Work by one of Scotland's best loved contemporary artists on show
Gillian Raffles was one of the few women to own and run her own gallery in London's hugely competitive 'art strip' of Cork Street in Mayfair. She set up the Mercury Gallery in 1964 as a space for both emerging artists and for the more established.
READ MORE:
The gallery also championed overlooked figurative artists, helping to establish the art world positions of figures including Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Alfred Wallis.
Raffles' most enduring professional relationship was with Blackadder, who was the first Scottish woman artist to be a fully elected member of both the Royal Scottish Academy and Royal Academy, London, and the first woman, to be made Her Majesty's Painter and Limner in Scotland.
Mercury Gallery held 14 solo shows of the artist's work every two years, from 1965 to 1998, with the two women carefully avoided inflating prices, ensuring accessibility for collectors.
Raffles once said of her quietly famous client: "You never read about Elizabeth in the gossip columns or hear her work is selling for record prices... but I don't think she has any regrets."
Katie Hannah, of Lyon & Turnbull Glasgow, with works by Elizabeth Blackadder (Image: Julie Howden) The new exhibition also includes the work of Blackadder's husband, John Houston, a successful and much-loved artist in his own right, exploring the impact travel had on their work; most notably showcasing their passion for Japan.
Although the Mercury Gallery was one of London's most significant and enduring private galleries of the second half of the twentieth century, Raffles expanded to Edinburgh in August 1982, opening a branch on The Mound in the heart of the Capital.
The Edinburgh gallery provided a vital platform for Scottish artists and reinforced Raffles' commitment to supporting figurative art beyond the London art scene by showcasing a diverse range of works, including paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, with a particular emphasis on Scottish artists.
Gillian Raffles closed the Mercury Gallery in 2001, but continued to work with artists on selling and promoting their work from her home in Essex. Her Mercury Gallery archive is now in the safekeeping of the Tate archive.
Gillian Raffles died, aged 90, in November 2021. Elizabeth Blackadder died in August 2021, aged 89.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years review – a wild walk between life, death and sheep-shearing
Rural life hits you in the face like the stink of cow dung as soon as you step into the Royal Scottish Academy. Andy Goldsworthy has laid a sheepskin rug up the classical gallery's grand staircase – very luxurious, except it's made from the scraps thrown away after shearing, stained blue or red with farmers' marks, all painstakingly stitched together with thorns. This is the Clarkson's Farm of art retrospectives, plunging today's urbanites into the raw sadness and beauty, the violence and slow natural cycles of the British countryside. Goldsworthy may love nature but he doesn't sentimentalise it. At the top of the stairs there's a screen and through its gaps you glimpse the galleries beyond. It feels mystical and calming, until you realise it's made of rusty barbed wire strung between two of the building's columns that serve as tightly-wound wire rollers. It made me think of Magnus Mills' darkly hilarious rural novel about hapless fencers, The Restraint of Beasts. Later you can relax looking at seductive, purple abstract watercolours – until you discover they are made with hare's blood and snow. The show is titled Fifty Years, which might make anyone feel old, and Goldsworthy may have been goaded by it. He fills the gallery's main floor with new and recent work, while you'll find an archive of his 20th-century career downstairs. But how could he exhibit his past achievements except in photos and video? Since the 1970s Goldsworthy, who was born in Cheshire and grew up on the outskirts of Leeds, has been making art with nature, in nature, even for nature, since some of his interventions could only be experienced by birds or sheep before the colour faded from a rubbed stone or a mat of leaves decayed. Other outdoor works are more permanent, using dry stone walling to make sheepfolds and little houses in sculpture parks and nature reserves. In Cumbria you'll find his monumental Grizedale Wall snaking between the trees. What makes this a work of art? It's simple. There's no practical reason a farmer would place an elegantly curving stone line in a forest. But by making it, Goldsworthy insists you ask what art is. He's a peasant dadaist. In photos of an early action he throws bunches of sticks in the sky to see how they fall – a fresh air reworking of Marcel Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages in which chance determined how a string fell. An entertaining video shows what happened when Goldsworthy brought a giant snowball from the Scottish Highlands to London's Smithfield meat market in June 2000: the meatpackers have fun moving it about with a forklift. Inside the snow, the artist gently explains, is a core of hair from Highland cattle. He's not saying meat is murder so much as what we consume is divorced from any sense of natural life. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion It is our connection with nature he wants to reawaken, not in a quiet contemplative way but as a shock. Earth and blood are the same, he suggests in the most powerful room. It is dominated by a whole wall made of cracked red clay that he collected by hand in Dumfriesshire's Lowther Hills. The epic scale and fiery colour seem more American than Scottish. Goldsworthy shows you this is a big country, too. The work is called Red Wall – but I don't think it's a political joke. The redness is all. In the same room a three-screen video records an alchemical performance in which Goldsworthy rubs a rock in a Dumfriesshire river to reveal a layer of iron-rich pure redness; the red appears as bloody clouds in the green water. Iron reddens the earth and reddens our blood. We are part of nature's cycle. Our bodies will return to the earth – at least, if you live in rural Dumfriesshire as Goldsworthy does. When you die there you still get buried, in a churchyard, according to Goldsworthy's grand project Gravestones, for which he has taken photographs of Dumfriesshire churchyards under stormy skies. Goldsworthy's 'gravestones' are not headstones but the pebbles and rocks that have to be removed when fresh graves are dug. He wants to create a vast monumental field with them, to show that there is animate nature and inanimate nature – blood and stone. We return to the earth, leaving our imperishable elements. He tests his idea in an installation here. Stones from graveyards form a continuous floor, like a rocky seashore, completely filling a room except for a narrow walkway. The stones have literally been cut short, neatly sliced through, to form a straight boundary between the artwork and the observer. It's typical of this artist's poetic precision. You wonder how he cut the stones in two so neatly, and accurately measured the perfect line they make. Then it hits you. This is the straight smooth absolute line between life and death. That's true in the country, and the city, too. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh from 26 July until 2 November 2025
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt review – a warmly comic saga of male friendship
Scottish-German author Alexander Starritt's debut, The Beast, followed a tabloid journalist; his second novel, We Germans, was about a Nazi. His new book gets us rooting for two wealthy management consultants fresh out of Oxford, both of them men (assuming you haven't already tuned out). I suspect his agent might have found it easier to pitch a novel about sex criminals, not least because Drayton and Mackenzie's approach is so unfashionably traditionalist: it's a chunky, warmly observed, 9/11-to-Covid saga that, while comic in tone and often extremely funny, doesn't labour under any obligation to send up its protagonists, still less take them down. James Drayton, born to north London academics, is a socially awkward high achiever who privately measures himself against Christopher Columbus and Napoleon. Joining the McKinsey consultancy firm after coming top of his year in philosophy, politics and economics hasn't eased the pressure he has always felt to 'come up with something so brilliant it was irrefutable, like the obliterating ultra-white light of a nuclear bomb'. The key to his sense of destiny arrives in the unlikely shape of a slacking junior colleague, Roland Mackenzie, who graduated with a 2:2 in physics (for James, a shame akin to 'admitting erectile dysfunction'). Mutual suspicion thaws when they're tasked with restructuring an Aberdeen oil firm in possession of the patents for a pioneering underwater turbine – tempting James and Roland to poach their star engineer, quit McKinsey and go it alone in green energy. It's a mark of Starritt's confidence that the quest to harness tidal power – the book's main business – gets going only 200 pages in. We feel in safe hands from the start, reassured that he knows the story's every last turn ('In later years, when he was the subject of articles and interviews …' begins a line about James on the second page, his A-levels barely over). But we're kept on our toes: while the