Gallery shows flourish and flexibility to keep lights on

At what point does a gallery become a shop, or vice versa? It’s not an easy question to answer but an important one, given the financial pressures on galleries, artists and the infrastructure surrounding the visual arts.

The RSA, like many other arts organisations, has had to be bold in its thinking regarding sales and marketing. The Academicians’ Gallery is an avowedly commercial space, intended to create much needed revenue for an organisation that gets no public subsidy.

The works include abstract prints by the late Philip Reeves, and his protégé, Jo Ganter, a painting by David Michie (Martins Flying at Dusk I, c 1994) and a series of wonderfully austere, atmospheric monochrome paintings by Marian Leven.

There is something primeval, archetypal even, in the partially found, partially constructed objects that Doug Cocker assembles to create abstract narratives in work such as Naming of Parts No 3. Cocker can be playful too. In the painted wood construction Bottle Wedding, he sets up two exquisitely honed objects in a kind of dialogue.

Taking inspiration from mythology, botany and the writings of Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal: Serpent) Elspeth Lamb’s lithography is a tour de force in colour, form and disconcerting imagery. Delia Baillie is an accomplished printmaker with a versatile iconography. She takes random texts, in the form of run-on titles from the world of advertising and uses them as a form of landscape. It’s a broad field of reference and includes many historical antecedents and influences in Seminary.

Jake Harvey is better known as a sculptor, particularly in his use of stone. Here he has made work on 25 paper panels involving symbols and motifs derived from the Borders landscape he inhabits. The buzzard, the salmon and the river are there, as well as human habitation and a rather forlorn and delicate human hand.

Taken together, this collection sits well in combination and is also accessible, financially and intellectually.