EDINBURGH.- This autumn, the Fruitmarket will present an exhibition of new and existing work by Glasgow based artist Hayley Tompkins that examines the metamorphic materiality of paint and colour. Tompkins’s career spans over 25 years, and this seems a timely moment to make what will be her most extensive solo presentation in a public UK context to date. The exhibition brings together in an installation across both floors of the Fruitmarket a suite of digital films unseen in a group until now, a new group of paintings commissioned specially for the exhibition, and a selection of the painted commonplace objects for which the artist is best known.

On the ground floor, Tompkins’s digital films are projected onto suspended screens, rhythmically inviting the audience to move through the space and engage with each individually. The films examine everyday movement and connectivity in familiar objects and sounds. Defying obvious categorisation, the works focus on the process of selection and play between these things and seek to find both equivalence and difference between them.

Upstairs, a new sequence of densely painted acrylic paintings on gesso panels reveals Tompkins particularised approach to colour and experimental brushwork. Instead of beginning with a preconceived plan or meaning, each work reflects the encounter with the object and materiality of the act of painting itself. What is seen is the result of this encounter or meeting. The paintings have a symbolic quality, ranging from loosely painted, soaked areas of overlapped luminous colour to denser moments of saturated weight, where brushstrokes become fractured, discordant, and quivering. The final image is the end of the re-working, of thoughts being replaced. A painting about thinking and seeing, querying, hesitant and changing. The image is not solved but stated, asserting in its fact, that for now, this is but one form of how it could have looked.




Fiona Bradley, Director of Fruitmarket said:

‘I am excited to bring to our audience Hayley Tompkins’s particular way of paying attention to things. Hayley Tompkins is one of Scotland’s most interesting artists, and I am proud to have her work in the Fruitmarket’s spaces and programme’.

Hayley Tompkins was born in Leighton Buzzard, England in 1971, she studied at The Glasgow School of Art, she lives and works in Glasgow. She is represented by The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

Fruitmarket is a free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, which provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences.