Ingrid Calame. Edinburgh Art Festival Exhibition

venue: Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

The Fruitmarket Gallery is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in Scotland of the work of American artist Ingrid Calame, whose beautifully-coloured, intricate drawings and paintings have a specific, if abstracted relationship to the world.

Calame's paintings and drawings all begin with tracings of marks, stains and cracks on the ground made by the artist in various urban locations. Back in the studio, the tracings are combined, layered and re-traced in coloured pencil, painted in enamel and, more recently, oil paint. The paintings and drawings that result from this singular process are beautiful and intelligent abstract works. Displayed in a gallery, they retain their connection with the world outside at several removes, exerting an oddly insistent presence.

This exhibition brings together drawings and paintings made from 1997 to 2011. Poised between sspspss..UM biddle BOP, 1997, a huge painting on Mylar that drapes from the gallery wall to the floor, and a new wall drawing LA River at Clearwater Street, 2006–8 made especially for and in The Fruitmarket Gallery, the exhibition presents the development of Calame's abstract visual language from her earliest outdoor tracings to her most recent workings and reworkings of marks recorded in the dried-out concrete riverbed of the L.A. River and at three locations in Buffalo: the ArcelorMittal Steel Shipping Building, the Perry Street Projects wading pool, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery parking lot.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication, Trace, edited, designed, produced and published by The Fruitmarket Gallery. With over 100 illustrations, newly-commissioned writing by Michael Newman and Brian Dillon, and a conversation between Ingrid Calame, photographer Shelby Roberts, and Fiona Bradley and Elizabeth McLean of The Fruitmarket Gallery, this substantial monograph presents Calame's career to date.