Cooper Gallery (DJCAD)

A Scone Off A Plate, Knife Edge Press, 1990.
Courtesy of the Artists. Photo: Ross Fraser McLean

Cooper Summer Residency – Invisible Residency

Bruce McLean and Mel Gooding

Adding marginalia to the exhibition Knife Edge Press: The Complete Works (so far), writer Mel Gooding and artist Bruce McLean will undertake an Invisible Residency. The invisible residency will take the place of this year’s Annual Cooper Summer Residency to inscribe a daily visual and textual dialogue into the Cooper Gallery creating an extended dialogue with the exhibition.

The annual Cooper Summer Residency invites artists to reflect upon and experiment with new ideas and strategies that extend or further explore their practice. Based on a desire to investigate the means and potential of exchanging resources and knowledge, for this year’s Residency we are delighted that the well-respected collaboration of Gooding and McLean will undertake an Invisible Residency to coincide with their Cooper Gallery exhibition Knife Edge Press: The Complete Works (so far). 

Artists’ Boigraphies

Bruce McLean is one of the major figures of contemporary British Art. Born in 1944 he studied at Glasgow School of Art and at St. Martin’s in London, where he was taught by Anthony Caro. All his work brilliantly sent up the pompousness of the art world and mocked established art forms. He was given an exhibition at the Tate Gallery at the age of 27. From the late 1970s he has made paintings and prints in which humour remains central.

After St. Martin’s, McLean went on to teach at The Slade School of Fine Art. His early reputation arose from his activities as a sculptor involved in performance art. He has obtained international recognition for his paintings and prints, as well as his work with film, theatre and books. McLean’s bold and confident approach to print making proved influential to his contemporaries and also to a generation of younger artists.

McLean’s work is in private and public collections world-wide and he has had numerous one man shows in both Europe and North America. These include The Tate Gallery, the Modern Art Gallery in Vienna, The Museum of Modern Art Oxford and the National Galleries of Scotland. Bruce McLean was awarded the John Moores prize for painting in 1985, and was the Head of Graduate Painting at the Slade until 2010. He lives and works in London.

Mel Gooding is an art critic, writer and exhibition organiser. Gooding has written many catalogue texts 
and has contributed extensively to the art press, and to 
magazines and newspapers. His monographs on artists 
include Bruce McLean (1990), Michael Rothenstein’s 
Boxes (1991), Patrick Heron (1994), Gillian Ayres (2001),
 Ceri Richards (2002), Patrick Hayman Visionary Artist
 (2005), John Hoyland (2006) and herman de vries: chance 
and change (2006). He has also written on architecture, 
and on general art topics including William Alsop Architect
 (1992), Joze Plecnik: The National and University Library,
 Ljubljana (1997); Public: Art; Space (1998); Abstract Art
 (2001); Song of the Earth: European Artists in the 
Landscape (2002).

www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/exhibitions/cooper-summer-residency-2013/