into the thinking behind and around, the works.

Yet for sheer presence, Keith Thompson’s pieces using layers of sandblasted glass, revealing the disembodied arms of classical statuary as if they were translucent fossils, make an insistent statement in the downstairs gallery. In his oversized photograph of two burning incense sticks, Pour it On, Scott Myles converts a process into a melancholic image of finality, while his painted bronze casts of scooped ice cream question our conditioned responses to different materials.

In the upstairs gallery, one of the smallest pieces makes the biggest impact. Alex Frost’s Sumo, barely ten centimeters high and seeming to glow from within, investigates architectonic forms in the idiom of handcrafted jewellery.

Frost’s larger piece, The Etc, transcends the implied moral imperatives of much minimalist architecture and sculpture by the use of insubstantial materials such as foam and polystyrene.

Made from bits of plastic washed up by the Clyde, Jennifer Beattie’s Homesick, Renfrew Ferry is a small tree composed of detritus. It is – like her photograph of a pavement edge, Homesick, Corunna Street – strangely poetic and charged with a particular kind of urban melancholia.

Alex Pollard’s work investigates assumptions about consumer products while Steven Duval uses the gallery context as an appropriate place to extend his researches towards GM foods. Easily mistaken for drawings, Anna Ray’s silk embroideries of deceptively flip, cartoon-like scenarios are richly rewarding vignettes. Her ball-shaped sculpture, composed of fake pearls from over 70 necklaces, works as a cleverly self-referential metaphor, while her recent departure into animation, Blossom, which takes a representation of a lowly shower-curtain as its theme, shows a quietly brilliant example of highly controlled expression.