Summerhall
Caroline McNairn: Dreaming of heroic days.
1 August – 26 September 2014
Caroline McNairn, In the Making, Courtesy of City Art Centre, Edinburgh
This exhibition celebrates Caroline McNairn's (1955-2010) year spent painting in Russia and Ukraine. This was the culmination of a historic cultural exchange between Scotland and the former USSR organised by Andrew Brown, director of Edinburgh's 396 Gallery and Baroness Smith, then chairman of the GB-USSR-Friendship Society. McNairn's painting was profoundly influenced by this cultural intercourse, describing her stay in Moscow as a love affair with the city, and the resulting paintings as the visual equivalent of love poems.
One of the paintings exhibited, Looking Outside (now owned by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), was exhibited in the ground-breaking exhibition of Scottish painting in Moscow in 1989. Many of the other paintings displayed reflect McNairn's time with the Kievsky Station Group in Russia – paintings which are in McNairn's words "something beautiful for Russia". They portray memories of the eclectic Moscow skyline - onion domes and Stalinist skyscrapers fractured by time, distance, and the confusion of post-communist disorder.
Presented by Beyond Borders UK and supported by Friends of Caroline McNairn
Mon-Sun 11am-9pm
Outside August: Mon-Sun, 11am-6pm