Vile statues, writhing liquorice and kids marooned online: Edinburgh art festival review — SkimNews
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- Del LaGrace Volcano opens the festival with intimate, erotic photographs of 1980s queer nightlife in London and lesbian goths draped over Edinburgh gravestones — work the reviewer says deserves far wider attention.
- Sandra George (1957-2013), a Black photojournalist who documented marginalized communities in Edinburgh's impoverished Craigmillar area, is featured at City Art Centre; her work was never shown publicly in her lifetime and was discovered only after her death.
- Wendy McMurdo's show at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery photographs children playing on computers and tablets with the technology digitally removed, producing what the reviewer calls 'quietly unsettling' portraits of kids drifting into online worlds.
- Eva Rothschild takes over Fruitmarket with rubber hoses coiled like 'giant bits of liquorice' around metal frames upstairs, described as 'Memphis Group aesthetics gone goth,' while the downstairs show is dismissed as hyper-referential and inert.
- Jamie Fitzpatrick at Edinburgh Printmakers responds to Edinburgh's statue-covered streets with figures of war criminals, land barons and slavers given grinning red-plasticine smiles — work the reviewer calls 'brilliantly gloopy, messy, cartoonish, chaotic and satirical.'
- Frank Walter (1926-2009), an Antiguan painter, writer, poet and polymath who died with thousands of unseen paintings, anchors the Ingleby Gallery group show and eclipses the Rose Wylie and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye works hung alongside him.
- The reviewer concludes EAF is 'too big and complex' and 'a bit worthy and lecture-y,' but finds enough strong shows — particularly Fitzpatrick's satire and the posthumous discoveries — to make the sprawling program worth navigating.
Why it matters: EAF's editorial identity leans hard on posthumously discovered and marginalized artists — Sandra George, Frank Walter, Sadao Hasegawa — none of whom showed their work publicly in their lifetimes, meaning festival programmers now function as cultural gatekeepers deciding which overlooked archives get a major-city platform. For visitors, the trade-off is a photography-heavy program (the reviewer flags it as the dominant medium) where the strongest satire (Fitzpatrick's statues) lands harder than most of the contemporary sculpture on view.
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