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Moyna Flannigan
Once Upon Our Time no.13 by Moyna Flannigan (c) Courtesy of the artist and National Galleries of Scotland
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
27 May 2004
This exhibition is a fine example of the National Galleries of Scotland finding new and stimulating ways to work with contemporary artists. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery Director, James Holloway, thinks it crucial, for the longevity and quality of the collection, to commission portraits by the most prominent artists of our day. This enlightened approach offers interesting and topical challenges to Scotland’s most prominent artists. You may have seen the recent portrait of specialists at Dundee’s Oncology Unit by Ken Currie and Wendy McMurdo’s photographs of members of the Roslin Institute, in which case you will know that they are significant pieces of contemporary art in their own right.
For this exhibition, the idea sprang from the artist’s interests rather than the institution’s remit. Moyna Flannigan is one of Scotland’s leading artists. She is a lecturer in Painting at Glasgow School of Art, and is represented by doggerfisher. She is renowned for her strange and surprising fictional portraits, which have been bought by Saatchi and Deutsche Bank as well as the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the City Art Centre in Edinburgh. In the last year or so, Moyna has undertaken a radical shift in scale, and has been painting miniatures – a familiar form in 17th- and 18th-century art and almost entirely absent within modernism. This gave her the desire to look more closely at the miniatures in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery collection (and it is rather fun to revisit that collection again through her eyes).
The miniature is not just a very small portrait, but rather it suggests an intimate form of portraiture – the keepsake, or the lover’s cameo, or even the memento mori. The implied combinations of vanity, age, anxiety, desire and death are so well suited to Flannigan’s style and themes that you get the feeling she was born to paint miniatures. The results are fantastical, intriguing, captivating, not least because their painterly quality rivals Watteau’s rococo brushstrokes for seductive finesse.
This is a great opportunity to ask Moyna about her work, and see the weird collection of faces and characters she has conjured.