Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys – On the Road to Meikle Seggie
| Place: | Axolotl, 35, Dundas Street, Edinburgh |
| Start date: | Friday 05, August 2011 |
| End date: | Monday 05, September 2011 |
| Times: | Tu-Th 11am-4pm, F & Sa 11am-6pm |
| Price: |
At Axolotl, 35, Dundas Street, Edinburgh (www.axolotl.co.uk)
Starting 5th August 2011 until 5th September 2011 'Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys – On the Road to Meikle Seggie'
Richard Demarco On the Road to Meikle Seggie 1976
Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys Edinburgh 1970
Richard Demarco collaborated with Joseph Beuys over a period of 16 years (from 1970 to 1986) after first meeting him in Düsseldorf. In that year, Demarco invited Beuys to Scotland, together with 34 other artists to present their work for the Edinburgh International Festival in an exhibition entitled ‘Strategy: Get Arts’. These artists were all identified with Düsseldorf, which was then still in West Germany and divided from East Germany by the Iron Curtain.
Joseph Beuys was the first of these artists to visit Scotland, which he regarded as the heartland of Europe’s Celtic world. He was therefore willing to explore the fabled ‘Road to The Isles’, from Edinburgh towards the legendary Hebridean world of Fingal and his son, Ossian, a land which had inspired Shakespeare to write Macbeth.
Beuys’ response to Richard Demarco’s question, “When shall we meet again?”, revealed his knowledge of the ‘Scottish play’ when he replied: “When the hurly burly’s done, when the battle’s fought and won.” The journey resulted in what is regarded as a Beuysian masterwork, Celtic Kinloch Rannoch: The Scottish Symphony. Beuys returned to Scotland seven more times to find inspiration in what he regarded as the key to Celtic Europe.
This exhibition consists of works by Beuys all inspired by Scotland along with watercolours by Richard Demarco and by what has been recently regarded as a new genre of contemporary art defined by art historians and the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf as ‘event photography’.
Demarco’s contribution reveals the nodal points on what he now call ‘The Road to Meikle Seggie’. This is the road which links Scotland via Beuys’ birthplace, Cleves, to Italy. It is a road travelled through many centuries by the followers of Saint Columba and the Roman legionaries who were essentially Dacians from that part of modern Romania around the Black Sea port of Constanza.
The exhibition therefore tells the story of how Beuys was inspired by the reality of the Romano-Celtic cultural heritage of Europe. This resulted in Beuys honouring Greyfriars Bobby, Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens, H.M. Prison Barlinnie’s Special Unit, Edinburgh’s Poorhouse and the College of Art, Loch Awe and Rannoch Moor.
Demarco’s watercolours and event photographs are inspired by what is easily identified as the drovers’ road which implies the road of the cattle-drover, the shepherd and the farmer. Meikle Seggie is now the name of a farm and represents all those hamlets and small communities which have dropped off modern maps and are re-designated as farms. Thus, every art work in the exhibition by Richard Demarco is inspired by some aspect of The Road to Meikle Seggie which is also the road travelled by his Italo-Celtic forebears who began their journey to Edinburgh from the Appenine mountain villages at the time of Garibaldi’s Resorgimento These art works consist of aspects of townscape and landscape. The exhibition is thus related to Richard Demarco’s exhibition currently in the Scottish Government’s Scotland House in Brussels entitled ‘Scotland in Europe: Europe in Scotland’.
Axolotl Gallery, 35 Dundas St., T 0131 557 1460/07528 689013,
Tu-Th 11am-4pm, F & Sa 11am-6pm
