Find the full list from 50 to 1 below.
50. Oana Stanciu
Oana Stanciu’s Buffalo. (Image: Oana Stanciu)
Romanian-born but now based in Edinburgh, Stanciu works primarily in photography and film and often presents images of herself in poses which are variously ridiculous, surreal, challenging or disturbing. She has won a slew of awards though perhaps the most notable is the one conferred on her by the President of Romania for her contribution to Romanian culture in the UK – the Order of Cultural Merit in the rank of Knight. She exhibited most recently in last month’s Hidden Door festival in Edinburgh with a photographic and audio-visual show titled Stai în banca ta/Behave, and her work can currently be seen in a large group show at the Villa Schöningen gallery in Potsdam, just outside Berlin.
49. Olivia Priya Foster
Olivia Priya Foster in her HOST studio, Outer Spaces x EAF25. (Image: Olivia Priya Foster)
Raised on a sheep farm in rural Argyll, Priya Foster studied painting and printmaking at Glasgow School of Art, graduating two years ago. Winner of a gold medal for her degree show, she was chosen for the Royal Scottish Academy’s prestigious New Contemporaries exhibition in 2025 and in the same year showed Black Sheep, a sculptural piece drawing on her childhood environment, at the Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF). She returns for this year’s EAF as one of two awardees of the Platform opportunity for early career artists.
48. Bethany Reid
When You’re Big by Bethany Reid. (Image: Bethany Reid)
Winner of a New Graduate award from the Society of Scottish Artists, Reid left Aberdeen’s Gray’s School of Art in 2024 and then featured in the Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries exhibition the following year. At the heart of her practice is an issue of growing political, ethical, social, economic and environmental importance: animals and how humankind treats them, relates to them and shares the planet with them. Check out her disarmingly titled mixed media work When You’re Big, an image of cute pigs frolicking in a field above which are sculptural pig carcasses.
47. Sekai Machache
Light Divine Sky II by Sekai Machache. (Image: Sekai Machache)
The practice of this Glasgow-based Scots-Zimbabwean spans photography, film, performance, drawing and design. She featured on the Saltire Society’s 40 Under 40 list in 2023, designed to showcase Scotland’s top young creatives, and in 2024 represented Zimbabwe at the Venice Biennale. A graduate of Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, she is currently exhibiting work at Edinburgh’s Inverleith House as part of Earth Matters, a group show celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of James Hutton, the so-called father of modern geology.
46. Francis Dosoo
Eyes, from Portrait Of Dorothy Gale by Francis Dosoo. (Image: Francis Dosoo.)
Edinburgh born but now based in Vienna, Dosoo never went to art school but instead cut his teeth on Scotland’s club circuit, DJing and putting on club nights in which he often collaborated with visual artists. But, drawn to themes around memory and nostalgia – themes which themselves pull in other ideas relating to colonialism and diasporas – he has begun making bewitching work such as immersive installation Portrait Of Dorothy Gale, currently on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts, where Dosoo has his first solo show. It’s a multi-layered video work which takes as its starting point 1978 musical The Wiz, which starred Diana Ross in a Motown re-imagining of The Wizard Of Oz.
45. Mandy McIntosh
Springburn Sculpture Park by Mandy McIntosh. (Image: Mandy McIntosh)
An artist whose work involves becoming embedded in a community – she has worked intensively in Glasgow’s Springburn area for over five years, and also in Ferguslie Park in Paisley – the Glasgow native originally trained in knitwear design and worked for Kenzo in Paris before returning to Scotland. Her work is inter-disciplinary but has politics at its heart, often dealing with issues around the planning decisions affecting working class communities. Her work Springburn Sculpture Park (Communal Bronze) featured in the recent Glasgow International art biennial.
44. Charlie Prodger
Charlie Prodger, Installation view, Blanks and Preforms at the Kunst Museum Winterthur in 2021. (Image: Charlie Prodger)
A writer, artist and film-maker, Bournemouth-born Prodger lives and works in Glasgow and took home the Turner Prize in 2018, the year of the all film/video/moving image shortlist. Prodger won for Bridgit, shot in Scotland on an iPhone and an exploration of her Queer identity. She represented Scotland at the following year’s Venice Biennale in 2019 and her most recent show was Cardinal Beams. Held in London in 2024 it consisted of new works and unveiled a new direction – drawings made during a residency at Harvard University in the United States. “Every few years, I shift to a new way of working,” she explained ahead of that show. “It hasn’t necessarily been a conscious process, rather it is reflective of my interest in the limits and parameters of particular materials, and in pushing, and feeling out those edges.”
