Wake up to the sleeping giants of modern art

Gordon Cockburn and Ronald Rae were born in Ayrshire within a couple of years of each other, the former in 1944 and the latter in 1946. Cockburn died in 2022. Both were from working-class backgrounds, and auto-didacts, notwithstanding Rae's single, rather painful year at Edinburgh College of Art, where he was manifestly unsuited to the strictures of academe.

As the title of this show suggests, their careers intersected at various points but also moved apart, significantly. Rae is the more obsessive and prolific. They are bound by empathy, compassion and humanity. Rae is also driven and supported by a strong, if unorthodoxly expressed, Christian faith, which underpins his oeuvre.

This show takes a thematic approach. Both experimented widely but it is Rae's work that offers the broader styles and themes. He is perhaps best known for his hand-carved, monumental granite sculptures. Over a 40-year period he created more than 50 such works. None of these feature here, but they are alluded to. Perhaps the best known is the Lion of Scotland from 2003, in St Andrew Square, Edinburgh.

A journey to Auschwitz in 1993 had a particularly profound and lifelong effect on Cockburn and this is reflected here in a large series of vivid and often lurid expressive works that reflect the trauma of events there and the artist's agonised response to them.

Rae's 1977 show at Ayr's Maclaurin Art Gallery was attended by the US philanthropist Morris Bear Squire who invited Rae to Chicago for a residency. Rae worked in one of Squire's psychiatric hospitals and there created a series of portraits of inmates, mainly using India ink on pader. In the same decade, Cockburn too was creating expressive portraits in the same medium, such as Trial, which Robert De Mey, the show's curator, suggests is based on Hogarth's 1733 engraving of the convicted murderer Sarah Malcolm.

One aspect of his remarkable output is his ballpoint drawings, which number in the thousands, often made on newspapers. Each took many hours to complete and are notable for their intensity and detail. Letters of Faith to Myself is a series of 1,000 drawings and inscriptions on a Victorian family Bible. These can be viewed as on-screen images.

Both artists tackled themes such as war, mental illness, disability, alienation and loss. By doing so, they have commented on these experiences with humanity and moral authority. De Mey says they are "sleeping giants of contemporary art". I agree.

     ConvergeDiverge: The Art of Gordon Cockburn & Ronald Rae runs at the Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries until April 6