One of Scotland’s most accomplished painters, Joe Hargan PAI PPAI RGI, will return to an Edinburgh art gallery this month with a new solo exhibition of work.
The Wee Picture opens in Morningside Gallery on Saturday 22nd November and includes 36 new paintings which showcase the artist’s mastery of colour and tongue-in-cheek humour.
Joe is known for his ‘Sniffy’ paintings, which feature the ‘sniffy’ rotund butler within gallery and stately home settings, always surrounded by old masters and an air of the ridiculous. Not only finely executed, these paintings offer humorous and sometimes surreal vignettes of the good life – wine flows and there is always cake, as we are treated to a painting within a painting, a Canaletto or a John Singer Sargent from the end of Joe’s brush.
In his early 70s now, Joe’s unshakeable energy and commitment to the arts is admirable, and the future will undoubtedly remember his contributions as an individual artist and for the work he has done to promote visual art in the West of Scotland and Scotland more generally. For now though, we are able to delight in his paintings – from the largest gestural abstracts to the ‘wee pictures’, Joe’s brushwork is irresistible and feels like painting at its most fluent.
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Eileadh Swan, director of Morningside Gallery says, “The ‘Sniffy’ paintings can be enjoyed on their own, but it’s in the context of a solo show like this that we can really appreciate them as part of the larger narrative of Joe’s life and work. The solo exhibition is also an opportunity to show the breadth of Joe’s creative output, and in particular, some of his larger figurative paintings, which reveal his life-long study of Western art and culture and his ability to see and make connections between its past, present and future.”
Based at Church Hill in Morningside, the gallery will display 36 new paintings for the exhibition, which can also be viewed online and toured as a virtual exhibition for anyone who can’t make it to Edinburgh.
The exhibition will run in the gallery from Saturday 22nd November – Sunday 7th December, and is open to the public, with a Private View on Friday 21st November. For more details of the exhibition or Private View, contact the gallery via morningsidegallery.co.uk.
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