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Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years review — a master rights some wrongs
Andy Goldsworthy is imaginative, inventive, poetic, hard-working, big-hearted and brave. He has been making art for 50 years. Nature loves him, people who have seen his work in books love him, people who go to his exhibitions love him, I love him, my wife loves him, and so do my kids. But for reasons we need to go into, the art establishment does not. Indeed, it ignores him. He has never been nominated for the Turner prize. He's not in the Royal Academy. He hasn't received an MBE or an OBE, let alone been knighted or damed like the Gormleys, Kapoors or Emins. He has never had a show at the Tate or the Hayward. No one has asked him to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. For 50 years Goldsworthy has been making art that touches the heart and delights the eye. But the art establishment can't see it. Why? One reason is that his work is centred on the landscape, and the art establishment, these days, is an urban beast. Sheep don't fret about their identities. Trees don't remember the empire. Farmers don't express themselves with their clothing as relentlessly as Leigh Bowery did, night after night, club after club, in the posthumous show he had recently at Tate Modern. Another problem is the delightful nature of Goldsworthy's art: that it is so easy to love. The gorgeous patterns he finds in autumn leaves, the magical moments he creates with nature's simplest materials, the ecstatic understanding he has of the joy of colour are not neurotic enough to appeal to the art world's tastes. It sees itself as a complex ally of the ego, not a joyous buddy of the id. It hungers for difficulty, rigour, unpleasure. So my advice to the commissars of the art establishment, to Tate directors and Serpentine curators, is to get yourselves to Edinburgh and visit Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years at the Royal Scottish Academy. It's a look at the whole of his lengthy career, but also a statement show that seems determined to stamp out the rumour that he's a softie. The real Andy Goldsworthy — hardcore, thoughtful, mysterious — is being encouraged to emerge. It begins spectacularly with a long and shaggy sheepskin rug running down the centre of the posh stairs that welcome us to the Royal Scottish Academy. Infused with the stony rigour of the Scottish Enlightenment, carved out of local granite, the posh stairs speak of privilege and rank, politeness and empire. Goldsworthy's rug, meanwhile, ascending shaggily step by step, speaks of muddy fields and the dirty bottoms of sheep. Two worlds are colliding, and societal sparks are flying. The attack continues with the next sight, a filigree of delicate lines stretching between the portentous Doric columns that loom over the entrance. What is it? A silk hanging? A beaded embroidery? As you get closer, you finally recognise it: barbed wire. From many fields and with many patinas. For the first time in its unpleasant history, the vicious outdoor fencing has been woven by an industrious spider into a curtain of fragile beauty. • Like nature itself, the show keeps switching moods. Gravestones, a lumpy gallery full of rocks that appear to have emerged from beneath the floor, like the biblical prophecy about the resurrection of the dead at the End of Days, is doomy and gothic. It's made out of stones dug up in the cemeteries of Dumfries and Galloway. But Sheep Paintings, two panels of cosmic swirlings with a perfect circle at their centre, feels druidically mystical, like that installation with the setting sun at Tate Modern by Olafur Eliasson. Goldsworthy's solar discs were actually created by the muddy feet of sheep feeding around a perfectly circular food trough. In his student days Goldsworthy worked on a farm, where he learnt a respect for labour and inherited an appreciation for the seasons. Despite their many moods, his installations are invariably centred on a simple piece of geometry: a circle, a square, a line. Oak Passage seems, from its first angle, to be an impenetrable tangle of branches. But as you walk round you see that its centre is dissected by a miraculously straight path. Man and nature are doing their thing in evident harmony. Most readers will know Goldsworthy's work from the sumptuous photography books he produced in the 1990s. They were popular and are, I suspect, the chief reason the art world took against him: it dislikes crowd-pleasers. Some of those images are on show here as well — a mysterious zigzag in the earth created with the feathers of a heron; a bottomless hole in a tree fashioned from autumn leaves. Rather than shining glossily in a coffee table book, they hang coolly on the gallery walls, part of a thoughtful photographic encapsulation in which the rigour that went into their production is easier to note. They remain beautiful — what a nose he has for the intensity of nature's colours — but their ambition to record a fleeting moment is much more evident. The job of this gorgeous photography is to record a natural performance that would otherwise be lost. All through the event there's a feeling that the artist is trying to right some wrongs: a sense of correction. Here, finally, the truth is being projected that he is, at heart, a minimalist: a lover of geometry's simplest order. But where most minimalists are urbanites, searching for industrial precision with industrial materials, he's a rural minimalist who finds order and simplicity in nature. If it's not there, he inserts it into the chaos. And like all great landscape artists — and he's certainly one of those — he's bringing the outdoors indoors. It's a traditional British ambition. It deserves far greater recognition that it has hitherto received.
