Installation view: "Evergreen", Inverleith House, 2005 

THE ARTISTS

CARL ANDRE

(b.1935. Lives and Works in New York). Recognised as one of the most important living artists, Carl Andre first visited Scotland in 1998 to make a solo exhibition at Inverleith House (12 Isohedra) for the Edinburgh International Festival. For that exhibition he used locally quarried red sandstone. Silver Ribbon, (2002) and developed his preoccupation with the fundamental expressions of material, mass and form.

JOHN HUTTON BALFOUR

(1808-1894). A renowned lecturer, Balfour was Regius Keeper of the Garden from 1845 to 1879, and he acquired Inverleith House where he lived and eventually died. He commissioned these diagrams and also used plant models for teaching botany to medical students.They form part of a larger collection, some of which were shown alongside the work of Laura Owens (2000). Little is known of the artists responsible for this large-scale form of illustration and the drawings themselves were almost destroyed in a bonfire in the early 1960s.

ADAM BARKER-MILL

(b.1942 Lives and works in London).Formerly a lighting cameraman, with films such as The Great Rock and Roll Swindle to his credit, Adam Barker-Mill is the foremost British artist to use light (natural and artifical) as a material. His solo exhibition at Inverleith House (Photosynthesis, 1997) was his largest to date, and it contained the work Chromat 6, also included in this exhibition, which the artist has reprogrammed especially for Evergreen.

LOTHAR BAUMGARTEN 

(b.1944 Lives and works in Dusseldorf, Paris and New York). In 1994 Baumgarten made an exhibition in the garden's glasshouses (Conservatory, 1973-1974) by installing 400 plant labels, each containing quotations from texts made by Rainforest explorers dating back to the 17th century. The relationship between human culture and the natural world is again explored in his work from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, shown here in a UK gallery for the first time.

GRAHAM FAGEN

(b.1966 Lives and works in Glasgow). The symbolic meaning and significance of plants in popular culture was the subject of Fagen's exhibition at Inverleith House in 1998. Fagen has used the phrase ‘My favourite flower is the Pansy'. The sculpture of a pansy cast for Evergreen has a pure yellow flower; bred to remove the familiar purplish blotches or markings and referred to by horticulturists as a ‘faceless' variety.

DOUGLAS GORDON

(b.1966 Lives and works in New York and Glasgow). Douglas Gordon previously exhibited at the garden in the Caledonian Hall (1996), and at Inverleith House in the exhibition Family (1998) where he exhibited Instruction No.7 I believe in miracles. Two new works were created for this exhibition; I still believe in miracles is positioned exactly where the first work was shown in Family, whilst I still believe in still is (obscurely) visible in the stairwell. Gordon's most recent exhibition at Inverleith House was Superhumanatural in 2006.

JOHN HOPE 

(1725-1786). Our exhibitions programme opened in 1986 to mark the bicentenary of the death of John Hope, Regius Keeper and Professor of Materia Medica at the University of Edinburgh. The drawings shown in Evergreen (commissioned by Hope) form part of the John Hope Archive, conserved thanks to a grant from the Pilgrim Trust. Most had never previously been exhibited.

CALLUM INNES

(b.1962 Lives and works in Edinburgh). In 1996 Callum Innes received the Scotland on Sunday award for the best exhibition of the Festival for his exhibition at Inverleith House. The Exposed Painting, shown for the first time in Evergreen, was typical of Innes' current work in which the visual plane is intuitively subdivided into five sections, and the pigment is washed away from certain areas using turpentine which flows across and within the painting to produce a vast, complex tonal range.

ALAN JOHNSTON

(b.1945 Lives and works in Edinburgh). A sculpture by Alan Johnston is situated on the East-facing wall, north of Inverleith House; created for his exhibition Haus Wittgenstein/ Inverleith House in 1995 (which also received best exhibition for the Festival that year from the Glasgow Herald). His drawing, Hamilton Shadow Walk (2005) is one of over three hundred created in private and public places worldwide.

RORY McEWEN

(1932-1982). A close friend of Cy Twombly, Rory McEwen was an artist and musician whose circle of friends extended well beyond his native Scotland. In the 1970s he exhibited at the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh and at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York, but the botanical paintings for which he is best remembered were shown at Inverleith House during the 1988 Festival retrospective, and later at The Serpentine Gallery, London.