43. Sooun Kim
A work by Sooun Kim exhibited at GI 2026. (Image: Eoin Carey)
Following undergraduate studies in Nottingham and in Seoul, the South Korean artist graduated from Glasgow School of Art’s two year Master of Fine Art programme in 2020 and still lives and works in the city. His practice is multi-disciplinary: Quiet Folds Dispersing You, a Creative Scotland-supported show at Patricia Fleming Gallery as part of last month’s Glasgow International biennial, was a film installation dipping into themes of migration and disconnection, while for his award-winning 2024 show, Mimae: The Edge Of Sleep, he presented a suite of fantastical, other-worldly paintings.
42. Jamie Fitzpatrick
“Essentially a large scale sculptor, Edinburgh-based Fitzpatrick brings a healthy dose of humour and grotesquerie to works which deal in big subjects such as political power and nationalism”. (Image: Ross Fraser McLean)
Essentially a large scale sculptor, Edinburgh-based Fitzpatrick brings a healthy dose of humour and grotesquerie to works which deal in big subjects such as political power and nationalism, and the ways in which they are controlled and deployed. He has exhibited internationally and featured in the New Contemporaries show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, and a solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers has just opened. It showcases new work made using techniques shaped during residencies there and at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and is titled Memorials To Sausage Politics.
41. Victoria Morton
Field Recording by Victoria Morton. (Image: Victoria Morton)
Though also employing sculpture and installation, the Glasgow-born and Glasgow School of Art-trained artist works mostly on large, colourful canvases which hover between abstraction and representation. She’s also a musician – she has played in several bands, including Luke Sutherland’s Rev Magnetic – and her work can currently be seen at The Modern Institute in Glasgow.
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40. Sam Ainsley
A work in progress for The Idea of North – Sam Ainsley, 2023. (Image: Alan Dimmick)
A noted writer on art and an educator – she was the founder and former head of Glasgow School of Art’s Master of Fine Art programme in 1989 – Ainsley is also known for her vivid, abstract paintings and wall-mounted panels. In 2024, her first institutional show for 40 years drew 70,000 people to Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, and a two-person exhibition with Alex Dempster has just opened at Glasgow’s Garnethill Gallery. Ainsley is showing a new body of work there, The Bed Drawings, made during her recuperation following an accident.
39. Joyce W Cairns
Joyce W. Cairns PPRSA, Pussers Rum. (Image: Joyce W. Cairns)
The first woman to be elected President of the prestigious Royal Scottish Academy, the Edinburgh born artist also taught for many years at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, so her contribution as an educator is not to be under-estimated. As for her very personal and autobiographical works, they are largely figurative (and largely large!) and often deal with elements of mythology or with aspects of her family background. War, soldiering and conflict loom large, but so too does the village of Footdee in Aberdeenshire, where she lived for many years. On August 1, as part of its 200th anniversary celebrations, the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh will mount A Personal Odyssey, a large retrospective of her long career which will include works from her critically acclaimed (and typically monumental) War Tourist series.
38. Sue Tompkins
Installation view of new work by Sue Tompkins, at The Modern Institute, Glasgow. (Image: Sue Tompkins)
Former lead singer with Glasgow indie band Life Without Buildings, Tompkins is the twin sister of Hayley Tompkins and like her trained at Glasgow School of Art. Her practice often involves sound and she has an interest in language which means she often uses typewritten text in her work. King’s Leap gallery in New York is currently hosting Wanna, her first US solo show in a decade and her first major career survey. Meanwhile the music continues: late last year she collaborated with rabble-rousing Nottingham duo Sleaford Mods on their single No Touch.
37. Josie KO
Of Ane Blak-Moir by Josie KO, from the pass shadow, whisper shade group show at Collective, 2024. (Image: Sally Jubb Photography)
Using papier mache, glitter and found objects and employing (in her words) “a kitsch DIY aesthetic full of colour and humour with dark gothic undertones” Josie KO create sculptures and casts of Black female figures as a way of examining the Black British experience. Based in Glasgow, the British-Nigerian artist graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2021 and featured in the prestigious New Contemporaries show at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh two years later, where her massive sculptural piece Lady In Blue dominated the main room. In 2024 she exhibited in the Glasgow International biennial and last September she was invited to Tate St Ives to create a large scale participatory artwork.
