THIS year's Edinburgh Art Festival was launched at the brand new Ingleby Gallery on Calton Road, a venue symbolic of the event's distinctive public-private partnership as well, perhaps, as the festival's desire to celebrate something new and newswort
hy at its fifth birthday.
The gallery, set up by husband and wife team Richard and Florence Ingleby 10 years ago in their Georgian house in the New Town, has marked its first decade with a hugely ambitious move, converting a former night club into a super-slick white cube space. The architect, Helen Lucas, has done a spare and simple job and the true surprise is the incredible light and vista available in a street that has always felt like a dark canyon beside Waverley Station.
Downstairs there is office accommodation, a central space, a small gallery and a room dedicated to prints and multiples. The revelation is the upstairs gallery, a gallery in the truest sense, a vast, long room lit by a long arcade of windows.
The opening show is Huen by Kay Rosen, a senior American artist who is admired but not well known in Britain. It is low key and assured. Rosen's work is simple, without being simplistic, playful without being too cute. She works in text and typography, in prints and wall paintings. The works are short puns, one liners and typographical tricks.
Outside, in a bold and impressive move, they have set up a billboard space and invited Mark Wallinger to inaugurate it. His simple salvo, the words "Mark Wallinger is Innocent" in bold print, is a wry comment on his Turner Prize-winner status, his genuine interest in the art of protest and perhaps a sly joke about being asked to lend his name to a flagship project.
Edinburgh-born artist Susan Collis is showing on the ground floor. At first glance the space seems in the middle of an installation. There are screws and rawlplugs in the walls, a messy brush and a bit of wood in the corners, a series of white drips on the floor. On closer examination these marks are not the result of bad housekeeping, but of jewelled precision. Those screws are silver and gold; the drips inlaid mother of pearl.
This a good, confident spread of opening work. The gallery has made an excellent job of its stunning building and its brave relaunch. What it might need now to develop in the programme is little more depth and complexity.
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Collis runs until September 24; Rosen until September 27; Wallinger until October 31 •
www.inglebygallery.comThe full article contains 439 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
