We are launching our beautiful new upstairs gallery at 23-29 Queen Street with an exhibition featuring a selection of key works by Graham Fagen. Living and working in Glasgow, Graham Fagen (born 1966) continues to be one of the UK’s foremost contemporary artists. Working across mediums including video, installation, sculpture, photography, and text, Fagen creates works which explore history and culture. He is interested in how history and culture is created and how in turn this shapes and forms who we are or who we become.

Common themes of his work have included Scotland and the transatlantic slave trade, war, plants, journeys, poetry, and popular song, as a means through which to explore the varying forces impacting our contemporary culture and identity.

“The End of Art is Peace is a line from The Harvest Bow by Seamus Heaney. It’s a line I’ve pondered for a long time and perhaps the location of our exhibition, in the country where Seamus was born, has brought it back into my thoughts.

I [have] talked about my personal conflict when making works of art about war or the transatlantic slave trade. If the end of art is peace does that suggest that the start or the process of art can be conflicting?”

– G Fagen

The exhibition The End of Art is Peace features ‘The Slave’s Lament’ video installation, which premiered at Scotland + Venice 2015, when Fagen represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, and ‘War/Garden (after Tubby)’ which has previously been shown with Golden Thread Gallery at the London Art Fair 2017 as part of our Radio Relay Project.