BBC News
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
A life's artwork: 50 years of Andy Goldsworthy
When the National Galleries of Scotland first approached Andy Goldsworthy about a show to mark his 50th year as an artist, they expected him to focus on one of their outdoor mingling inside and out, as he did in a show at the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh in he asked to have the run of one of their largest spaces – the Royal Scottish Academy in the heart of features over 200 works, from photographs, films and sketchbooks dating back to the 1970s to major installations made in response to the neoclassical building. For the past few weeks, he's been transporting pieces of art from the area in Dumfries and Galloway where he lives."To have this building to work with is a major moment for me as an artist," he explains."I don't think I've ever had an exhibition that has paralleled the work that I'm making in the landscape but because the RSA is less than two hours from where I live, it has become a dialogue, with everything intertwined." Born in Cheshire in 1956, Andy Goldsworthy worked on farms in Yorkshire as a teenager, where he learned the skills which have become part of his process. Harrowing the fields, picking out and piling stones, cutting, digging and stacking. After studying art, he began photographing and filming these ephemeral has always risen to the challenge of working outdoors, adapting to the elements and adjusting to the material he finds. Staging such a major show inside has brought new issues to overcome and a large-scale building which he's determined to work with, not against.A runner made from sheep fleeces, daubed with colours marking different farms, carpets the stairs leading up to the galleries. A sculpture made of discarded work gloves, worn and dusty, is glimpsed in a corner, leading to a slowly cracking clay wall, and a 20-metre-long Oak Passage made from discarded trees."The oak branches stand on an oak floor and that's not by chance," he says."It reveals that this was once a tree, I hope, in the minds of people who walk it." The relationship between humans and land is a constant theme in his work. Fences and barriers feature prominently, including a rusted barbed wire piece which extends across an entire room."That wire fence is about the difficulties and obstructions which every artist has to face, especially one that works in the land."But it is also about finding a way through."Goldsworthy came to Scotland 40 years ago, and set up home in Dumfries and west Scotland, he says, was affordable and welcoming."I liked the right to roam, the openness of the farmers, and the ability to enjoy the land." It was all those factors which made him stay, raising a family here, and creating a large body of says the show is a tribute to all those who supported him."People have shown such openness and tolerance and they're the reason I've stayed. This exhibition is an acknowledgement of just how wonderful it has been, to show my appreciation of Scotland." He continues to produce work, locally and globally, and one of the rooms hosts a very personal work in progress."My former wife Judith died in 2008 and when I was visiting her grave, I noticed there was a pile of stones by the cemetery wall. And I discovered they're found in every cemetery, displaced from digging graves," he says"So when a body goes into the earth, there are always some stones left over. There's an exchange between the body and the land and I thought that was very powerful." He began to gather stones from hundreds of graveyards across the region."It took me two or three years to even touch them, they felt so special."The stones on display in the RSA will form part of a huge project he plans for the Lowther Hills."It'll be in a walled enclosure on top of a small hill, with beautiful views."It'll be a sea of humanity; a sea of stones and I hope it'll be spiritually uplifting."Andy Goldsworthy: 50 Years is a National Galleries Scotland exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy building from 26 July to 2 November.
The Herald Scotland
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is monumental in every sense
You could call Andy Goldsworthy the ultimate outsider artist. Not in the sense of his being untutored or self-taught, or because he inhabits the margins of the art world. Neither is true. It's simply that outside is where he is for so much of the time. In the elements. Jumping naked into sun-dappled rivers running red with iron and peat, crawling through frozen hedges at dawn, submerging himself in a rock pool on the coast of Maine – and photographing or videoing the results. Or else he is cutting, twisting, shaping, bending, placing and patterning leaves, twigs, stones and branches for interventions in the natural world. This has been his take on outsider art for half a century, a fact reflected in the simple title of this extraordinary show of his work at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA). Accordingly, Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is monumental in every sense. In scale, ambition, time span covered, themes broached, questions asked and – perhaps most important of all – in emotions triggered as a result. It's hard to ask more of art than this, and rare to be delivered of anything as powerful. The downstairs galleries tell Goldsworthy's back story with a collection of older works and cases featuring archive photographs and sketchbooks. But as much as it is a retrospective, the show is also a rich source of recent works and of others newly created for the space. Read more: The first of these, Wool Runner, greets visitors at the entrance to the RSA. It's a carpet of discarded wool fleeces, marked here and there with the colours farmers use to identify their flocks. You can even smell the lanolin. Upstairs in Room Two, another new work titled Skylight. Few artists offered the chance to create site specific work in the vast galleries of the RSA respond to the height of the rooms or turn the lack of natural ambient light in some of them to their advantage. Goldsworthy does both. With Skylight he creates a sort of chapel made from bull-rushes which reach high up to the grimy skylight. Gravestones is the most affecting work. (Image: Sam Drake) Next door, in the room holding the show's most affecting work, is a partner piece titled Gravestones. Here, in the half-light, the eye is drawn down rather than up, to the stones which fill the space. They were collected from 108 cemeteries in Dumfries and Galloway, where the Leeds-born artist has lived since 1985, and the work was inspired by a visit he made to the grave of his ex-wife. The stones are essentially rubble removed by gravediggers as they prepare the ground for a burial. But for Goldsworthy they are a powerful symbol of transference and meaning: their removal to make space for a human body gives them a tremendous power. They become solemn objects, to be treated with respect. Resistance is a common theme, which seems odd at first for a land artist. This is work, after all, which deals often with natural spaces, open landscapes, weather, chance, time, the circle of life and the environment. But it is also work made in places which are quite literally fenced in. Permissions and rights of way are a constant concern for Goldsworthy – he is often asked to leave, not always politely – so the materials used to enforce and protect them inevitably find their way into the work. The most explicit example is Fence, another new, site-specific work. It greets visitors in the Sculpture Court. Wound round the two mighty pillars on either side of the main entrance to the main galleries – and blocking it – is what looks like a pretty trellis. Come closer, though: it's a forbidding barrier of rusted barbed wire. Read more: How the famous Oasis-Blur chart war became a West End play Supernatural fiction and psychological thriller - set in a Springburn high rise More obvious a theme is the earth and what it contains in terms of minerals. Iron is a favourite, also an important component of human blood. In Flags, which cuts across Room Three, Goldsworthy has collected the reddest earth he can from all 50 US states and made 50 flags in various shades. In 2020 they were flown on some of the 200 flagpoles outside the Rockerfeller Centre in New York. Iowa is the one which most closely resembles dried blood, others appear orange or pinkish. Elsewhere, more blood, only the real stuff this time. Driving home one night in 2004 Goldsworthy hits a hare. He scoops up the body, guts it, fills the head with snow and hangs it up. As the snow melts, drips and mingles with the blood, he captures the resulting patterns on large pieces of paper. This is Hare Blood And Snow, a beautiful (if gruesome) triptych. The works made from wood, stone, ferns, bull-rushes and other natural materials do dominate but the photographs and video works featuring Goldsworthy shouldn't be overlooked or their importance ignored. Yes, they are performative to an extent, but that isn't their chief aim. For the artist, they are simply adjuncts to the important experiential aspect of his art. In that rock-pool in Maine, for instance, his primary focus was not on the footage he would collect but on his own body: how he felt submerged under the seaweed as crabs nibbled his ears and his feet, as a rock under his back became increasingly uncomfortable. Then the sense of dislocation as the tide came in around him and floated his body clear. Goldsworthy himself is there for the opening, a sprightly 68-year-old dressed in T-shirt, jeans and hiking boots, a faded tattoo visible on one muscled forearm. At one point he mentions the philosopher and humanist Jacob Bronowski and quotes his famous dictum that the hand is the cutting edge of the mind. 