Major gift leads to ‘The Poetry of Place’

Duncan Shanks Sketchbooks: The Poetry of Place
14 March – 16 August 2015
Hunterian Art Gallery
Admission free

A new exhibition at The Hunterian will offer rare insight into the creative process of Scottish artist Duncan Shanks, highlighting his rich body of work.

Duncan Shanks Sketchbooks: The Poetry of Place opens at the Hunterian Art Gallery in March 2015 and follows Shanks major gift to The Hunterian of his entire output of sketchbooks from the past 55 years. The resulting research project, led by The Hunterian, is the first major assessment of Shanks’ career exploring the artist’s use of sketchbooks over five decades.

A true landscape artist, Shanks presents us not with the familiar and predictable face of Nature but enables us to crouch low or soar high, to see it as we have never seen it before. His 106 sketchbooks, covering over five decades and gifted to The Hunterian in 2013, have been the anchors of his life as an artist. An important addition to The Hunterian collections, this generous gift is celebrated in a distinctive focus exhibition that reveals the artist's creative working process and provides insights into his changing interpretations of the landscape he has known and loved all his life.

The research project began in 2008 and was carried out over several visits to the artist between 2008 and 2014. It was followed by an intensive six month period of cataloguing assisted by University of Glasgow postgraduate students.

Duncan Shanks Sketchbooks presents over 30 sketchbooks from The Hunterian collection, never exhibited before, alongside works that illustrate how the artist used sketchbooks for different purposes. In addition three paintings, Fragments of Memory, early 1990s, Shower from Tinto, c.1980-2010 and Night Garden, 1995-2007, generously gifted by the artist to complement the sketchbook collection, will demonstrate the central role sketchbooks started to play in his work from the 1980s.

Based on the work of the research project, the exhibition will open up this unique body of work to display the artist’s ability to astonish with colour and form. An invitation to share his feeling of being part of Nature, it will offer a glimpse into the complex nature of his sketchbooks and the wide variety of drawings they contain, from simple recordings of his surroundings to exploratory studies investigating complex subjects or more finished drawings.

A comprehensive online catalogue of Shanks 106 sketchbooks will be available from March 2015. The richly illustrated site will include over 6500 sketchbook pages, the artist’s own photographs capturing some of his favourite locations, and two hand-drawn maps helping to place these locations.

An additional painting, The Dance of Time, 2010-2013, will also be on display for the first time from March. Located in the Art Gallery’s Scottish Art displays, this recent gift from Duncan Shanks highlights a previously unrepresented aspect of his work in the form of a table top still life.

Duncan Shanks Sketchbooks will be accompanied by a special events programme including talks, tours, poetry readings and music. Visit our website for further information.

Hunterian Art Gallery
University of Glasgow
82 Hillhead Street
Glasgow G12 8QQ

Open Tuesday – Saturday 10.00am – 5.00pm and Sunday 11.00am – 4.00pm
Admission free
www.glasgow.ac.uk/hunterian


For further information contact:
Anne Dulau Beveridge, Curator, The Hunterian
Email: Anne.Dulau@glasgow.ac.uk

For images contact:
Harriet Gaston, Communications Manager, The Hunterian
Email: Harriet.Gaston@glasgow.ac.uk

Notes to Editors
The Hunterian is one of the world's leading University museums and one of Scotland’s greatest cultural assets. Built on Dr William Hunter’s founding bequest, The Hunterian collections include scientific instruments used by James Watt, Joseph Lister and Lord Kelvin; outstanding Roman artefacts from the Antonine Wall; major natural and life sciences holdings; Hunter’s own extensive anatomical teaching collection; one of the world’s greatest numismatic collections and impressive ethnographic objects from Captain Cook’s Pacific voyages.

The Hunterian is also home to one of the most distinguished public art collections in Scotland and features the world’s largest permanent display of the work of James McNeill Whistler, the largest single holding of the work of Scottish artist, architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 – 1928) and The Mackintosh House, the reassembled interiors from his Glasgow home.

First published: 21 January 2015