36. David Sherry
Performance-based artist David Sherry. (Image: David Sherry)
Born in Northern Ireland, based in Glasgow and a lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, Sherry’s performance-based practice has been described as “comedy-adjacent” and absurdist, among other things. Alongside physical performances – one work was titled Carrying A Bucket Of Water About For A Week, and consisted of just that – he works with video, sculpture and drawing . Earlier this year he presented a grin-inducing solo show titled Sublime Review Of Wrongness in Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket gallery’s large Warehouse space.
35. Rae-Yen Song
A work by Rae-Yen Song, showing at the Tramway. (Image: Keith Hunter)
In common with other Scottish artists of migrant background, Rae-Yen Song mixes personal and family stories with influences from her wider cultural story, often to fantastical effect and using a blend of sculpture, installation, video, performance, sound and even collaborations with family members. Currently showing at Glasgow’s huge Tramway space where it featured as part of the Glasgow International art biennial is a show titled •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•, a series of large sculptural installations. Born in Edinburgh, educated at Glasgow School of Art and still resident in the city, Song brings the wow factor to everything she does.
34. Moyna Flannigan
Monya Flannigan mounted a large solo show to mark the 40th anniversary of Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery in 2024. (Image: Monya Flannigan)
Born in Kirkcaldy, Flannigan studied at Edinburgh College of Art before heading to Yale University for a masters in Fine Art, Flannigan’s preferred form is the portrait and her grand subject is women. Drawing on influences from history, mythology and popular culture – and serving it all up with a twist of humour – her earlier work was often presented as exquisite miniatures. She has since moved into larger scale painted works and, increasingly, collage. Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery mounted a large solo show to mark its 40th anniversary in 2024, and in 2018 was part of a large group show at National Galleries Scotland’s Modern One.
33. Tessa Lynch
An L-shaped, waist height wall is vertically striped from dark pink (at the top) to light pink then white (at the bottom). (Image: Tessa Lynch)
Having studied at both Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art, Lynch now teaches at the first of those august institutions but lives and works in Glasgow. She works in sculpture primarily, co-opting everything from signs to huge building site hoardings, but also in print and performance. Her practice often involves working with community groups to make work which turns on cities, domestic spaces and the built environment as experienced by women. She featured alongside Nathan Coley and others in the group show NOW at Modern One in Edinburgh 2017 and in 2022 exhibited installation works at Edinburgh Printmakers in a show titled Houses Fit For People. Last year she had a solo show of new and old work at Glasgow’s Patricia Fleming Gallery. For Lynch the gallery space is “a city brownfield site, ripe for new development.”
32. Anya Gallaccio
Anya Gallaccio with her work eight hours of whale song (2025), acquired for the Government Art Collection. (Image: David Parry/PA Media Assignments)
Few who saw it at Jupiter Artland near Edinburgh will forget the Paisley-born artist’s 2014 work Stroke, in which she covered an entire room in chocolate from floor to ceiling – or Red On Green, from two years earlier, where she covered the gallery floor with 10,000 fragrant English roses and left them to rot. Her permanent display at the celebrated outdoor art venue, The Light Pours Out Of Me, is a sunken grotto whose walls are encrusted with obsidian and knuckles of amethyst. Kids love it, adults are suitably intrigued by it. Shortlisted for the 2003 Turner Prize the year Grayson Perry was garlanded (“Well, it’s about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize” is how he opened his acceptance speech), Gallaccio was treated to a large career survey show at Margate’s Turner Contemporary gallery in 2024.
31. Katie Paterson
Visual artist Katie Paterson at the Scottish debut of Afterlife at Collective Gallery in Edinburgh. (Image: Eoin Carey)
The Glasgow-born conceptual artist is nothing if not ambitious: in 2014 she initiated Future Library, a century long project in which trees planted in a Norwegian forest will become paper for a series of as-yet-unwritten books. Unsurprisingly, Deep Time, geology and natural change are key artist interests and her work often sees her collaborate with scientists and researchers around the world. At last year’s Folkestone Triennial she unveiled Afterlife, a series of 200 tiny amulets carved from materials sourced from disappearing landscapes and fragile ecosystems. It’s currently on show at Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery and is included in this year’s upcoming Edinburgh Art Festival.
30. Andrew Gannon
Andrew Gannon ‘Drawing Performance 2’. (Image: Chris Scott)
Originally from Bolton and now based in Edinburgh, Gannon was born with a congenital limb difference affecting his lower left arm and wears a prostheses as a result. In 2019, realising that in his words he had been “othering disability in my practice for a long time”, he began making molds of his arm and using the resulting sculptures in his work. “I started pulling at the thread of disability, pulling at what it means to be disabled and to identify as disabled,” he has said. Along with Daisy Lafarge, Jo Longhurst and future Turner Prize winner Nnena Kalu, he participated in this year’s ground-breaking We Contain Multitudes exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts. It was a group show foregrounding the issue of disability justice, a subject growing ever more prominent in the work of British and Scottish visual artists, and rightly so.
29. Hayley Tompkins
Surroundings (2025) by Hayley Tompkins, courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow. (Image: Patrick Jameson)
Films, painted objects and colourful panel paintings are among the means of delivery for this Glasgow-based artist, twin sister of Sue Tompkins, also an artist and former lead singer with Glasgow indie band, Life Without Buildings. Tompkins was nominated for the 2004 Beck’s Futures Award, has represented Scotland at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and has exhibited in Brazil, the US and South Korea. Her most recent solo show, Surroundings, was held at The Modern Institute in Glasgow late last year, and in late 2022 she had a mini-retrospective of works made since 2007 at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket gallery.
28. Sara Barker
Glasgow artist Sara Barker with her exhibition ‘Change-The Settings’ (2016). (Image: Gordon Terris)
Currently Head of Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art, from where she graduated in 2003, Manchester-born Barker co-founded Glasgow’s innovative Mary Mary gallery co-operative and makes spindly, finely-wrought, angular sculptures in steel, aluminium, brass and glass often drilling into ideas she finds in the work of writers like Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Doris Lessing. You can see her work on permanent display at Jupiter Artland near Edinburgh, as part of the celebrated art venue’s outdoor sculpture collection, and this year she has exhibited in Newcastle and Glasgow.
27. Ross Sinclair
Artist Ross Sinclair pictured with his light installation ‘We Love Real Life Scotland’, last seen in 2016 on Glasgow’s City Chambers. (Image: Colin Mearns)
The Glasgow‑born artist, musician, and writer wears his art close to his heart, though in his case it takes the form of a tattoo across his back reading ‘Real Life’. He was inked at Terry’s Tattoo Parlour in Glasgow in 1994 and in 2017 added the words: ‘Is Dead’. Real Life is also the title of an ongoing artistic and research project which encompasses much but deals in large part with politics, Scotland, and Scottish identity and culture. Currently also Professor of Contemporary Art Practice within the School of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art, he exhibited a huge, wall-mounted piece at last year’s 199th RSA Annual Exhibition in Edinburgh titled 31 Years Of Real Life, School Of Whales and returned for the 200th show with a piece featuring painted drums.
26. Richard Wright
Richard Wright’s No Title, an installation at The Modern Institute, Glasgow. Pic Keith Hunter, courtesy of the Artist. (Image: Keith Hunter)
A graduate of both Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art, London-born Wright still has a base in Glasgow and regularly shows work at The Modern Institute in the city. He has been described by one eminent art critic as “a modern fresco painter” given his chosen technique of making large, in-situ drawings often composed of complex geometric designs. These are normally painted over at the end of an exhibition. It was for just such an abstract fresco – this one executed in gold leaf on the walls of Tate Britain – that he was awarded the 2009 Turner Prize. Wright had one of his largest shows to date in London last year, preceded by a large 2023 solo show at the Gagosian gallery in New York.
25. Martin Boyce
Immersive works by Turner Prize-winning Scottish artist Martin Boyce. (Image: Neil Hanna)
Winner of the 2011 Turner Prize and another graduate of Glasgow School of Art’s celebrated Environmental Art course, the Hamilton-born artist uses sculpture and installation to question and examine the built environment we move through daily and the everyday items we interact with. You see it in his unique sculptural take on the municipal park furniture of his boyhood – sturdy rubbish bins and steel fences turned into curious artefacts – and in the other items on which his eye fastens: phone booths, fireplaces, ventilation grids. Earlier this year he showed work at The Modern Institute in Glasgow, and he currently has a piece in the 2026 Summer Show at London’s swanky Royal Academy.
