West, London
Barry McGlashan
Invisible Lines, Immortal Beams
Frestonian GalleryFrestonian Gallery is delighted to present the book launch of Invisible Lines, Immortal Beams, published by Hurtwood, documenting the last three years of work by Edinburgh-based Barry McGlashan (b. 1974). Alongside the book launch will be a presentation showcasing a selection of the artist's recent works. With a foreword by Rollo Campbell and Matt Incledon of Frestonian Gallery, a text by McGlashan himself comprising detailed notes about the exhibited paintings, and an interview with the artist by Kathryn Lloyd, the publication includes more than fifty of McGlashan's dreamlike and otherworldly paintings that are as haunting as they are enchanting. It also features works presented by the artist and gallery at Art SG in Singapore in early 2025, and from The Distant Ideal, the fist presentation with Frestonian in 2024. Barry McGlashan (RSA) was born in 1974 in Aberdeen on the North-East coast of Scotland. He lives and works in Edinburgh. McGlashan’s paintings are inspired by memories of places visited, photographs, passages from literature, and scenes from films, as well as the meticulously researched lives of pioneering explorers, innovators, and artists. ‘All these truths and fictions become mixed in painterly distortion and the resulting mutability of a remembered image or event is shared as subject and object. There is a fascinating relationship between the visual of the original source and its changing representation over the intervening time spent painting in the studio. I find an innate beauty in that, like the fragility of recollection… Each painting is a sum of time spent, just as we could be said to be the sum of our memories. Each element, each mark is a layer of time… But somewhere in the centre of all that thinking and making runs a seam of common intention: a desire to explore and evoke shared experience.’ McGlashan studied painting at Gray’s School of Art, graduating in 1996. He taught in the painting department at Gray’s between 1998 and 2005. In 2001, McGlashan was awarded The Alastair Salvesen Scholarship through the Royal Scottish Academy. Examples of his work are held in numerous private and public collections including Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland; The Scottish Society, New York, USA; and the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Scotland. In 2024, McGlashan was elected academician of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA).