Visual arts review: Scottish Women Can Paint at Traquair House

In a 2013 interview with Der Spiegel the German painter Georg Baselitz told a reporter that “women don’t paint very well”. It was, clearly, a contentious and provocative remark, and also erroneous.

Here the work of seven living artists — Carole Gibbons, Lys Hansen, Sheila Mullen, Joyce Cairns, Margaret Hunter, June Redfern and Fionna Carlisle — is shown alongside some of their predecessors including Joan Eardley, Anne Redpath, Caroline McNairn, Pat Douthwaite and Lil Neilson. The show sets out to eloquently disprove Baselitz’s theory.

Gibbons and Mullen are, perhaps, less well known than the others: both paint with a subtle but subdued palette and their work here – portraiture and figuration – respectively needs time and contemplation. Hansen, Cairns and Hunter all use a brighter palette with clearer cut imagery. Here Hansen (who happens to be this reviewer’s mother) presents a vivid statement which itself is a refutation of Baselitz’s remark: Portrait Bust with Pedestal (1990) poses the question why so many men are celebrated in portraiture and answers it by presenting a self-portrait literally bursting out of the confines of this traditional form.

Hunter has been partly based in Berlin, where her teachers included Baselitz, since the mid-Eighties. Her works here, Homage and Female Figure, both date from that time; the former is clearly a tribute to Hunter’s former Meister, depicting colourful, complex figures. The latter is a tour de force of energy and movement.

Redfern has been described as a painter’s painter, but this belies the accessibility of her work, which is sumptuous, sensuous and beautiful full of rich golds, fleeting yellows and burnished oranges. She has commented that “painting has its own language of beauty; it should represent feelings, longings and a sense of being . . . wrapped around by colour and ever-elusive light”.

This small but perfectly formed show, nestling in one of Scotland’s oldest continuously inhabited houses, is a delight for the eyes and a feast for the mind — and a refutation of Baselitz’s apparent misogyny.