In 2024 Fruitmarket turns 50 and celebrates with a programme that brings the very best of Scottish, British and international visual art and culture to Edinburgh, to inspire and energise audiences – for free – as they have been doing since 1974.
The year opens with a last chance to see two newly commissioned films: Blind Spot by Zarina Bhimji, part of her solo exhibition Flagging it Up which opened in October 2023; and Project Paradise, a film by Sarah Wood that asks, in the context of the climate crisis, ‘can the experience of art help’? In Spring, Turner-Prize-winning artist Martin Boyce (first seen at Fruitmarket in 1999 as one of the first artists to take part in the Visions for the Future strand of promising young Scottish artists) returns with a major solo show. In Summer, Ibrahim Mahama takes over Fruitmarket with a major body of new work, his first showing in Scotland, while the Autumn offers a rare chance to see work by ground-breaking American sculptor and installation artist Barry Le Va, part of a generation that included Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman and Robert Morris. Holly Davie and Jill Smith close out the year: Davie with an installation that celebrates unseen women artists and results from months of research in Fruitmarket’s archive; and Smith with a birthday party for Fruitmarket, the culmination of a year of ritual journeys round the zodiac.
Artist, performer and writer Jill Smith was the first woman to show in Fruitmarket’s exhibition programme in 1975 when she was working as a pioneering performance artist with her then-husband Brice Lacey. For Fruitmarket’s 50th year, she is making a new ‘ritual journey’ – her term for her works structured around actions spread over a span of time and multiple locations chosen for their significance. This will be her first time working with the zodiac in the island landscape of Lewis and Harris where she lives. The journey involves monthly rituals centred on the personality or persona of each star sign, with Smith drawing on her costume-making experience and honouring past performances from her career as well as making new work. The rituals are documented by Lewis-based photographer Mhairi Law and Smith is writing a diary entry each month that will be shared with Fruitmarket’s audience alongside each of Law’s images.
The year runs from Virgo (August/September 2023) to Leo (July/August 2024), ending at Fruitmarket’s ‘birthday’ on 19th August. The cycle closes with a zodiac party in the Warehouse at the end of the year.
Sarah Wood 9th December 2023–21st January 2024 Warehouse
British artist Sarah Wood works with found documentary images to interrogate the relationship between the narrating of history and individual memory. For Fruitmarket, she is making a film inspired by the Black and White Oil Conference organised by Richard Demarco in Edinburgh in 1974 at which Joseph Beuys and Buckminster Fuller both spoke. The conference took place in the context of the imminent exploitation of oil and natural gas in the North Sea. It posed a number of questions and made observations frighteningly relevant now as we try to find ways to combat climate change, mitigate its ravages and keep fossil fuels underground. 50 years on, Wood’s film examines the idea of Paradise as a way of talking about how we relate to nature now often as something simply to commodify. She argues that our current panic about resources is about the end of an era rather than the end of the planet. Instead the film invites viewers to open up thought and imagine how we might want to live in the future. Projected as a portal into the floor of the Warehouse, Project Paradise invites midwinter audiences to gather round the light of the image and come together as participants in the reimagining of a new way of living in the world.
Martin Boyce 2nd March 2024 – 2nd June 2024 Exhibition Galleries and Warehouse
Glasgow-based artist Martin Boyce, reworks and references the textures and forms of the built environment. Using the iconography of the everyday alongside the formal and conceptual histories of modern architecture and design, his sculptures often form poetic landscapes which merge interior and exterior spaces. In an extended act of homage and deconstruction, Boyce has most notably referenced Jan and Joël Martel’s concrete trees of 1925. From these structures, Boyce developed a typography and a consistent lexicon of shapes which feed into his sculptural practice. Alongside his large-scale, site-specific installations, Boyce’s output also encompasses the reimagining of more modest utilitarian objects. Vents, screens, telephone booths, fireplaces and lanterns are incorporated into a wider body of work imbued with the language of urbanism and punctuated with moments of unexpected tenderness and beauty. Boyce won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2011 and since 2018 has been professor of sculpture at HFBK Hamburg.
Ibrahim Mahama 22nd June 2024 –6th October 2024, Exhibition Galleries and Warehouse
The first-ever solo exhibition in Scotland of the work of Ibrahim Mahama; a Ghanaian artist critically acclaimed for his evocative large-scale, site-specific installations that speak to the cultural and social effects of post-colonialism and global migration.
Born in Tamale in 1987, Mahama burst onto the international art scene at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 with Out of Bounds, a work that clad the massive outside wall of the Arsenale in jute sacks to make a visually spectacular and thought-provoking installation. This work set the tone for what has become Mahama’s on-going investigation into the life of materials and their dynamic potential – the jute sacks telling a visual history of the narratives of production and trade, and the more human tales embodied within.
For Fruitmarket, Mahama is making a brand new body of work inspired by the Gallery’s unique physical location, supported on columns above Waverley railway station. This proximity to – and dependence on – the railway is the starting point for large scale drawings, sculpture and installations referencing his own interest in and using material from the now defunct colonial-era railway of Ghana.
Holly Davey 19th October 2024– 17th November 2024, Warehouse
Since 2020 British artist Holly Davey has been making a body of work under the title A Script for an Archive, which includes photography, collage, sculpture and performance. Interested in ‘what is happening at the edges’ of archives, in the figures (often women) who have been marginalised in the historical record, Davey has been working with Fruitmarket’s archive, finding the overlooked, and ‘re-seeing’ women whose stories could and should be part of what we know.
Barry Le Va, In a State of Flux 26th October 2024- 2nd February 2025 Exhibition Galleries
In partnership with Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and Kurhaus Kleve
Barry Le Va (28.12.1941 – 24.01.2021) was an important figure in American art from the 1960s, part of a generation that included Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman and Robert Morris. Le Va was an innovator in the art of sculpture, with his Distribution or Scatter pieces of 1966 a breakthrough in terms of how art could be made and presented. The floor was his field of exploration and he used a wide range and variety of materials, setting a scene for the viewer to engage in: ‘the viewer always participates. They aren’t just an audience. They’re a participating member, but not in the sense of performance’. His interest in transience, in sculpture as merely a short section of endlessly continuous time, has inspired generations of artists.
This exhibition is curated by Christiane Meyer Stoll of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein with the collaboration of David Nolan, who worked closely with Le Va and whose New York gallery looks after the artist’s Estate, and Rolf Ricke, the German gallerist who brought the work of Barry Le Va to Europe (along with the work of Bill Bollinger and Fred Sandback, two artists whose work we have been proud to include in our programme in exhibitions made similarly in collaboration with Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein). The exhibition includes important sculptures such as Corner–On Edge–On Center Shatter, 1968-71 (glass layered together then shattered); Cleaved Wall, 1969-70 (meat cleavers embedded in the gallery walls and floor); Right Angular Section (On a Diagonal), 1969 (chalk spread across a corner of the Gallery); and the rarely seen works such as A – (Red, Green, Blue, Purple, Felt, Steel, Bought, Cut, Folded, Placed, Rolled), 1966 and B – (Red, Green, Blue, Purple, Felt, Steel, Bought, Cut, Dropped, Arranged, Re-arranged), 1966. A key theme in the exhibition is the dialogue in Le Va’s work between sculpture and drawing, and beautiful drawings made both in preparation for sculptures and as stand-alone artworks; collages and woodblock prints complete the presentation
Fruitmarket is a free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, which provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences.? We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process. Creativity makes space for meaning, and we create a welcoming space for people to think with contemporary art and culture in ways that are helpful to them – for free. Further information at fruitmarket.co.uk.??
