EDINBURGH.- For the 2017 Edinburgh Art Festival Ingleby Gallery reaches the half way point of its year-long marathon and per se and – a sequential exhibition where one work is paired with another for two weeks at a time across a stretch of twelve months.

Having begun with Mark Wallinger’s epic film The End, a thread has been woven through the work of such diverse artists as Albrecht Dürer, Katie Paterson, Callum Innes and Agnes Martin. In each case there’s a link between the two works on show, but there is also a no-less intriguing connection between the works that are not together, made by the work that comes between: a continuum perfectly illustrated by this summer’s sequence.

At first glance the large abstract paintings of James Hugonin, the small-scale still lives of Giorgio Morandi, and Ragnar Kjartansson’s film of a rock band playing the same song over and over again for six unbroken hours, may not appear to have very much in common, but bringing them together reveals an unmistakable connection of spirit.

Fittingly, for an exhibition that is in itself something of a durational challenge, the half way point brings us to a sequence of artists whose very different work and approach is nonetheless linked by their dogged pursuit of ever-varying repetitions of the same subject.

All are the products of an unusual single-mindedness: Morandi working in semi-monastic isolation in Bologna in the middle years of the 20th century, painting the same sets of jugs and vessels over and over again; Hugonin working today - equally isolated from the wider world- high in the Cheviot hills between England and Scotland, working and reworking the possibilities of sequence, series, repetition and variance; and the Icelandic artist Kjartansson whose unique approach to collaborative and durational performance has firmly established has reputation as one of the leading performance artists of the present day.

Kjartansson’s film A Lot of Sorrow depicts the performance orchestrated by Kjartansson at MOMA PS1 in 2013 in which he asked the American rock band The National to play their song Sorrow repeatedly for six hours straight. Described by the New York Times as “Minimalist in structure: yet unimaginably expansive” it is a masterpiece of endurance art - soothingly melancholic and strangely hypnotic. It will be screened in full daily (see opening hours) from 8 August, the first time that Kjartansson’s work has been seen in Scotland.

Giorgio Morandi (1890 - 1964) was born in Bologna where he lived and worked all his life. He was a painter and printmaker who devoted his life’s work to making small-scale, tonally muted still-lives and landscapes, a deceptively simple choice of subject which belies a mastery and economy of materials and composition. He has come to be recognised as one of the most distinctive and singular artists of the twentieth century whose work carries with it an unmistakable sensibility, born of a finding a peculiar intensity in the most ordinary subjects.

Raised in a family of acting professionals Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976) brings together the artifice of the theatre and the conventions of Western Romance in durational performances and immersive, film installations. His works simultaneously incorporate the grandiose and the banal; balancing emotional sincerity with the knowingly absurd. Kjartansson represented Iceland at the 2009 Venice Biennale and has since established himself at the cutting-edge of contemporary performance art. Recent solo presentations include the New Museum, New York; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Center in Washington DC and the Barbican Centre, London. Ragnar Kjartansson lives and works in Reykjavík, Iceland.

James Hugonin (b. 1950) makes paintings that are composed of thousands of coloured marks applied over an underlying grid with a slow and deliberate colour notation; each painting is written like a musical score before a single mark is made and is completed over many months. Hugonin’s paintings are unlike any others being made in the world today, owing something perhaps to Seurat’s pointillism or the early works of Agnes Martin, but also resonating, in their process, with the work of minimalist composers such as John Cage and Steve Reich. Public collection include the Tate London, National Gallery of Wales; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Arts Council Collection of Great Britain. James Hugonin lives and works in Wooler, UK.