EDINBURGH.- This summer, the largest ever indoor exhibition by Andy Goldsworthy takes over the National Galleries of Scotland in the heart of Edinburgh. Featuring over 200 works, the show includes stunning installations made in response to the iconic Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) building, as well as drawings, photographs, films, sketchbooks and archival items dating back to the mid-1970s.
Goldsworthy is internationally recognised for his work with natural materials such as clay, stones, reeds, branches, leaves, snow and ice. Over fifty years, he has created a unique and highly influential body of work that speaks of our relationship with the land. In Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years the land is brought indoors, in Scotland’s capital city.
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years has been conceived by the artist as a single immersive artwork in response to the space, materials and character of the RSA building. Occupying all of the upper rooms and most of the lower floor, the exhibition is at once beautiful and ambitious in scale. The interrelationship of humans and the working land is a recurrent theme in Goldsworthy’s art and in the exhibition. He often presents the land as a hard, hostile and brutal place. Fences and barriers feature prominently, in the form of rusted barbed wire stretched across a room, and a massive, cracked clay wall. As in nature, beauty and danger co-exist.
While Andy Goldsworthy is one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary art, his work is seldom seen in exhibitions. He has completed outdoor commissions all around the world, from the Arctic Circle to Tasmania, but the inclusion of his work in museum shows is rare. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is by far the largest and most ambitious indoor exhibition of his work ever attempted. Never seen before and never to be seen again, this exhibition is set to cement Goldsworthy’s position as one of the leading artists of our time.
In a diverse career spanning four decades, Andy Goldsworthy has become one of the most prominent and iconic contemporary sculptors. In photographs, sculptures, installations, and films, Goldsworthy documents his explorations of the effects of time, the relationship between humans and their natural surroundings, and the beauty in loss and regeneration. Goldsworthy’s permanent projects and ephemeral works contrast in their scale, tension, and lifetime, but are unified through their responses to the environment and his constant investigation into understanding the landscape he is in.
Recent permanent site-specific installations by Goldsworthy include Road Line, College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine; Walking Wall, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Watershed, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Stone Sea, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Chaumont Cairn, Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, France; Path and Rising Stone, Albright Knox Art Gallery, New York; and Wood Line, Presidio of San Francisco, California. Goldsworthy is currently working on Hanging Stones in North York Moors, UK. In this ongoing project, ten existing buildings, all in varying states of disrepair, have been or will be rebuilt as artworks and connected by a six-mile walk encompassing Northdale, near Rosedale Abbey.
Other permanent works can be seen at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; de Young Museum, California; Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York; Storm King Art Center, New York; Stanford University, California; and Haute Provence Geological Reserve in Digne-les-Bains, France, among numerous other sites. Major solo exhibitions of Goldsworthy's work have been presented by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Neuberger Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; and Des Moines Art Center, Illinois.
The artist was born in Cheshire, England, in 1956, and is now based in Scotland.
