Sorcha Dallas

One makes models of standing snake and drawings of an imaginary Scottish island; another has filmed a flashing light illuminating objects in an art gallery.

Yesterday, Charles Avery and Lucy Skaer were named as two of the six artists to represent Scotland at the world’s biggest art showcase, the Venice Biennale, this summer.

From June to November, work by Avery, Skaer, Rosalind Nashashibi, Louis Hopkins, Henry Coombes and Tony Swain will show at the Palazzo Zenobio, having been asked to take everything ‘vital and stimulating’ in Scottish art to the event.

Fiona Bradley, director of the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, said that although they may not be household names, their selection reflected the healthy state of Scottish art.

Five of the artists graduated from the Glasgow School of Art, and four work in the city, reflecting Glasgow’s grip on the contemporary art scene.

Skaer was born in Cambridge and is based in Glasgow and New York; Avery trained in London and is now based in there; Nashashibi was born in Croydon and is now based in London.

The official British pavilion at Venice is set to pull the crowds with the famous face of Britart, Tracy Emin. Northern Ireland has also opted for a single artist, Willie Doherty.

But Scotland has chosen a collection of ‘emerging’ talent rather than ‘megastars’. They face a major task: in 2005, about 900,000 people converged on the Venice Biennale, but only about 10,000 visited Scotland’s exhibit. This year’s venture, at a cost of over ¬£250,000, will see the National Galleries of Scotland working with the Scottish Arts Council and the British Council Scotland, to push the numbers up.

The 1960 Palazzo Zenobio is in the same Dorsoduro district as Venice’s main art gallery. It is hoped a bigger building, shared with several other countries, will pull the punters in.

Philip Long, curator of the National Gallery of Modern Art, said: ‘We see it as an opportunity to bring forward young artists’

But Duncan MacMillan, a historian and The Scotsman’s art critic, asked why bigger draws were not on the list, such as Ossian by Callum Colvin.

‘It’s a pity if they are going to focus exclusively on younger artists, because it’s our international reputation that’s involved here. Our senior artists don’t get much chance of international exposure so why shouldn’t they get a chance?’

The history of Scottish artists appearing at Venice dates back to the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In 2003, the Scottish Arts Council decided to send a separate Scottish exhibition to Venice, focused on younger talent. The 2003 exhibit was well received. But two years ago three artists were enlisted for a show widely considered disappointing, and whose theme, ‘Selective Memory’, came loaded with artistic jargon that was hard to grasp.

The culture minister Patricia Ferguson, said Scottish artists from JD Fergusson to Eduardo Paolozzi have been shown at Venice as far back as 1895: ‘It is very important that we should present the work of artists living and working in Scotland.