narration hews to the point of view of the central duo, it fills in the period backdrop – bailouts, Brexit – by dipping unpredictably into the perspective of real-life figures such as the Italian politician and former president of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi, seen delivering his famous 2012 speech vowing to save the euro 'whatever it takes'. As James and Roland jet around the world for venture capital, Starritt grants hefty speaking parts to PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (is he allowed to do that?, I asked myself: always a sign of a writer up to something exciting). The plot is crammed with curveballs for the plucky entrepreneurs, whether it's a shattered undersea cable, a coma caused by undiagnosed diabetes, or the dilemma that ensues when James and Roland fall for the same woman, having spent much of the novel joking uneasily about going to bed with each other. With a joyful knack for pithy analogy, the writing holds our attention as much as the events: the aforementioned relationship wrangle induces a 'low eczemal itch of guilt' in the eventual girlfriend-stealer, while new parents drive home from the maternity ward feeling 'like random civilians handed suits and guns and told to protect a miniature, defenceless president'. There's pathos as well as laughter in the protagonists' beer-and-Champions League blokeishness, a way to keep unvoiced feeling at bay. When Roland, nearly 30, wistfully recalls a teenage holiday fling, he thinks that 'she was probably someone's mum by now', a line hinting at his deep-lying sense of stasis, even as the company's ambition grows: not just electricity, but rocket fuel. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Because it concentrates on personalities rather than systems or ideas – not unlike Richard T Kelly's 2023 North Sea oil novel, The Black Eden – Drayton and Mackenzie probably won't be called 'cli-fi' in the way that the novels of Richard Powers are, but it's a reminder that science fiction isn't the only game in town in terms of writing about the environment and technology. Yet while there's no shortage of chat about electrolysers and optimal blade rotation, Starritt keeps his focus on the human story of invention: dangling quietly over the action is the fact that James, lauded as a visionary, relies mostly for his ideas on other people. In the end, though, critique of disruptor-era genius is less important here than feeling and friendship; the winningly Edwardian, even Victorian, approach to storytelling extends right to the heart-swelling deathbed climax. It might have been subtitled A Love Story. Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt is published by Swift (£16.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Glasgow Times
7 hours ago
- Glasgow Times
Moment Glasgow bar erupts as man nails 'amazing' karaoke
The Horseshoe Bar is famed for its karaoke nights, and the watering hole was packed out for a special performance at the weekend. The Drury Street institution posted the 'amazing' video of a punter, 'wee Bob', absolutely nailing his rendition of Luciano Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma. Posting the video on social media, the bar said: "How amazing is wee Bob, what a cheer he got tonight." The Horse Shoe Bar, Glasgow (Image: Newsquest) READ MORE: 'It was a shock': City centre pub forced to close as ceiling collapses The video shows Bob approaching the song's anthemic climax, where the final lyric 'vincero' is belted out at full volume. Bob's voice soars from the pub's stage to a cheering crowd as he delivers the song with passion and a red-faced blast at the top of his voice. The unassuming man, dressed as a regular pub punter, proved that he had something special as the entire bar cheered his finale. People were quick to flock to the comments to appreciate Bob's singing talent. One said: "Can feel the emotion from this wee man goosebumps man unreal." While another joked: "Imagine being on the karaoke after this!" A third tagged their pal and said: "We would've been greeting watching him, he can fair belt out a choon." READ MORE: Inside the plans for major Buchanan Galleries refurbishment READ MORE: I am behind some of Glasgow's biggest murals, now I am doing a first The Horseshoe is a much-loved pub in the city centre, at 104 feet and three inches, their grand Victorian bar is apparently the 'longest in Europe'. It's the centre of the Horseshoe, where they serve pub food and have a selection of Scottish beers. They also have 11 screens for sports fans and early opening times for major fixtures. The lounge upstairs 'has been graced by some famous singers' and now has wee Bob and his big voice to add to its list of performers.
