Description
Kenneth Dingwall: Being surveys over sixty years of abstract paintings, drawings, prints and constructions by this Edinburgh-based Scottish artist (b.1938). Colours, textures and abstract forms are used in a search to create a presence that can exist as an entity in its own right, and yet relate to human moods and feelings. Over the ages, many cultures, including our own, expressed ideas, fears and hopes through visual images not drawn from outward appearance. Each day we gather information from “abstract” signs; our sense of touch even when not touching, how weather colours our moods, how the subtlest change of pallor conveys health or illness, and the corner of a mouth or the body’s linear tension betrays emotion. Degrees of spatial distance acutely register when people are too close or too distant. Our thoughts are guided by many unvoiced sensations.
Essays by distinguished art historians and authors – Duncan Macmillan, Emeritus Professor of the History of Scottish Art, and the art critic for The Scotsman, Professor Natalie Adamson, author of a number of publications on the development of post-war abstract art in Paris and Europe and Dr Alistair Rider, who also teaches at St Andrews University and has researched and published on abstraction, minimalism, and durational projects. A selection of sketchbook notes and quotes gathered by Dingwall over this sixty year period are interspersed through the plates.
The works illustrated were made in Scotland, Switzerland and the United States and are drawn from public, private and corporate collections in Europe and the United States and also include works from the artist’s studio, some never before shown.
This archival publication is timed to coincide with a retrospective exhibition at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh from 21 November 2026 to 7 March 2027
About the authors:
Alistair Rider teaches in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, and researches art from the 1950s to the present. He completed his doctoral dissertation on minimal art from the United States at the University of Leeds in 2005 and was a Henry Moore Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York during 2007 and 2008. He is the author of Carl Andre: Things in their Elements (2011) and James Howell: Infinite Array (2021), and has published articles on many aspects of late twentieth-century European and North American art. Rider’s current interests include histories of modern and contemporary sculpture, durational art practices, art and environmentalism, and the legacies of abstraction. Rider first wrote about Ken Dingwall’s work when several of his Constructions were exhibited at the University of St Andrews in 2012.
Duncan Macmillan is Emeritus Professor in the History of Scottish Art in the University of Edinburgh where he pioneered the teaching Scottish art as a university subject. As curator of the Talbot Rice Gallery he presented a wide ranging exhibition programme of contemporary art. He is art critic of The Scotsman and a fellow of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Arts and an Honorary Royal Scottish Academician. His book, Scottish Art 1460-2000, won the Saltire Prize for Scottish Book of the Year. He has also won several other prizes and holds an honorary degree from the University of Dundee. As well as Scottish Art 1460-2000, numerous articles, exhibition catalogues etc. he has published a number of other books on Scottish art and artists. His most recent, Scotland and the Origins of Modern Art, examines the role of the Scottish Enlightenment in the history of modern art.
Natalie Adamson is Professor in the School of Art History, University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her research and teaching are focused on the art, politics and cultural history of twentieth-century France, and its international and transnational relations around the world; practices of painting, especially abstraction; surrealism; and the history of photography. Publications include essays on Pierrette Bloch, Sam Francis, John Hoyland, Herbert Read, Édouard Pignon and Pierre Soulages, and the books Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944-1964 (2009) and Material Imagination: Postwar European Art, 1946-1971 (2017). A monograph on the abstract painting practice of Pierre Soulages is forthcoming with Yale University Press.
