RSA Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh review: 'much to admire and perhaps acquire'

It must be human nature to want to have pictures on our walls as we seem to have done so since the Stone Age, and when the Royal Scottish Academy was founded 199 years ago it was to meet that need. It brought artists and their art to people who wanted to buy it to hang on their walls. The commission on sales from the annual exhibition was the Academy’s principal source of income. It was an essential part of the economy of art. In recent decades, however, an alternative economy of art has grown up in which, usually at least, there is no way that the art with which it engages could ever hang on anybody’s wall. Mostly its funding comes directly or otherwise from public sources. These two economies exist side by side, but there has been a regrettable tendency for the new one to look down on the old one as old-fashioned and conservative. That is quite wrong and of course the split is anyway more apparent than real - and, indeed, in tune with these developments the RSA Annual Exhibition doesn’t look remotely as it did even 30 years ago.

Nevertheless, with more than four hundred works to choose from (at least, if you have the budget) you can go to the RSA and buy a first-class work of art to take home to hang on your wall or, if you fancy sculpture, to stand in the window. Indeed it is sculpture that greets you. Kenny Hunter’s life-size Youth stands, enigmatically, with his back to you at the top of the stairs. Elsewhere Hunter has a really beautiful Mother and Child. They are a simple modern mother with her child, but they have a monumental presence. With more than a nod to Michelangelo, too, they seem to have emerged only partially from the block from which they appear to have been carved, although in fact they are not cut out of stone but are modelled in plaster.

If you have a big enough wall, Barbara Rae’s painting Gerlache Strait is equally monumental. Deploying collage and metallic paint, this is undeniably a modern picture, but it also brings home to us something real - the awe the artist felt sailing through Antarctic waters. In two large paintings of the mountains of the south of France, Leon Morrocco captures a similar sense of the grandeur of the landscape. Interestingly, too, neither artist uses a traditional landscape format. Like these paintings, Doug Cocker’s sculpture, Little Monuments 1-26, a group of twenty six little wooden sculptures that variously pay homage to Brancusi, space rockets and much else, would command any wall, but you can buy them individually too.

Toby Paterson has for a long time conducted a dialogue with the formalities of early modernism and its interface with the ideals of utopian architecture. The result here in Penumbral Park 2, painted on aluminium with some relief elements, is quite stunning. Looking back in a similar way too, Neil MacPherson in his delightful collage, Cobalt and Mimosa: the Days grow Longer, seems to be remembering fruitfully both Miró and Paolozzi. Victoria Crowe’s Misted Horizon, misty trees, drawn in oil and graphite, is quietly poetic in a quite different way as, too, are Ian Westacott’s etched studies of individual ancient trees, or Phil Braham’s quartet of still, winter landscapes.

There is a beautiful but very different poetry in Helen Flockhart’s In Elysian Fields. Two lovers, one with a classical lyre, are seated at the edge a field of standing corn lit by a brilliant moon. It seems to have strayed from Douanier Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy, but has brought with it some of that picture’s eerie beauty.

Adrian Wiszniewski’s The Magic Box and smaller study, Thinking, are both studies of deep reflective, thought. Zuzanna Salamon’s It was the silence that hurt me, a beautiful charcoal drawing of a seated girl seen from behind, is equally reflective but more poignant. Gabriele Jogelaite’s Lidl Avocados, a cast in bronze of two halves of an avocado set in a block of glass, is simply a beautiful object. From Great to Gone, Natalia Kapchuk’s electroplated, life-sized head of a great white shark, strikes a note of ecological anxiety and this is seen elsewhere too, in Lennox Dunbar’s This Fragile Earth, for instance, and perhaps also in Ross Sinclair’s enormous 31 Years of Real Life, School of Whales, a painting of 20 whales that dominates the main gallery.

There is a different dark side in Will Maclean’s Circle Log, a soliloquy on the fate of the men lost on both sides in the Battle of the Atlantic, the merchantmen and the U-boat crews. Darkest of all, but nevertheless a powerful image, is Jock McFadyen’s Shelf, a sombre painting in a crumbling and battered frame of a semi-naked woman seated against the wall in a dark alley like a piece of merchandise on a shelf. But then you could raise your spirits with Liondsaidh Chaimbeul’s charming life-size, lime wood carving of a man with a child on his shoulders, or with Robert Powell’s delightful Clepsydra, a print of people struggling with umbrellas in a rainstorm. Appropriately a clepsydra is apparently a kind of water clock.

There is of course much else to admire and indeed perhaps acquire. Generally, too, the hang is clear and spacious which makes it a pity that some works are so “skied” as to be hung quite out of sight.

Until 8 June

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