Ilana Halperin: What is Us and what is Earth, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 28 February until 10 May New York-born, Glasgow-based Ilana Halperin is known for making art which seeks to connect the vastness of geological time to its human measures. She shares her date of birth, for example, with a volcano on Iceland and has marked significant birthdays there. Her work isprecise, detailed and often relatively small scale, so it will be fascinating to see her working to fill the Fruitmarket Gallery. Expect a thoughtful and illuminating deep-dive into how we understand ourselves and our brief – or otherwise – lives. SM
Joan Eardley: The Nature of Painting, National Galleries of Scotland: Modern Two, Edinburgh, 2 April until 28 June The aim of this show is to place the artist in a broader context than that in which she is usually seen. In the exhibition her work will be seen alongside a selection from the national collection, ranging from works by artists from the past whose work she admired, like William McTaggart, Constable and Monet, to work by her contemporaries in Scotland like Bet Low. She was also well aware of her European contemporaries such as Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tàpies, whose work will also be shown alongside hers allowing us to appreciate her real stature as an artist. DM
Bugarin + Castle, Scotland + Venice, The 61st Venice Biennale, 9 May until 22 November Everyone in the art world in Scotland is delighted that we will be back at the Venice Biennale this summer and, with the selection of artist-collaborators Davide Bugarin and Angel Cohn Castle, it looks like we’ll be back with a bang. The artists met when both were performing in queer cabaret in Edinburgh, and promise “to trouble easy narratives on the contested ground of identity today”. The project is curated by Mount Stuart Trust, which has earned a reputation for attracting world-class artists to make site-specific work at the historic house on the Isle of Bute. SM
Sandra George, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 30 May until 27 September One of the surprises at the last Glasgow International was an exhibition of photographs by Sandra George, a photographer who worked in community education and activism in Wester Hailes and Craigmillar until her early death in 2013, and whose work was almost unknown. Drawing on her meticulous archive, the City Art Centre will create the first major show of her photographs in the city. Her work foregrounds social activism, disability rights and youth empowerment, as well as exploring her own identity and perspective as a black female photographer, and a mother. SM
Glasgow International, various venues, Glasgow, 5-21 June Glasgow’s festival of contemporary art returns this year under a new director, Helen Nisbet, last seen in Scotland curating the wonderful Art Night Dundee in 2023. While the city’s permanent galleries roll out their most eye-catching commissions from international and home-based artists, there is also an open submission strand to draw in the best artists, organisations and curators from Glasgow’s grassroots art scene. With its typically egalitarian focus, Glasgow International presents work by top contemporary artists alongside emerging voices, and opens up unusual spaces around the city as venues. SM
Katie Paterson: Afterlife, Collective, Edinburgh, 19 June until 6 September The work of leading Scottish artist Katie Paterson manages to make graspable immense scales of time and distance, like the age of a rainforest or the life cycle of a star. Afterlife made its debut in a Martello tower for the Folkestone Triennial in 2025, and happily it comes to another historic hill-top venue, Collective’s City Observatory, in time for the summer’s Edinburgh Art Festival. Nearly 200 amulets, created by collecting 3D scans of precious objects in museums around the world, have been remade by Paterson in materials sourced from endangered landscapes, ranging from plastics regurgitated by a baby albatross to twigs from trees which survived the Hiroshima atom bomb. SM
Gwen John: Strange Beauties, National Galleries of Scotland: Modern Two, Edinburgh, 1 August until 4 January 2027 Gwen John’s art is like a quiet voice that commands attention in a noisy room. Although it is apparently reticent and withdrawn, its intensity and thoughtfulness are tangible and her pictures stay with us. The aim of this exhibition is, however, to offer a new perspective on her work and legacy. The show will include rarely seen drawings and watercolours and some which will be exhibited for the first time. This ambitious exhibition, prepared by an international partnership of galleries, will be an opportunity to appreciate to the full the work of an important artist. DM
200 Years, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 17 October until 15 November Next year is the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Scottish Academy, and to mark this momentous birthday the organisation is sponsoring a nationwide programme of exhibitions and events which will culminate in this major historical exhibition, celebrating the rich history of Scottish art in all its forms over the last two centuries. The Academy has played a central role in the history of Scottish art and the exhibition will include paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints by the foremost artists working in Scotland since it was founded. DM
Barbara Rae: Charting South, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 21 November until 24 January 2027 After sailing through the Arctic several times, Barbara Rae’s exhibition in 2018, Barbara Rae: The Northwest Passage included some stunning and original work and was a great success with the public. In 2022, she followed these Arctic voyages by sailing to the Antarctic for the first time. The voyage that she went on commemorated the centenary of the death of the Antarctic explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton. She currently proposes to sail to the Antarctic again in 2026 to seek the locations of Shackleton’s ill-fated Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-17). Work from both of Rae’s two voyages will come together in this eagerly anticipated show. DM
Kenneth Dingwall: Being, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 21 November to 7 March 2027 Over recent years, Edinburgh’s City Art Centre has proved to be the most important place for seeing Scottish art. In 2026 the gallery will continue its series of major shows of our distinguished contemporaries with a retrospective of Ken Dingwall’s work. A veteran of abstract art, Dingwall, now 87, has championed the austere beauty of pure abstraction for more than 60 years. In all that time, however, his work has not been widely seen in Scotland and so this exhibition will be a valuable opportunity to appreciate the range and scope of the artist’s achievement. With an accompanying catalogue, the exhibition will bring together work from a wide variety of sources and from across the whole of a long career. DM
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