Hunterian to premiere new work from artist Alex Impey
Published: 1 November 2019
This November, The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow will premiere new work from visual artist Alex Impey.
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.
For further information contact:
Dr Dominic Paterson, Curator (Contemporary Art), The Hunterian
Harriet Gaston, Communications Manager, The Hunterian
Notes to Editors
The Hunterian
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 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.
The Hunterian has also developed an important collection of works by leading contemporary artists including Lucy Skaer, Ilana Halperin, Mat Collishaw, Mark Dion and Christine Borland. www.glasgow.ac.uk/hunterian
First published: 1 November 2019