Press

In this tale of the two Alasdairs, Gray and Taylor, there is no doubt who the leading man is. Intended as a further installment of Gray’s fight to rescue Taylor, his long-term friend, from the obscurity he suffered in his lifetime, this show nonetheless focuses on the work of the better-known Glaswegian. It’s lucky, then, that this is such a generous show, with several of Gray’s famous paintings.

He is at his best when depicting his home city itself. ‘Cowcaddens in the Fifties’, which has been used as the cover for his novel Lanark, is a particular delight.

Drawn in a vivacious, fluid style recalling Peter Howson, it portrays the austere, grey-faced men, steely women and young bullies he remembers living in the city; sketching their lives out against a backdrop of brooding tenements and grimy industry.

Somehow his portraits are less intimate. In ‘Two Views of Katy Mitchell’, a picture of a nubile young woman in a leotard, the painter’s eye becomes a dirty old man’s, lingering on a lacy bra strap or a necklace hanging seductively on the young woman’s breast. In others, it is almost as if the painter is too shy, perhaps too curmudgeonly, to engage with his human subjects up close. It is the fleeting encounters, sketched from memory or from anonymous observation, that prove the most resonant of these works.

Taylor, on the other hand, is altogether more mysterious. Most of his heavily textured paintings and pop-art style collages are, sadly, forgettable.

But in the centre of the space, stands a large beheaded angel, without a name to identify it, mysterious and haunting. It’s a fitting epitaph to an untold life and, for that, his exhibition must be praised.