The Fruitmarket Gallery

Ingrid Calame

4 August – 9 October 2011

The Fruitmarket Gallery is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Scotland of the work of American artist Ingrid Calame, whose beautifully-coloured, intricate drawings and paintings have a specific, if abstracted relationship to the world.

Calame’s paintings and drawings all begin with the artist tracing marks, stains and cracks on the ground. Back in the studio, the tracings are combined, layered and re-traced in coloured pencil, and painted in enamel or, more recently oil paint. The paintings and drawings that result from this singular process are beautiful and intelligent abstract works. Displayed in a gallery, they retain their connection with the world outside at several removes, exerting an oddly insistent presence.

This exhibition brings together drawings and paintings made from 1997 to 2011. Highlights include sspspss…UM biddle BOP (1997), a huge painting on Mylar that drapes from the gallery wall to the floor, and LA River at Clearwater Street (2006–8), a new wall drawing made especially for and in The Fruitmarket Gallery for the 2011 Edinburgh Art Festival. The drawing is made using the ‘pounce’ technique developed in the Renaissance, whereby loose pigment is forced onto the wall through holes pricked in a preparatory drawing, to create an ephemeral ghost of the original marks. Poised between these two vast visual events, the exhibition presents the development of Calame’s abstract visual language from her earliest outdoor tracings to her most recent workings and reworkings of marks recorded in Los Angeles, Buffalo and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

30 August – 9 October:

Mon–Sat: 10–6pm, Sun: 12–5pm

Event

5 August 2011
Artist Talk: Ingrid Calame in conversation with Fiona Bradley

3pm

Free, booking advised

To book, contact 0131 226 8182 or [email protected]