There has been a distinct buzz surrounding the solo exhibition of new works by Audrey Grant at Broughton Street's Union Gallery.
Even before the doors opened on Friday evening, 9 of the 25 paintings hanging had been sold to buyers around the world – unseen except on the gallery's website. In the 3 days since, a further 7 have been purchased. These are unusually fast sales.
So what's going on?
Partly, the answer has to do with good timing: Grant's 'Man III' won the prestigious Anne Redpath Award in Thursday's Visual Arts Scotland's Annual Open Exhibition at the RSA.
Partly it is evidence of the artist's burgeoning reputation since her return to painting as a mature student at the Leith School of Art in 2003.
Union Gallery's Rob Dawkins and Alison Auldjo were in at the start – admiring and encouraging the diffident Grant's endeavours and including the results in a joint exhibition with Martyn McKenzie in 2011 (Breaking news, 18.2.11). In that same year, she went on to win the Tom McGrath Trust's Maverick Award and the David Gilchrist Memorial Award at the Royal Glasgow Institution.
Critical acclaim for Grant's work back then confirmed the couple in their belief that hers was a talent to watch, and they have been proved right. The recent oils on show this time are being snapped up by investors and aficionados alike while their prices remain comparatively modest.
Grant's work, however, is far more than fashionable commodity. It is beautiful, sombre and humane.
The new oils bear some similarities to those we've seen before. There are the familiar, thickly painted backgrounds, heavily reworked, scratched and scrawled upon (see 'Woman Holding Arm', top-right), flecked with sparks of contrasting colour.
There are also, often, the strong, horizontal bands dividing the works into 2 or 3 sections. In some ways these are reminiscent of the background measuring tapes in police mugshots – they provide reference for the foreground figures, a sense of contrasting normality, a context of intense scrutiny by the artist and viewer. (See 'Woman and Yellow Background' below.)
And there are again the strangely solitary bodies which so intrigue her, caught in moments of misshapen stillness or awkward movement; caught also in existential self-reflection.
In the past I've thought of these subjects as mostly lonely, melancholy, unsociable even when in company.
But here, more of them seem at greater peace. Her backward-leaning figures, like the 'Man with Hand on Chest' or 'Man with Blue Background' (below), may be eccentric, but they are also rather comfortably poised. They themselves seem capable of weighing-up the world.
'Man with Stick' – whom age has gnarled and twisted and rendered lame – is nevertheless calm, balanced between past and future, light and shade.
Even the 'Woman on Chair' – who on close inspection of the 112 x 122cm original appears to have been locked in a room with a Force 8 hoolie – is oddly serene.
It is difficult to define what makes Grant's work appealing. There is of course a painterly interest in the intensity of her brushwork, the subtlety of her tones and composition.
But for this reviewer, what charms is more her unhistrionic and compassionate eye, her recognition of physical, mental or emotional otherness and refusal to judge. AM
Audrey Grant – New Paintings continues at the Union Gallery (45 Broughton Street) until 1 April 2013.