1970s: Tamara Krikorian
Fruitmarket opened at its current site, above Edinburgh’s Waverley station, in 1974, operating initially from just its ground floor space. During its early years, the gallery’s curatorial focus largely revolved around male British and American artists, while also looking to Europe, with exhibitions by Polish, Finnish and Dutch artists. Looking back through Fruitmarket’s archive, it is fascinating to see how much this early programming contrasts with the diversity and global reach of Fruitmarket’s exhibition programme now.
Tamara Krikorian was the first woman to have a solo exhibition in the gallery since the gallery’s founding. Born in Dorset to Armenian parents, Krikorian was an Edinburgh-based artist who became recognised for her pioneering video works. In 1979, Fruitmarket showed two of her new works in a solo show: Vanitas (Or an Illusion of Reality) and Tableau. Unusually, Krikorian’s ‘television sculptures’ did not seek to alter the hardware of the television, but instead took cues from forms of image-making such as 17th-century Dutch painting, to question the authority of broadcast as the sole means of using the television.
Krikorian was a notable figure in the development of video art in the UK during this period. In 1976, she presented Video: Towards Defining An Aesthetic at the newly opened Third Eye Centre in Glasgow (now The Centre for Contemporary Arts), the first exhibition of video art to take place in Scotland. In the same year, she also co-founded London Video Arts, which would later merge with another organisation to become LUX. During this period, The Third Eye Centre and Fruitmarket shared many values and maintained a reciprocal working relationship; artists who were invited to show their work in Glasgow would often be invited to tour to Edinburgh to exhibit in Fruitmarket, and vice versa. Earlier in 1979, Krikorian had already exhibited her installation An Ephemeral Art in Glasgow before the opening of Eye to Eye: Video Installations at Fruitmarket later in the year.
1980s: Jean-Michel Basquiat
1984 saw a shift in Fruitmarket’s curatorial ambitions, with Mark Francis becoming Director and the gallery taking over the upper floor of the building. Francis’s ambitious programme brought in many world-renowned artists from Nancy Spero to Dan Graham, while also giving space to Scottish artists such as Steven Campbell and Gwen Hardie. At this time the practice was to curate two shows alongside each other – one upstairs and one downstairs – making for some evocative juxtapositions, such as John Cage shown alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1984.
The iconic New York painter’s exhibition came at the height of his success and only four years before his tragic and untimely death in 1988. Paintings 1981–1984 was the first showing of Basquiat’s work in the UK – an exciting moment for the new Directorship, for Fruitmarket and for Edinburgh. Basquiat shot to fame as part of the artist duo SAMO with Al Diaz, who together made artworks in the cultural hotbed of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As a solo artist, Basquiat captured the more macabre side of New York life; the staggering class divides, racial inequality and continuing spatial segregation.
At the same time, Basquiat’s practice was deeply introspective and textual, reflecting on his own experience as an African-American man, but also as the child of a father with origins in Haiti and a mother from Puerto Rico. The exhibition featured 16 of Basquiat’s large works on canvas, many of which have become some of his most recognisable works: including Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits, In Italian and Hollywood Africans.
Later in the 1980s, Fiona McLeod took on the Directorship, exhibiting works by artists including Richard Hamilton, Max Ernst and Marie-Jo Lafontaine. A key exhibition during this period was the group show From Two Worlds in 1987, which featured the works of Sonia Boyce, Rasheed Araeen and Lubaina Himid, among others.
1990s: Seydou Keïta & Malick Sidibé
Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé are both globally recognised for their contributions to contemporary photographic practice on the African continent. The two photographers lived and worked in Bamako, Mali’s capital city, capturing thousands of portraits in their commercial studios in the city. Their photographs are both snapshots and archives of life in the period marking the end of French colonial rule in Mali and the promise of independence.
While Keïta had retired in the 1970s, following a stint working as a government photographer, his works weren’t shown internationally until 1991, when his photographs were shown anonymously at the Center for African Art in New York City. Four years later, his works were being shown at Fruitmarket alongside Sidibé’s (who had his first international exhibition in 1994). Sidibé had also been working in Bamako, capturing the party and club scenes in a newly independent and flourishing Mali. For Fotofeis ’95, the second Scottish International Festival of Photography, Fruitmarket Gallery presented the photographs of Keïta and Sidibé together.
The exhibition had originally been shown in two parts at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, but the curatorial decision was made to merge the works of the two artists into one show. This pairing allowed for both similarities and contradictions to emerge between these two photographers, who were working in the same city in the second half of the 20th century, albeit in vastly different national contexts. There are certainly similarities in the way that both artists intuitively and effortlessly deploy pattern and style as photographic devices and in their investment in the potential of the classic studio format – but also differences, in the contrast between Keïta’s interest in cosmopolitanism and more formal compositions versus Sidibé’s more candid, playful images of young people and hedonistic party-goers.
2000s: Ellen Gallagher
Fiona Bradley took over the Directorship in 2003. Her programme continued to build on the strengths of the gallery’s history of showing Scottish and international contemporary art and notably giving high profile exhibitions to women artists.
One of these women artists was the American multi-disciplinary artist Ellen Gallagher, famous for her collaged and painted works. Gallagher’s paintings and collages are filled with repeated motifs and regardless of the medium she works with, are full of motion and fluidity. The exhibition, titled Orbus, was staged at Fruitmarket at the end of 2004 and into 2005. It featured older and new works, selected in close collaboration with Gallagher herself. The artist often uses biomorphic and oceanic forms to represent the Black body and experience, such as in Watery Ecstatic, inspired by the aquatic, afrofuturist world created by the musical duo Drexciya. This underwater kingdom is populated by enslaved African women and children who were murdered by being thrown off ships during the transatlantic slave trade – the musical duo pays homage to their loss by imagining their survival and their creation of this new world.
Orbus featured three works on this theme, including a film titled Murmur made in collaboration with the Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne, which directly references Drexciya. The exhibition also made space for new concerns in Gallagher’s practice. This took shape in the presentation of her film Monster, where the artist scratched, drew, slowed down and sped up footage from a Cold War-era science fiction film, quite literally changing the narrative to create a new story about alien visitations. In another film titled Super Boo, Gallagher combined animations and drawings with cutouts of Bruce Lee and Jim Kelly from adverts in Ebony magazine, who move and pose across the screen.
2010s: Karla Black
In 2011, Fruitmarket had the honour of curating Scotland’s representation at the 54th Venice Biennale (Scotland + Venice). Karla Black was selected to represent Scotland in the same year that she was nominated for the Turner Prize. The artist presented a series of sculptures, which she described as “almost objects”, over nine rooms in the grand 15th century Palazzo Pisani, which sits pride of place looking out over Venice’s Grand Canal.
Black’s distinct, instantly recognisable immersive sculptural installations are made with everyday materials such as nail polish, soap, cotton wool and toothpaste. Her sculptures, often made intimately in situ, feel live and fluid – they hang, spread and stretch, very much drawing our attention to the spaces that they inhabit. The duality of these ‘live’, transforming and tangible works and their setting in traditional gallery spaces, which can often feel rigid and static, makes for a highly engaging and immersive viewing experience.
In 2021, Black was the first artist to be invited to exhibit in all of Fruitmarket’s gallery spaces (which had been refreshed and redeveloped alongside the construction of the brand new Warehouse space) following its closure due to the pandemic. The retrospective featured over 30 works spanning two decades (including works from the 2011 Venice Biennale) and set the scene for many more years of exhibitions and events in Fruitmarket’s stunning galleries.
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