Ghana’s El Anatsui’s exquisite metal masterpieces sing of tragedy, humanity and hope; compatriot Ibrahim Mahama digs deep into colonial labour; and Ukrainian photography bears witness in the festival’s most urgent show
‘The method is plainly visible’: Woman’s Cloth, 2001 by El Anatsui , above, made of metal bottle caps and tags held together with copper wire. Courtesy of Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh; photograph by Sally Jubb‘The method is plainly visible’: Woman’s Cloth, 2001 by El Anatsui , above, made of metal bottle caps and tags held together with copper wire. Courtesy of Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh; photograph by Sally Jubbglows with light.
Like Anatsui, Mahama recycles the past – in his case, hundreds of documents from the paint division of the Ghana Industrial Holding Corporation, concerning gallons of white paint, board meetings and low annual production. Collaged together, they make a substrate for lifesize charcoal drawings of Ghanaian workers burdened with railway tracks, and sketches of people hauling the abandoned carriages and engines back to Mahama’s art and education complex.
The paint appears so thin and dry, sinking exiguously into the canvas, yet the images are gloriously dense. Barker aspires to be an American Vuillard. And for a further paradox, look at the mauve tennis courts of Florida in the survey ofat the Royal Scottish Academy. Born in Belfast in 1856, Lavery roamed through France, Morocco, Monte Carlo, Venice and Spain: just about anywhere the sun could be found and described in buttery slathers on canvas.
Lavery is eventless froth: he can’t make a snake look scary or a woman look like more than a doll. He can’t paint faces and has a weak sense of psychology. But as an official great war artist he takes great care with soldiers’ wounds and numbers the dead in shadowy fields of graves. He may be the only impressionist ever to paint Edinburgh’s Princes Street; if only he was Monet.
An old man rearranges his shattered possessions in a house with the facade blown off. Displaced Ukrainians sardine themselves into fractional spaces. The art ranges from semi-abstract images of charred landscapes and deserted chairs at the Polish border, to gravely beautiful portraits of citizens in bunkers. Every work is a revelation of life right now, an art made with extraordinary urgency, as nowhere else in the festival.
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