24. Callum Innes
Callum Innes’ Exposed Painting Sapphire Blue. (Image: Callum Innes studio)
Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1995 (the eventual winner was a certain D Hirst for a dissected cow preserved in formaldehyde) and recipient of the prestigious Jerwood Prize for Painting in 2002, Edinburgh-born Innes is Scotland’s foremost abstract painter, concerned in equal measures with light, colour and geometry. His intense, beautifully realised works sell for five figure sums and he is exhibited in galleries all over the world. In Scotland he is represented by Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery: an installation show of four site-specific wall paintings closed there last month.
23. Susan Philipsz
Installation by Turner winner and Scot Susan Philipsz, which was part of ‘Now’ at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (2018). (Image: Gordon Terris)
The Glasgow-born sound artist won the 2010 Turner Prize for a Glasgow International commission in which three different versions of her singing a 16th century Scottish lament were played under bridges in the city. Other works have featured her singing a cappella versions of songs by Nirvana and the Velvet Underground. Sound, in Philipsz’s hands, is as powerful and emotional a tool as the paintbrush, the camera lens or the sculptor’s chisel. She exhibits internationally – last year alone she showed in Germany, China, the UK, Luxembourg, Italy and Japan – and a new, immersive show titled The Stars Look Down has just opened in Berlin, where she is currently based.
22. Martin Creed
Artist Martin Creed at Fruitmarket Gallery (2017). (Image: Gordon Terris)
Along with Tracey Emin’s My Bed, one of the most notorious/celebrated Turner Prize-nominated artworks ever is probably Work 227: The Lights Going On And Off by Glasgow-raised conceptual artist Martin Creed. Emin lost out in 1999 to future Oscar winner Steve McQueen but Creed actually won the 2001 competition, picking up his award from Madonna at the televised ceremony. Those were the days. A quarter of a century on, Creed divides his time between London and Italy but back home his outdoor public artworks are very visible, particularly in the capital, while those contained in the Artist Rooms collection regularly tour Scotland’s galleries. A show of new work recently closed in Spain, though it included 1998’s Work No. 3891: Half The Air In A Given Space – essentially a gallery half-filled with balloons. As ever, simple but thought-provoking.
21. Toby Paterson
Toby Paterson’s Penumbral Park 2 (2024), courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute. (Image: Patrick Jameson.)
‘Skateboarder wins UK’s largest art prize’ screamed the headlines when Glasgow-born Toby Paterson picked up the Beck’s Futures Award in 2002, and his passion for skateboarding and the architecture it took him through were indeed early influences on the work of the Glasgow School of Art-trained artist. Today, young Glasgow skaters riding past BBC Scotland’s Pacific Quay headquarters can find themselves interacting with Paterson’s art: his large 2007 sculptural work Poised Array sits right outside. Still based in Glasgow, Paterson’s work involves installation, drawing, collage and colourful, wall-mounted relief sculptures. He exhibited in last month’s 200th Annual Exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and late last year had a solo exhibition, A Short Guide To Towns Without A Past, in the same venue.
20. Bugarin + Castle
Bugarin + Castle at the opening of their work Shame Parade, representing Scotland at the Venice Biennale. (Image: Dimitri D’ippolito)
Currently representing Scotland at the 2026 Venice Biennale with Shame Parade, a show curated by Bute-based Mount Stuart Trust and drawing on European traditions of public shaming, Davide Bugarin and Angel Cohn Castle draw on a long tradition of artistic double acts (see also Gilbert and George, Dalziell + Scullion etc.). However they may be alone in also having a side hustle as drag artists – the Glasgow-based duo perform as Hairy Teddy Bear and Pollyfilla when they’re not filling gallery spaces with work which draws on subjects as diverse as Queer histories and diasporic culture. A recent work by the pair, interactive short film Sore Throat, was filmed in Edinburgh and Manila, and exhibited at the Tate Modern in London as well as at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket gallery.
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19. Karla Black
Harris Brine, from the National Galleries of Scotland, takes a closer look at an abstract sculpture called ‘Interconnected Spaces’ by contemporary artist Karla Black which features in a new exhibition ‘A New Order’ at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. (Image: Jane Barlow)
The Dunbartonshire-born, Glasgow School of Art-trained sculptor has just unveiled her first New York solo show since 2016, an event which saw her described as a “canonized” Scottish artist by contemporary art journal Art Spiel. Actual sainthood may be a way off yet, but she has plenty of accolades on her CV, from her 2011 Turner Prize nomination to her role representing Scotland at the Venice Biennale in the same year. Her large sculptures, often suspended from the ceiling, are made using everyday household objects such as Sellotape, Vaseline, various plastics and even bath bombs, usually rendered in pastel shades. Black still lives and works in Glasgow, but her profile and her reputation are international.