'I think through my hands,' he adds. 'I get ideas through my hands and the world makes sense through my hands.' So go on, touch the work of Andy Goldsworthy – perhaps not literally, though it's unlikely he would care. But do it by wandering the halls of the grand old building on the Mound, where for a few months the outside has come inside to remind us of its elemental qualities – and where, guided the artist's eyes, work and yes, his hands, we can perhaps make our own sense of it all. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years opens at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh on July 26 (until November 2)
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pastoral play, AI portraits and a radical utopia for kids – the week in art
Andy GoldsworthyCaptivating retrospective of this countryside conceptualist who makes art with substances including sheep fleece, fern leaves, barbed wire and hare's blood. Read the review. Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 26 July to 2 November Virtual BeautyThe human body and self in the AI age, explored by artists from Orlan to Qualeasha Wood. Somerset House, London, until 28 September Pablo BronsteinThe artist's fascination with architectural history is unleashed on the Temple of Solomon. Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, until 2 November Monster Chetwynd: Thunder, Crackle and MagicRadical utopian art for the kids as Chetwynd creates this summer's Tate Play installation. Tate Modern, London, until 25 August Darwin in Paradise CampA queer take on evolutionary theory and Gauguin's Tahiti paintings, by Japanese-Samoan artist Yuki Kihara. Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, until 3 August A disagreement over this painting, Trans Forming Liberty, in which American painter Amy Sherald poses a trans woman as the Statue of Liberty, has led to the artist cancelling her hit exhibition American Sublime from showing at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. In March, Trump signed an executive order targeting the Smithsonian, claiming it had 'come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology' and the administration would restore it 'to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness'. The artist said she was told that the painting might be removed from the show to avoid provoking President Trump. The gallery later proposed an accompanying video of people discussing both the painting and transgender issues at large. She said this decision would have 'opened up for debate the value of trans visibility' which she rejected. Read the full story. A Norfolk woman handed over a 16th-century painting that was on Interpol's most-wanted list The Guardian's head of photography had her favourites at Arles photo festival Many of Russell Newell's photographs of Peckham, south-east London, have not been seen for the past 40 years The salty nooks of Folkestone were the setting for a bleakly brilliant coastal festival A pioneering female Renaissance artist got her due A visionary Australian artist got her first retrospective aged 90 Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion In the US, Black Girls in Art Spaces is bridging the cultural gaps You don't need a car in Los Angeles An exhibition is interrogating white-dominated AI Stormy Landscape With Ruins on a Plain by Georges Michel, c 1830s Nature is an unforgiving, awe-inspiring power in this French Romantic painting. Just like his British contemporaries Constable and Turner, Georges Michel worked in the open air. He mostly painted landscapes near Paris. He had a lot of imitators, hence the uncertainty about his attribution. You can see why this approach was popular. Even though the countryside spread out under those massive clouds is ordinary, even a bit nondescript, the artist finds sublimity in two archetypally Romantic themes: ruins and storms. The raised hill in the foreground is bleak and barren, and it's crowned with the shattered, eroded shell of a great house that time has reduced to little more than a fireplace and stumps of walls. Above it, low, dark storm clouds whip up to unleash brutal rain. It's an exciting blast of bleakness to hang in a cosy room. National Gallery, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years review – a wild walk between life, death and sheep-shearing
