On 30th march Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum unveiled the largest exhibition on Charles Rennie Mackintosh held in Glasgow since 1996.1 As well as marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, it was intended as a prelude to the reopening next year of Mackintosh’s most famous building, the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), following the restoration of the interiors lost in a fire in 2014.
‘Landscape,’ ‘portrait,’ ‘still life’: unlikely, untimely, even burdensome words with which to frame exhibitions of contemporary art, or so one might presume. And yet these are the titles given to Tacita Dean’s unprecedented trio of shows in London, staged collaboratively by institutions with names just as redolent of history as these traditional genres of painting: the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy.1