MASKS, MUSIC AND MAGIC

This is the second of our forays into exhibiting aspects of the art of Africa at The Hidden Lane Gallery.

On holiday in Crete in 2006, a chance meeting by Robert Burns with three Ukrainians kindled an interest that has brought the Glasgow photographer back to that ravaged country again and again. Best known for his portraits and coverage of jazz festivals, Robert is internationally recognised as a printmaker for his ability to get the best results, not only from his own creations, but also from the negative of other celebrated photographers. For ‘A Window On Ukraine’, Robert’s extraordinary work demonstrates his keen interest and empathy for the plight of the ordinary people in Kiev and other nearby towns and cities. He has recorded the joys and sorrows of Ukrainian life, the weddings, the festivals, children at play and vibrant street life. Robert’s work is currently benefitting charities there, particularly aiding children in Eastern Ukraine, where the horrors of Chernobyl still affect life decades after that horrendous disaster, with civil war now bringing further grief to the country.

The renowned Canadian-born photographer Margaret Watkins lived in Glasgow unknown for more than forty years until her death in 1969. She left a legacy of more than twelve hundred superb images of exhibition standard, mainly of her work in the 1910′s and 1920′s in New York. A further treasure emerged after her death of thousands of negatives and occasional prints of her visits to Europe. More immediately, she took some seven hundred photographs of Glasgow in the 1930′s. This exhibition shows previously-unseen contact prints and enlargements which have been processed by master-printer Robert Burns, who has used the same chemical processes that Margaret Watkins would have utilised including selenium toning.

Only at the Hidden Lane Gallery; ends April 14th 2015

The older Glasgow paintings and prints underline how much the city has changed over the years, and includes many rare and original watercolours from the late eighteen hundreds by David Small, the illustrator of many now-rare books on Glasgow.

Exhibition runs from October 18th to late November 2014.

Open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Leading Scottish writer Alasdair Gray is also an established artist, who this year celebrates his 80th birthday. Poet, painter, graphic artist and short story writer, he will have a major retrospective exhibition at Kelvingrove later this year.

He has recently been branching off in a new direction with his paintings, experimenting with abstract design and colour. A half dozen of these paintings form a third of the Hidden Lane Gallery’s show.

He will be joined on the gallery walls by Haiti’s leading writer, Frankétienne, the 78 year old poet, song writer, novelist, graphic artist and painter whose name has been mooted as a possible Nobel literature laureate. Frank will show a dozen of his most recent works and launch a CD of his songs and poems set to music by Haiti-based Glaswegian Mark Mulholland. Frank recites and sings while Mark plays on guitar. Frank writes in Creole and French. His was the first novel written in Creole in the troubled Caribbean republic that broke from France in 1803.

The parallels between the two artist/writers are extensive and fascinating.

During the exhitibition we will have for sale limited first edition hardback copies of Gray’s ‘Mavis Belfrage’, ‘The Fall of the Kelvin Walker’ and ‘A History Maker’ at their original published prices, and limited edition screenprints by Glasgow Print Studio. Also for sale is the most recent highly acclaimed Frankétienne/Mark Mulholland collaboration CD ‘Chaophonies’.

Saturday 22nd March – Saturday 17th May 2014

8 February – 15 March 2014

This month the Hidden Lane Gallery hosts a selection of African artefacts, brought to Europe by colonists, evangelists and soldiers, and collected over several decades from auctions and on European trips. Available for public viewing for the first time, the collection consists of masks, statues and carvings from the past 200 years, and some contemporary pieces.

We will be holding another exhibition of African Artefacts in October this year.

]]> http://hiddenlanegallery.com/exhibitions/101-artefacts-from-africa/feed/ 0 http://hiddenlanegallery.com/exhibitions/margaret-watkins-art-and-advertisin/ http://hiddenlanegallery.com/exhibitions/margaret-watkins-art-and-advertisin/#comments Fri, 25 Oct 2013 15:47:12 +0000 http://hiddenlanegallery.com/?p=700

Continuing its series of exhibitions of the work of Margaret Watkins, the celebrated Canadian-born photographer who lived in obscurity in Glasgow for the last 40 years of her life, the gallery shows, for the first time, her innovative approach to photography for advertising. Much of it appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers Bazaar and the daily papers in New York, commissioned by clients such as Macy’s famed stores, leading American and French cosmetics companies and many others. She applied her artistic eye to each subject, determined to turn the advertising into something more artistic and attractive, just as in her approach to her other, better known, pictorial work.

The show opens on November 9th and will be running until February 2014.