Rural life hits you in the face like the stink of cow dung as soon as you step into the Royal Scottish Academy. Andy Goldsworthy has laid a sheepskin rug up the classical gallery's grand staircase – very luxurious, except it's made from the scraps thrown away after shearing, stained blue or red with farmers' marks, all painstakingly stitched together with thorns. This is the Clarkson's Farm of art retrospectives, plunging today's urbanites into the raw sadness and beauty, the violence and slow natural cycles of the British countryside. Goldsworthy may love nature but he doesn't sentimentalise it. At the top of the stairs there's a screen and through its gaps you glimpse the galleries beyond. It feels mystical and calming, until you realise it's made of rusty barbed wire strung between two of the building's columns that serve as tightly-wound wire rollers. It made me think of Magnus Mills' darkly hilarious rural novel about hapless fencers, The Restraint of Beasts. Later you can relax looking at seductive, purple abstract watercolours – until you discover they are made with hare's blood and snow. The show is titled Fifty Years, which might make anyone feel old, and Goldsworthy may have been goaded by it. He fills the gallery's main floor with new and recent work, while you'll find an archive of his 20th-century career downstairs. But how could he exhibit his past achievements except in photos and video? Since the 1970s Goldsworthy, who was born in Cheshire and grew up on the outskirts of Leeds, has been making art with nature, in nature, even for nature, since some of his interventions could only be experienced by birds or sheep before the colour faded from a rubbed stone or a mat of leaves decayed. Other outdoor works are more permanent, using dry stone walling to make sheepfolds and little houses in sculpture parks and nature reserves. In Cumbria you'll find his monumental Grizedale Wall snaking between the trees. What makes this a work of art? It's simple. There's no practical reason a farmer would place an elegantly curving stone line in a forest. But by making it, Goldsworthy insists you ask what art is. He's a peasant dadaist. In photos of an early action he throws bunches of sticks in the sky to see how they fall – a fresh air reworking of Marcel Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages in which chance determined how a string fell. An entertaining video shows what happened when Goldsworthy brought a giant snowball from the Scottish Highlands to London's Smithfield meat market in June 2000: the meatpackers have fun moving it about with a forklift. Inside the snow, the artist gently explains, is a core of hair from Highland cattle. He's not saying meat is murder so much as what we consume is divorced from any sense of natural life. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion It is our connection with nature he wants to reawaken, not in a quiet contemplative way but as a shock. Earth and blood are the same, he suggests in the most powerful room. It is dominated by a whole wall made of cracked red clay that he collected by hand in Dumfriesshire's Lowther Hills. The epic scale and fiery colour seem more American than Scottish. Goldsworthy shows you this is a big country, too. The work is called Red Wall – but I don't think it's a political joke. The redness is all. In the same room a three-screen video records an alchemical performance in which Goldsworthy rubs a rock in a Dumfriesshire river to reveal a layer of iron-rich pure redness; the red appears as bloody clouds in the green water. Iron reddens the earth and reddens our blood. We are part of nature's cycle. Our bodies will return to the earth – at least, if you live in rural Dumfriesshire as Goldsworthy does. When you die there you still get buried, in a churchyard, according to Goldsworthy's grand project Gravestones, for which he has taken photographs of Dumfriesshire churchyards under stormy skies. Goldsworthy's 'gravestones' are not headstones but the pebbles and rocks that have to be removed when fresh graves are dug. He wants to create a vast monumental field with them, to show that there is animate nature and inanimate nature – blood and stone. We return to the earth, leaving our imperishable elements. He tests his idea in an installation here. Stones from graveyards form a continuous floor, like a rocky seashore, completely filling a room except for a narrow walkway. The stones have literally been cut short, neatly sliced through, to form a straight boundary between the artwork and the observer. It's typical of this artist's poetic precision. You wonder how he cut the stones in two so neatly, and accurately measured the perfect line they make. Then it hits you. This is the straight smooth absolute line between life and death. That's true in the country, and the city, too. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh from 26 July until 2 November 2025
