EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND.- The Fruitmarket Gallery’s innovative and prestigious publishing program now has an established international reputation for unusual and high quality visual art books, with commissioned critical and fictional writing. Publishing is a key component of The Fruitmarket Gallery’s creative program. Making publications with artists plays a vital part in the development of their career, and commissioning new texts ensures the support of new critical writing about art in Scotland and elsewhere.

The Fruitmarket Gallery has had a busy year of publishing, with the beautiful Life Beneath the Shadow produced for Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibition in collaboration with 2006 Booker Prize longlisted writer James Robertson. Documenting Cai’s spectacular Black Rainbow that launched the 2005 Edinburgh Art Festival, this stunning book brings together Cai’s gunpowder portraits of infamous Edinburgh characters like Major Weir and James Hogg, and Robertson’s new ghost stories inspired by Cai’s portraits.

Another recent publication, Dada’s Boys: Identity and Play in Contemporary Art, which had record sales throughout the run of the exhibition, has been shortlisted for The Art Newspaper & AXA Art Exhibition Catalogue Award 2006. The winner of the £5,000 award will be announced in November and will be presented by Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry. A book on the work of Dutch artist, Marijke van Warmerdam, examining her work in more depth, has been created for the Fruitmarket Gallery’s Edinburgh Art Festival 2006 exhibition. It includes essays by The Fruitmarket Gallery Director, Fiona Bradley and critic Caoimhín Mac Giolla Leith and is co-published with Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

In September 2006, The Fruitmarket Gallery will produce a major new publication on the work of Callum Innes that will offer an opportunity to survey the full span of Innes’s career. The publication will be a substantial, retrospective monograph, tracing the development of his practice from 1990 to 2006. Although there have been several smaller catalogue-type publications about Innes, what is needed at this stage in the career of Scotland’s pre-eminent painter is a sizable career-spanning monograph. Innes’s monograph will include an 8,000-word interview with Callum Innes by Paul Bonaventura, curator, critic and Senior Research Fellow at the Ruskin School, Oxford. Also included are essays by Michael Auping, Chief Curator at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth and scholar on American Abstract Expressionism; Richard Cork, art critic, historian and broadcaster and Eric de Chassey, Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Tours in France.

Staying with Scottish artists in December, Ayrshire-born Christine Borland will present her work in the Gallery. Alongside the exhibition will be a substantial monograph: the most comprehensive survey of Borland’s work to date. Bringing together major themes and preoccupations of Borland’s practice over the last fifteen years, this publication will be an essential sourcebook for curators, students and an international audience both new to and familiar with Christine Borland’s work. Borland’s monograph will also include an interview with the artist, essays by Fiona Bradley, Director of The Fruitmarket Gallery; historian, writer and broadcaster Ruth Richardson, who has published numerous papers in medical and historical journals, and distinguished curator, Maria Lind.