BUNCH OF FIVES

The Union Gallery celebrates its anniversary this month with a group exhibition featuring work by some of the artists who have shown here over the previous five years.

No particular theme prevails, although there’s a general lightness of touch which matches the season and the sunshine-flooded premises.

What follows is a selection of personal favourites, from which others are omitted mostly for reasons of space or some difficulty in photographing them adequately. More images will follow later in the month.

First up is Tadeusz Deregowski’s postcard-sized oil (above), in which he has reached by his own circuitous route a quickening of texture which reminded me of Cathy Campbell's ‘Afternoon Spider Plant’, shown here last year. Interestingly, Deregowski’s restless enthusiasm for travel and new scenes is tempered by a slight reserve in his use of colour. Campbell, by contrast, matches a fascination for the complex intimacies of domestic shapes and spaces with an often vivid palette. Four of her most recent paintings now on display have evolved along slightly more abstract lines, with greater simplicity of form and brightness. Shown below, and more typical of her earlier work, is ‘Early’.

In Audrey Grant's ‘Standing Figure (Leaning)’ one finds a concern for the alternative and out-of-kilter. I enjoyed the mid-air flecks of colour which seem almost to be being blown or hurled towards the subject. I enjoyed too the mysterious hieroglyphs which look at first like scratches on a blackboard, then emerge from background onto the figure’s skirt as if in irritated contradiction of, or intense interest in, the point of bending departure.

Holding their own beside Annette Edgar’s exuberant ‘Runner’ are four much smaller abstracts by Trevor Jones. I loved their optimism, their appetising application of paint with knife, and the way all that positive energy is effectively focused within black frames. Shown below is ‘Etude Op. 25’.

To appreciate the artful irregularity of Fiona Thompson’s hand-built ceramics, it really helps to get up close. Sometimes their organic bulges are reminiscent of gourds or bellies. There are satisfying and undisguised drips among the flesh tones. In this detail of ‘Contained Animal Jar III’, an elevated toucan seems to have slipped or avoided altogether the cage.

In Joyce Gunn Cairns’s ‘The Gilded Cage’, however, a loving mother may have slipped into captivity, and without realising it. Or is it perhaps the child – whose hair colour matches that of the caged canary's plumage – who has unwittingly entered a prison of emotion and familial obligation? Typically of Cairns’s work, the mental states here are not static. Relations which first appear set soon dissolve and re-form under closer scrutiny.

Finally, who could resist Jackie Gardner’s ‘Angus Fields in Springtime’ (below)? It’s an instantly familiar, blustery turmoil of hope and foreboding; and one which – despite being a non-political painting – is still peculiarly apt in our current Scottish climate.  AM

Now We Are 5 continues at the Union Gallery (45 Broughton Street) until 29 July.