Organisers have announced an important exhibition in Broughton of new works by the acclaimed Scottish artist Philip Braham during August's Edinburgh Art Festival.
STILL. will be Braham's first solo show since 2005, and represents something of a coup for the two-year-old Union Gallery, where staff are already fielding enquiries about it from art historians, institutions and private collectors far and wide.
Braham, born in Glasgow in 1959, studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee in the late 1970s. Painting full time since 1985, he has worked in the Netherlands, California, Spain, Sardinia and various locations in Scotland. Over the years, he has won numerous prestigious awards from, among others, the Scottish Arts Council, Greenshields and the RSA. He is now based in Edinburgh.
Gallery co-owner Robert Dawkins says the exhibition will be a personal account of themes and events which have shaped Braham's life. Many of his explorations for STILL. take place against the backdrop of strangely deserted but highly charged woodland, a terrain now unsettlingly familiar to those who admired his series Suicide Notes and Falling Shadows in Arcadia (the latter showcased as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival last year).
[img_assist|nid=1813|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=640|height=482]Superficially, observers of Braham's work are often first seduced by the exactitude of his technique. One cannot help admiring the superfine brushwork which renders his beautifully composed paintings almost photographic in detail.
But there's more going on than that. His technique is like the hypnotist's glittering fascinator: it draws you in so that – without you noticing – other processes may begin.
His landscapes appear realistic, but in recent projects it has been through his refusal to explain, to direct the viewer's eye upon any single area of interest or provide easily decoded metaphors that he has conveyed a disturbing sense of something other, unspoken, and unquantified.
Based on the previews seen by Spurtle, it seems that such themes will be continued: poignant suggestions of stories and forgotten histories (e.g. 'Antonine Hill' top right), glimpses of the everyday growing uncanny, the unfamiliar on the brink of recall ('The Hermitage', above). There is the sense of a wider context emerging, a world in which things we prefer to think of as understood and stable instead signify quite differently or are in flux ('Love Letter', below).
However, whilst Braham's August exhibition may emerge from events in his own life – there is also a strong sense that – like a hypnotist – his power to move us will depend on what the hypnotised subject brings to the interaction. Speaking of STILL. he writes:
A brushstroke is different from a pixel or a grain of silver halide on photographic film [...] [T]he gestural movement both describes and withholds information simultaneously; it gives form, colour, tone, texture, depth and expression but it resists amplification. The openness of the mark allows completion in the mind of the viewer and the transmutation of the idea begins in front of the painting.
Braham's paintings, then, will require concentration to appreciate fully, but Dawkins is convinced that such close attention will amply repay the effort. The works will be supplemented by a short film – Philip Braham in Conversation: a move typical of the gallery's friendly and no-nonsense determination to share contemporary Scottish art with as wide an audience as possible. AM
STILL. will show at the Union Gallery, 34 Broughton Street, from 5 August to 5 September 2011, seven days a week.
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