Share This Article

Widely regarded as the most ambitious and influential exhibition of British contemporary art, the British Art Show takes place every five years across four different UK cities. Having already visited Nottingham and London, this year it stops off in Glasgow from 27 May – 21 August before moving on to Plymouth in September.

The Glasgow leg of the show is taking place at three of Glasgow's top art institutions - the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) and the Tramway. Entry to the show is free.

“Glasgow continues to be a key European centre for contemporary art production, as demonstrated by the large number of Glasgow-trained and–based artists in the British Art Show. Given the great strength of the city’s artists and art scene, it feels vital that this edition of the BAS comes to Glasgow.” Tom Morton, BAS7 Curator 

Established in 1979 the exhibition is now in it’s 7^th incarnation and this year’s show is curated by Tom Morton - curator at London’s Hayward Gallery and Contributing Editor to frieze magazine and Lisa Lisa Le Feuvre - Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

A total of 39 artists have been chosen by Morton and Le Fauvre for British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet on the grounds of their significant contribution to contemporary art in the last five years. The chosen artworks encompass sculpture, painting, installation, drawing, photography, film, video and performance, with many artists creating new works especially for the exhibition.

Of the 39 artists selected, eight have their roots in Glasgow and seven of the eight have studied at the internationally renowned Glasgow School of Art. The variety and scope displayed in their work serves to cement Glasgow's reputation as a leading light in the contemporary art scene.

Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray is a Glaswegian artist and writer best known for his semi-autobiographical, time-travelling novel, Lanark. His paintings and drawings also draw on his personal life, often depicting friends and family.

view the Artworks documentary on Alasdair Gray

Karla Black  

Karla Black trained at The Glasgow School of Art (BA, MFA) and is based in Glasgow. She is representing Scotland in the 2011 Venice Biennale and is nominated for this year's Turner Prize. Often formed from loose materials – such as soil, plaster of Paris, powder paint, and soap powder – Karla Black’s sculptures are poised between fragility and robustness. She works with such unstable and impermanent materials ‘not because they easily change and decay but because I want the energy, life, and movement that they give.’

Duncan Campbell

Duncan Campbell is based in Glasgow and has an MFA from The Glasgow School of Art. His works combine traditionally different styles of filmmaking. Documentary portraits of complex historical figures, composed of archival footage and animation in cinéma vérité style, are integrated into more abstract scenes, influenced by avant-garde writers and artists. By combining them, Campbell intends to ‘allow this difference rather than homogenise it.’

Luke Fowler

Luke Fowler studied Printmaking at Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee and is an internationally renowned short film and documentary maker. His three part film cycle, A Grammar for Listening, will be screening at the exhibition. Luke is represented by represented by The Modern Institute in Glasgow and won the inaugural Jarman Award in 2008.

Mick Peter 

Mick Peter is based in Glasgow and has an MFA from The Glasgow School of Art. His sculptures misrepresent everyday objects, replacing them with handcrafted replicas in the wrong materials. What should be heavy is in fact often made of near-weightless polystyrene. Illusion is disturbed by the knowledge of substitution.

Sue Tompkins  

Using rhythm and repetition, layering, juxtaposition, inversion, elaboration, stresses and pauses, Sue Tompkins’s dynamic spoken-word performances re-energise language and give it new meaning. Her material – amounting to hundreds of pages of meticulously ordered and edited texts – is gathered omnivorously from literature and everyday life and, according to Tomkins, derives from ‘thoughts, statements, views, descriptions, feelings, emotions and things that are triggered by actual events.’ Sue Tompkins has a BA from the Glasgow School of Art and is based in Glasgow.

Michael Fullerton 

Michael Fullerton was born in Bellshill and trained at The Glasgow School of Art (BA, MFA). His subject is the political nuances of art and the aesthetics of persuasion. ‘How do we decide that something is beautiful?’ Fullerton asks. ‘I liked the idea of a bunch of guys sitting round a table pondering these issues in a corporate environment.’

Tris Vonna-Michell

Tris Vonna-Michell's performances are rapid-fire monologues delivered in dimly lit mixed-media installations. His narratives fuse elements from his personal life with history and fiction, and finally probe the limits that separate these categories. The stream-of-consciousness digressions that blend almost seamlessly into his percussive stories often drive them to near incomprehensibility. No two performances are ever the same; as he describes ‘it is impossible to narrate consistently’. Tris Vonna-Michell has a BA from the Glasgow School of Art.

British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet runs in Glasgow until 21 August. More details on the programme can be found on the British Art Show website.