Exciting young talent finally gets chance to show off

Now in its 12th year, the Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries has become an established platform for the new graduates of Scotland’s art colleges and schools of architecture.

The 57 graduates are the choice of the convener, the Fife-based artist and academician Marion Smith, and a small group of her colleagues. The selection was made online from the work of students who graduated in 2020 and were denied a proper degree show — for obvious reasons.

There are many ways to critique a show. One of my own, admittedly subjective, methods is to mull it over for a day or two and then see what remains vivid. Tayo Adekunle’s large format photographs — partly self-portraiture, partly re-imagined historical narrative — remain intense, not only for their intellectual clarity but also because they are part of general reassessment of personal, historical and political “norms” — not “woke” but genuine post-imperial truths. Here the young black female body has been transformed from object to subject and the traditional “male gaze” subverted.

Adekunle’s work dominates Gallery V and for those who don’t know the RSA, it’s worth mentioning that these purpose-built Victorian galleries, flooded with natural light from above, generally favour larger work; smaller pieces can be drowned out by the scale of the architecture.

Adjacent is the sculpture court, which is a darker space with stone surfaces. Here a series of vast, coloured and black-and-white ink drawings by Madeleine Wood present a personal phantasmagoria, full of ghouls and demons, reminiscent in mood of Francisco Goya’s aquatint The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters from about 1799.

There are more large-scale drawings in Gallery II, this time by Lauren Ferguson — one shows a detail of the sequoia wellingtonia planted in Perthshire by Queen Victoria in 1842. It’s good to see the traditional craft of the pencil line being used to such good effect.

The basement area, devoid of natural light, is often reserved for video and other technologically-oriented work, but there is room for quieter material such as Sherry Trimon’s abstract, red and black painting on plywood or her sophisticated amalgam landscape photography. Alicja Rodzik’s painted wood wall-hanging depicting a pair of children’s shoes, seems to evoke a personal, far-off family history.

These artists, many of whom come from beyond our shores, engage with the world in complex, nuanced ways often with great skill and ingenuity. We are privileged to have them.

At www.royalscottishacademy.org until April 3