AGNES MARTIN 

(1912-2004). Evergreen is dedicated to Agnes Martin, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, who died 19 December 2004 as plans for the exhibition were almost complete. Her exhibition at Inverleith House in 1999 contained fourteen new painitings from her studio in New Mexico, placed in context with some of her writings and her only film Gabriel, made in 1976. The true and wider significance of her work is yet to be fully realised.

STELLA ROSS-CRAIG 

(1906-2006). Arguably the greatest illustrator of the British flora of all time, and best known for her Drawings of British Plants (in which she illustrated 1, 340 native plant species), Stella Ross-Craig was given her first solo exhibition in 2002, aged 96, at Inverleith House. This exhibition toured to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where the drawings are kept, and close to where she once lived.

THOMAS STRUTH 

(b.1954 Lives and works in Dusseldorf). In 1985 Thomas Struth visited Scotland at the invitation of his friend Alan Johnston, where he made his first portraits and photographed the city and parts of the Highlands on his way to Orkney; making some of the photographs which are shown here for the first time.

CY TWOMBLY 

(b.1928 Lives and works in Rome and Virginia). For many years Cy Twombly and Rory McEwen were friends, McEwen dedicating Northern Leaves for Cy to him. This drawing was shown alongside Twombly's sculpture Rome. One of the greatest living artists Twombly embraces painting, sculpture and photography with equal delight, as seen in his exhibition at Inverleith House in 2002, which received a Herald Angel award at the Edinburgh International Festival.

RUTH VOLLMER 

(1903-1982). Living in New York for most of her life, Ruth Vollmer was influential in the lives and works of several generations of artists, including Eva Hess and Sol LeWitt. The first exhibition of her work in Scotland was held at Inverleith House in 2002. Her explorations of natural geometry found expression in drawings and sculpture, many of which show a refinement of form and innovation in technique.

LAWRENCE WEINER 

(b.1942 Lives and works in New York). Acknowledged as a leading founder of conceptual art, Lawrence Weiner makes book, films and music, and has collaborated in the production of Opera as well as making the works using text, for which he is widely known. His work BEFORE & AFTER TIME (1999) was chosen by the artist for Evergreen, having previously visited Inverleith House to make his solo exhibition TIME + PLACE in the year 2000.

FRANZ WEST 

(b.1947 Lives and works in Vienna). For Evergreen Franz West made nine small sculptures called Nippes in addition to the three collages which relate to his exhibition of outdoor sculpture Meeting Points held at the garden during the 2001 Festival. In that exhibition's catalogue, we attempted to classify his papier mache sculptures along botanical lines and its juxtaposition with botanical illustration is brought to life in this exhibition with Ross-Craig's line drawings.

RICHARD WRIGHT 

(b.1960 Lives and works in Glasgow). All works made for Wright's exhibition at Inverleith House in 1999 were drawn directly onto the walls, and painted over when the exhibition came to a close. In Evergreen there were works on paper but during the course of the exhibition, Wright began a new wall drawing in Inverleith House.

We wish to thank the artists and those who kindly insisted in making the exhibition possible: Carolyn Barker Mil, Sadie Coles HQ (Sadie Coles and Pauline Daly), Haunch of Venison (Anja Birnbaum, Pilar Corrias and Lupe Sanchez), Anthony Fawcett (Anthony Fawcett Consultants), Peter Flessig ( nvisible Museum), Gagosian Gallery (Larry Gagosian, Kay Pallister, Becky Poostchi, Stefan Raitbor and gary Waterston), Marc Glimcher (Pace Wildenstein), Marion Goodman Gallery (Marian Goodman and Rose Lord), Robert Johnston, Bethany Izard, Susan Johnston, Hyjdla Kosaniuk, Lisson Gallery (Nicholas Logsdail and Lias Rosendahl), Romana McEwen, Victoria Miguel, Jeremy Millar, Robert Robertson, gary ough, Marlies Pfeifer (Goethe Institute, Glasgow), Eddie Ross (Inglis Allen), Ines Turian (Studio Franz West), Marilyn Ward (Royal Botanics, Kew)

Installation view: "Evergreen", Inverleith House, 2005

Installation view: "Evergreen", Inverleith House, 2005

Installation view: "Evergreen", Inverleith House, 2005

Installation view: "Evergreen", Inverleith House, 2005

Installation view: "Evergreen", Inverleith House, 2005

Installation view: "Evergreen", Inverleith House, 2005

Installation view: "Evergreen", Inverleith House, 2005

Installation view: "Evergreen", Inverleith House, 2005

Installation view: "Evergreen", Inverleith House, 2005

Installation view: "Evergreen", Inverleith House, 2005

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