EDINBURGH.- At a recent General Assembly meeting, the Royal Scottish Academy elected four new Royal Academicians: Claire Barclay, Ken Currie, Barry McGlashan and Caroline Walker.
Claire Barclay RSA (Elect) works predominantly with sculpture and print and is recognized for her large-scale installations informed by the contexts in which they temporarily exist. These include Thrum, produced for MAC Belfast and Yield Point, made in response to Tramway, Glasgow.
Her work engages a wide range of hand making and machine fabrication processes to explore the nature of materials, methods of production, and relationships between people and objects. Different elements provoke ideas as to possible scenarios and interactions in relation to the human body. She is interested in how people are affected by material and form both physically and psychologically, and comprehend these by engaging a sophisticated and primal understanding of the tactile world we inhabit. Claire Barclay is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.
Ken Currie RSA (Elect) is renowned for his unsettling portrayal of the human figure. His rich, luminous paintings depict mysterious rites, rituals, and quasi-medical practices, offering a meditation on violence in its many guises.
Currie studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1978-1983 and rose to attention within a generation of painters known as the 'New Glasgow Boys' in the 1980s. Through the 90's, deeply affected by humanitarian events in Eastern Europe, Currie's works evolved, his focus shifting to confront ideas of mortality and corruption, both physical and moral. Over the last 10 years Currie's work has addressed the horrors of the contemporary world, without shying away from their brutality or grotesque nature. His painting Unknown Man, a portrait of the eminent Forensic Anthropologist Sue Black was acquired for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2022. Ken Currie is represented by Flowers Gallery, London.
Barry McGlashan RSA (Elect)’s paintings take place between the memories of places visited, old photographs, passages from literature, and remembered scenes from films, with the constant being his interest in the materiality of paint and surface.
Born in Aberdeen in 1974, McGlashan studied Drawing and Painting at Gray’s School of Art, graduating in 1996. He returned to the Painting Department at Gray’s in 1998 and taught there until 2005 when he left to pursue painting full-time. He regularly exhibits both nationally and internationally with examples of his work being held in numerous private and public collections. He has been the recipient of many awards throughout his career and in 2019, was invited to exhibit in the Rubenshuis, the historic studio of Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp. Barry McGlashan is represented by Frestonian Gallery, London.
Caroline Walker RSA (Elect)’s paintings explore the performance of gender identity, femininity, and question the norms of depicting women and the female form across a range of socio-economic contexts. Blurring the boundary between objectivity and lived experience, Walker highlights the often-overlooked jobs performed by women and the psychologically charged spaces they inhabit.
Born in Dunfermline, where she also currently lives and works, Walker received a BA in Painting from Glasgow School of Art in 2004 and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2009. Caroline Walker is represented by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.
As part of the body of Royal Scottish Academicians, Claire Barclay, Ken Currie, Barry McGlashan and Caroline Walker will be invited to participate in the life of the Academy by sitting on committees, awards panels and hanging committees. The four artists will also be asked to deposit a Diploma Work into the RSA’s Nationally Recognised Collection. This collection dates back 200 years and is one of the largest and most important Collections of Scottish Art and associated archives and artefacts anywhere in the world.
