Art reviews: Joan Eardley | Mona Yoo

​Mona Yoo: RE:SET, City Art Centre 2 ****

One thing you should know if you’re heading to the new Joan Eardley exhibition in National Galleries Scotland’s Modern Two: it’s not a big blockbuster of a show across the upper floor like 2017’s Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place. If, like me, that’s what you were expecting, best get over the disappointment now so you can appreciate what an interesting and substantial show it still is.

The aim is to “complement and contextualise” Eardley’s practice with the work of artists she is known to have liked, or is likely to have seen. Some choices are the result of curatorial detective work, digging deep into her archive (held by NGS). Other choices sound like best guesses at works she might have seen.

But it’s a worthwhile enterprise because, while several shows have looked in depth at Eardley in recent years, we tend to celebrate her in isolation. We have the sense, too, that she worked in isolation in Townhead and Catterline, at a remove from major art galleries and the art world of her day.

Trying to patch together an artist’s influences retrospectively is not easy, and we don’t have the benefit of the reflections she might have made as an older artist looking back on her career. Nor does she fit easily into an artistic lineage, painting differently in her two locations: social realism in Glasgow, landscape and seascape in Catterline. Rather than trying to pin too much down, the show wisely proposes a series of conversations: let’s hang a broad range of works on the walls and see what they have to say to one another.

Some work on the level of “interesting to know”. It’s interesting to know, for example, that Eardley’s ethereal self portrait from 1943, which won her the James Guthrie Prize for Portraiture at Glasgow School of Art, was owned by Hugh Adam Crawford, who taught her, and he painted it into his own self-portrait. It’s intriguing to see the very blue from Chagall’s ‘l’Ecuyère’ (The Horse Rider) in the background of Eardley’s ‘Head of a Red-Haired Girl’.

Other works look like logical choices given Eardley’s subject matter: seascapes by McTaggart and Ethel Walker, social realism by Millet, Guthrie, David Wilkie. Monet’s ‘Grainstacks: Sun Effect’, moved temporarily from the Mound, is one of the most famous works here, and of course Eardley was interested in light and weather, but what landscape painter isn’t? Somehow Paul Nash’s ‘Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (III)’ seems to have more to say in this context, as does Joseph Herman’s painting of miners in South Wales.

In an interview with Sydney Goodsir Smith in The Scotsman in 1961, Eardley waved away suggestions that she was influenced by Turner and MacTaggart (or perhaps McTaggart?) but said she was quite interested in Jackson Pollock and the Tachistes. Seeing Eardley’s late painting ‘Boats on the Shore’ next to Karel Appel’s ‘Danse d’espace avant la tempête’ (Dance in the Space before the Storm)’ is illuminating. While Appel’s work is entirely abstract and Eardley’s is not, the movement and expression in both paintings brings them into a lively dialogue. And surely, Eardley danced before the storm, perhaps more than any other.

Something similarly dynamic happens between Antoni Tàpies’ ‘Croix sur gris XCVIII’ and Eardley’s ‘Seeded Grasses and Daisies’. The paintings are near contemporaries, and both artists were interested in accidents: Tàpies’ thick, cement-like structure is embedded with sand. Eardley painted seed and grasses into her work, and even, in one case, a live beetle. She painted on the shoreline, letting the wind and waves do their work on her canvases. Her paintings are alive with the process of their making, which might be one reason they still look so fresh today.

There are several memorable sequences here: Hornel’s ‘Girl and Goats’, for example, next to Eardley’s ‘Street Kids’, next to Dubuffet’s ‘Villa sur la Route’, in which all three paintings seem to shed fresh light on each of the others (she shared with Dubuffet an interest in graffiti, as her Glasgow paintings show). There are also works by Eardley rarely seen before: two large works done on her postgraduate scholarship to Italy, and small mixed media pieces on scraps of torn paper, surprisingly sun-soaked and pastoral.

However, the revelation of this show is to see Eardley next to her European contemporaries: an artist of the mid-20th century, exploring the same territory they were. We begin to see her work as dynamic, not fixed: every piece an experiment, an ongoing exploration of process in which she figured out, as artists do, what worked best. Her early death meant her paintings became museum pieces early. To see them as dynamic works in progress does not diminish their importance, vigour and originality. It adds to it.

Meanwhile, Edinburgh-based Korean artist Mona Yoo has been plundering a different archive for her show RE:SET at the City Art Centre. Her raw material is the story of the building itself, a former fruit and veg warehouse which was transformed into an art gallery in 1980. The blueprint for her show on the fourth floor is an unrealised plan for the second floor in 1976, which was then earmarked for studio space for emerging artists, a keeper’s office and library.

Her structural interventions – temporary walls, lighting, tape on the floor – subtly mark the space as it was intended to be: the studio areas, the central lift shaft, a remarkably effective area of floor marked on the plan simply as “void”. A construction in place of the central staircase becomes a display of objects which evoke the past: a cardboard architectural model, an obsolete humidity monitor, a typewriter speaking to its more distant past as an extension to the Scotsman building.

But this is so much more than a museum of the past. If you put your ear to the central pillars, you might hear the building breathe. Vertical blinds are stirred by a whirring fan; a light pulses gently, visible through the windows at night. Gently and precisely, Yoo is conjuring a sense of a living building, one in which the past coexists with the present.

Yoo is interested in the traces of ordinary life, and her work lives in the subtlest of details. Look at the materials in Yoo’s own studio (studio four on the plan) which are remnants of the work of making; look at her three clocks, showing the time in the UK, San Francisco and Seoul, the three worlds of her own life. The coloured material in glass frames is actually the lint from her tumble drier, an intimate self-portrait of the colours of her clothes.

Spend some time here and it starts to add up: the past and the present; the poignant echoes of unrealised dreams. One becomes aware of the way in which almost all buildings are idealistic, their highest ideals often sacrificed at the altar of budget constraints and practicalities. It takes a wise and subtle artist to remind us of that, and make them live again.

Joan Eardley: The Nature of Painting ends 28 June; Mona Yoo: RE:SET ends 19 April