Art reviews: This 26 | Fall Leaves Fall | John Byrne: Blurred Boundaries

This 26, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★★

Fall Leaves Fall, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★★

John Byrne: Blurred Boundaries, Fine Art Society, Edinburgh ★★★★

For some time now the RSA has been using some of its considerable resources to support younger artists. Indeed, in the preface to the current exhibition, This 26, the Academy declares “Every year we support hundreds of artists through awards, residencies, exhibitions and scholarships. Since the start of this century, the Academy has given over £5.5 million to artists, many of whom have used the financial support as a springboard for professional success and artistic acclaim.” The exhibition celebrates a selection of the outcomes of that remarkable investment in individual artists. The 26 is for 2026 and the selection is from the work of artists who received grants in each of the 26 years of the current century. The resulting show is as diverse, lively and imaginative as you would expect.

Craig Coulthard, for instance, who received support in 2002, has since then developed a style with echoes of old-fashioned comic book illustration and uses it to explore history in landscape, the continuities in the world that surrounds us that we may not notice, but which nevertheless link past and present. Thus in Strawberries of St Triduana he seems to reimagine St Triduana’s Well (actually in Restalrig) as a cave on the beach at St Andrews. Aptly for a visual artist, St Triduana was an early Scottish female saint who had a special affinity with the eyes. In Maenads and the Secret Weapon at Cascate di Chia, Coulthard inhabits with lively comic-book figures in classical dress a celebrated waterfall in Italy that was used as set by Pasolini.

READ MORE: Royal Scottish Academy 200th anniversary preview supplement - e-mag

Rachel Maclean is also relatively senior. Like a good many of the artists here, her breakthrough came in the RSA’s New Contemporaries show, one of the RSA’s most valuable undertakings and an always fascinating showcase for new talent emerging from Scotland’s five art schools. In Maclean’s case this was in 2010. Now an RSA (Elect), she is represented here by a single work titled In The Style Pelicliar. That last word seems to be her own neologism with echoes of pelliculo, or film. A three-dimensional phantasmagoria on the theme of fairies, the work itself seems to be more inspired by painting than by film, however, as it appears to take its fairy theme from Joseph Noel Paton’s celebrated Victorian fairy pictures. She apparently includes herself as the sinister lead fairy, however, with a lot of rather dark goings on behind her.

The artist professes to be exploring an analogy between the Victorian obsession with fairies and our own attitude to AI which has in turn played a part in the composition of her work. If so, that is certainly topical and topicality, indeed direct engagement, has also shaped the work of Alicia Bruce. Winner of the RSA’s Muirhead Purchase Award in 2015, her work here is billed with her name linked to the Menie Community. The latter is the community in Aberdeenshire that has suffered from the imposition of Donald Trump’s golf courses. We have all suffered from Donald Trump, of course. Arguably the people of Menie have had it worse, or at least more tangibly, than most, but one work here does say it for the world at large as well. It is a photograph of a row of houses, presumably at Menie, with “No More Trump Lies” splashed across it in red paint. Another shows the ravaged dunes with the words “Nature Will Take Revenge” splashed across them — both for the ruined dunes and the world at large perhaps.

For its lead image, the RSA has chosen a striking work by Paloma Proudfoot. Described as “glazed ceramic with metal bolts”, it is an image of three impassive girls. Their figures are articulated with pins at the joints like cardboard puppets. Hence, I think, the metal bolts. The two girls on either side are fitting the third, standing between them and already party dressed, with a waistcoat in the form of naked breasts on a split torso. The glazed ceramic gives a startling quality to this bizarre piece of detached anatomy. It is perhaps a striking comment from a woman’s point of view on the whole business of dress and undress.

Though her work is very different, there is perhaps an affinity here with Pam Cloutman’s exquisite, tiny images, particularly with Inside the Cake. In pastel and watercolour and barely six inches high, this shows a naked woman crouched inside what looks very like a multi-tiered wedding cake. Equally pointed, another image appears to be a view inside a pregnant woman’s body with scenes of harvest, bread-making and love-making.

There is much else to admire here, but I was particularly drawn first by what appeared to be a rather beautiful abstract composition by Lindsay Sekulowicz in 12 panels in brown and gold, but then by the artist’s story. Her other works here are of leaves and grasses, or of things made from them. The artist used money from a William Littlejohn Award to carry out fieldwork in the Upper Rio Negro region of the Brazilian Amazon, working alongside Indigenous artists “to explore the connections between artistic practice, botanical knowledge, and Indigenous understandings of the natural world.” Outreach indeed.

Meanwhile in the neighbouring Academician’s Gallery, Fall Leaves Fall is a show for autumn bringing together work by past and present Academicians, all reflecting on the season. There are two characteristically beautiful watercolours of autumn leaves by Elizabeth Blackadder, for instance, and a spectacular small watercolour of an autumn sunset over the sea, one of several by John Houston. Paul Furneaux, with no loss of impact, seems have moved away form simple abstraction to images with a clear landscape reference as he does here in two beautiful prints inspired by Lewis, Lewis Hill and Lewis Moonrise.

Henry Kondracki is absolutely up to date with a characteristically atmospheric painting titled the Botanical Gardens, Autumn 2026. The most unexpected work here though is a superb etching of a fallen tree by Philip Reeves. It was done in 1959 and so before his work became predominantly abstract. We are all indebted to Reeves for the part he played in the revival of printmaking its Scotland and it is good to see such a powerful work from his early years here.

The late John Byrne is not included in the RSA show, but is currently the subject of Blurred Boundaries, a one man show at the Fine Art Society. The most protean of Scottish artists, he was indeed always blurring boundaries. Here there is a selection of painted furniture, of works that he did masquerading as a “primitive” or naive artist under the name of Patrick. Referring, too, to his work as a dramatist there is a drawing of Bomba, a character in Tutti Frutti and a painting of Writer’s Cramp, Byrne’s first stage play. There is also a wide variety of prints, paintings and drawings including a number of his remarkable, indeed protean, self-portraits in a variety of styles and a very striking study for his memorable portrait of Steven Campbell.

This 26 and Fall Leaves Fall run until 11 October; John Byrne: Blurred Boundaries until 7 November

The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today

Enjoying the Arts & Culture journalism on scotsman.com? Make it easier to find by selecting us as a preferred Google source

Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here