Edinburgh Art Festival review

Edwin G Lucas: An Individual Eye (until February 10, 2019)

Platform: 2018 (ends today)

City Art Centre

The Days Never Seem The Same: Gunnie Moberg & Margaret Tait (until October 28)

Stills Gallery

Ross Birrell & David Harding: Triptych (ends today)

Trinity Apse

Lucy Skaer: The Green Man (until October 6)

Talbot Rice Gallery

THIS year’s 15th “edition” of the Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) encompasses 36 exhibitions in 25 venues, as well as roving performance pieces such as Ruth Ewan’s Sympathetic Magick, one of four EAF commissions and a collaboration between the young Aberdeen-born artist and Ian Saville, a self-style “Marxist magician”.

Pre-eminent among the static, gallery-based exhibitions – though equally concerned with performance, as it turns out – is the Fruitmarket Gallery’s Woman With A Red Hat, a retrospective of sorts for the highly-regarded British artist Tacita Dean, recipient of three major London exhibitions earlier this year. Works range in size from the massive When I Raised The Tempest, a 2016 chalk-on-blackboard drawing which dominates the upper gallery, to the tiny His Picture In Little, filmed in 2017 and back-projected through a hole in the wall on to a tiny screen made of vinyl. It’s about the size of a chocolate bar and features Ben Whishaw, Stephen Dillane and David Warner, three actors of different ages who have all played Hamlet. Downstairs, there’s more Shakespeare, another actor (Tim Piggot-Smith this time) and more wry, playful musings on cinema, theatre and its various contrivances in Foley Artist, an installation piece which celebrates those unseen creators of sound effects. Four more films, including the 50-minute Event For A Stage, and two wall-mounted sets of work drawn from Dean’s collection of vintage postcards make this one of EAF’s most compelling draws.

Across the road in the City Art Centre are four artists at the outset of their careers as well as one who laboured in anonymity for much of his and is only now receiving the recognition denied him during his lifetime. He is Edwin G Lucas, Leith-born and a lawyer by trade, who was denied a place at art school by parental opposition but who spent his life painting anyway. He fell first under the spell of the Surrealists – and it’s a rare treat to see his dreamlike representations of familiar (and in some cases long-demolished) Edinburgh landmarks – and later produced work in a fluid, colourful, avant-garde style that also drew on Cubism. It’s not easy to discern a singular vision which is definitively his, but if this retrospective wins him even a small space in the story of mid-20th century Scottish art, it has done its job. Platform: 2018, meanwhile, presents work by four young, female, Glasgow-trained artists – Scots Rae-Yen Song and Isobel Lutz-Smith, Donegal-born Renèe Helèna Browne and Annie Crabtree, from Yorkshire – in an annual showcase of new work chosen by a panel of invited artists after an open call. Song’s whimsical works exploring her dual Scottish and Chinese identities through sculpture and costume are the most eye-catching, though Lutz-Smith’s eerily kitsch video installation isn’t far behind. Brown presents a beguiling audio installation while Crabtree turns her camera on herself for the large-scale video piece Body Of Water.

Head south from the City Art Centre to Stills, Edinburgh’s photographic gallery, and you wind up well north of the capital – in Orkney, in fact. Stills’s EAF contribution is a two-woman show celebrating the work of the late artist, photographer and gardener Gunnie Moberg, Gothenberg-born but Orkney-based from the mid-1970s onwards, and the incomparable Margaret Tait, a poet and film-maker who was born in Kirkwall the day the Armistice was signed and spent much of her working life there after stints in Edinburgh and Rome. Three aspects of Moberg’s work are presented – her stark, black and white documentary photographs; images of authors and artists taken at Orkney’s St Magnus Festival; and vivid double exposure shots of flowers in her garden – while the back half of the gallery is given over to a welcome showing of some of Tait’s short films. Among them are the iconic pair Rose Street, from 1956, and Hugh MacDiarmid: A Portrait, from 1964, as well as some of her more abstract and experimental work such as Garden Pieces. Completed the year before she died in 1999, it features images hand-drawn straight on to the film.

Among EAF’s four site-specific commissions, the prime spot has gone to frequent collaborators Ross Birrell and David Harding, formerly head of the influential Environmental Art department at Glasgow School of Art. They have mounted their piece, Triptych, in the richly atmospheric Trinity Apse, a gothic curio located down a close off the High Street. A three-channel film using footage of Syrian soprano Rasha Rizk performing with the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra, it’s complex and multi-layered but essentially draws together themes of dislocation, loss, war and place into a confection of sound, atmosphere and light – the last supplied by two “chromatic mosaics” fixed into the arches at either end of the building.

Even more daunting in its proliferation of sources and associations is The Green Man, which focuses on the work of Turner Prize-nominated Scot Lucy Skaer, in collaboration with Rosalind Nashashibi, Hanneline Visnes, Fiona Connor and Will Holder. Skaer has dipped into the collection of the University of Edinburgh and pulled out a pleasing array of artefacts to help frame the exhibition, among them a selection of antique brass musical instruments, a letter from James VI about a dog and Dermatome Man, a curious, glazed papier-mâché model dating from the early 20th century. But the exhibition’s weight (both literal and figurative) comes from Skaer’s sets of massive, clustered sculptural installations in bronze, yew, copper, mahogany, walnut, aluminium and marble. Set on the floors of the gallery’s two main spaces, they can be viewed from above as well as up close: along with the thick exhibition booklet, visitors will need both views to make out Skaer’s meaning in this most complex and multi-layered of shows.