The Hunterian

Alex Impey -Gnostic Cautery
16 November 2019 - 23 February 2020
Hunterian Art Gallery
Admission free

This November, The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow will premiere new work from artist Alex Impey.

-Gnostic Cautery opens on 16 November at the Hunterian Art Gallery and includes sculpture and video on themes of biology and technology.

Alex Impey is a visual artist who lives in Glasgow. A graduate of The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, and of the Master of Fine Arts at Glasgow School of Art, he was awarded Glasgow Sculpture Studios’ Gordon Foundation Graduate Fellowship for his MFA degree show in 2011.

Impey’s work, which takes in sculpture, installation, drawing, writing and video, has been featured in solo exhibitions at venues such as Hangamura, Sadogashima, Japan (2017), Collective, Edinburgh (2017), David Dale Gallery, Glasgow (2014) and Raum fur Kunst, Lucerne, Switzerland (2012).

For his solo exhibition at The Hunterian, Impey has made new work in sculpture and video. These works extend an interest in themes of biology and technology that is a consistent feature of his practice. In -Gnostic Cautery, the artist has explored these concerns through research into two, seemingly very different, uses of animal bodies. The first of these relates to historical practices in which sheep's livers were interpreted to divine the future.

The exhibition is also informed by much more recent scientific experiments that use cauterisation to damage butterfly pupae and to study its effects on the development of mimetic eyespots on the butterflies’ wings. Impey responds to these precedents in a number of ways, including the casting of animal specimens from The Hunterian’s collection.

-Gnostic Cautery is supported by a grant from the Henry Moore Foundation. 

The exhibition is at the Hunterian Art Gallery from 16 November 2019 until 23 February 2020. Admission is free.

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First published: 1 November 2019