18. Barbara Rae
Dame Barbara Rae RSA, Antarctic Memory, 2024. (Image: Barbara Rae)
The grand dame of Scottish painting, 82-year-old Rae has been exhibiting solo since 1967 but continues to produce the stunning, colourful, landscape-inspired abstracts which are her trademark. A keen traveller, she began a series of journeys to the Arctic in 2013 inspired by the expeditions of her namesake, polar explorer John Rae. These visits have greatly influenced her work since. A trip to the South Pole in 2022 to trace the ill-fated last journey of Sir Ernest Shackleton has brought about another body of work – Charting South. An exhibition of these new works opens at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in Edinburgh on November 21, a pleasing and fitting way to mark the culmination of the RSA’s 200th anniversary celebrations.
17. Alison Watt
Scottish artist Alison Watt with her work at the launch of Generation: 25 years of Contemporary Art in Scotland in Edinburgh at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. (Image: Gordon Terris)
Another giant of contemporary Scottish painting, Watt’s instantly recognisable works have often centred on sumptuous studies of folded fabrics and textiles, usually in white or cream. In 2000 she exhibited 12 such works in an exhibition titled Shift at the then-Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, becoming the youngest ever artist to have a solo show there. You can see here beautiful, four panel work Still in the memorial chapel of Old St Paul’s just behind Waverley Station in the capital. More recently she has turned to a different form of still life, though still death might be a better description: a 2025 show in London saw her exhibit exquisitely rendered paintings of subjects such as death masks and skulls.
16. Jim Lambie
Gold Love Forever by Jim Lambie (2025). Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow. (Image: Patrick Jameso)
Also a DJ and musician – he was once in the band that would become Teenage Fanclub – Lambie trained at Glasgow School of Art and was Turner Prize nominated in 2005. He’s best known for his signature installation work Zobop which, like all the best songs by The Ramones, is always the same and yet different every time: essentially a gallery takeover in which Lambie lays out concentric rings and lines of brightly coloured tape. Last year he transformed the entrance hall and sweeping double staircase of Vancouver Art Gallery into this candy-coloured dreamland. He currently has a show in Italy with David Batchelor and is part of a group show at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Though his practice is about a lot more than sticking vinyl onto floors, Lambie is one of a small number of artists whose work can capture a child’s imagination in an instant.
15. Nnena Kalu
Nnena Kalu’s Hanging Sculpture 2. Courtesy of the artist, ActionSpace, London and Arcadia Missa, London. (Image: David Levene)
In 2025, Glasgow-born Kalu became the first learning disabled person to win the Turner Prize when she scooped the award for her large-scale, abstract sculptures and drawings. Wrapped in a variety of different materials – fabric, rope, parcel tape, cling film and unspooled reels of VHS tape have all been used in the past – these are often made on site and suspended from the ceiling. Kalu is autistic and largely non-verbal, and accepted the Turner Prize while wearing a rosette bearing the words: ‘Idol, Legend, Winner, Whatever.’ Among her previous Scottish shows were the eponymous Nnena Kalu at the Project Ability Gallery (part of the 2018 Glasgow International biennial) and a group show, We Contain Multitudes, held at Dundee Contemporary Arts in February. She has also exhibited in London, Stavanger, Hull, Liverpool and Barcelona. With disability rights and neuro-divergence increasingly coming into focus, expect more from Nnena Kalu.
14. Cathy Wilkes
Come and visit me in a million years by Cathy Wilkes. (Image: Cathy Wilkes)
Born and raised in Belfast, educated at Glasgow School of Art and still living and working in the city, Wilkes is known for using figures and everyday objects in large scale installations which are haunting and disturbing, but also solidly domestic – you might find an empty chair sitting next to a coat hung on a wall, or an empty pram accompanied by two naked female mannequins, one wearing a crash helmet. She represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and the UK at the 2019 event, and was nominated for the 2008 Turner Prize. Her influence is felt at grass-roots level too: she is a founding member of Castlemilk Womanhouse (a meeting space for women and children centred on a four empty flats), Dalriada Gallery (an artists’ collective run out of her flat) and Glendale Women’s Cafe in Pollokshields. Until August 19, a show of new work by Wilkes can be seen at The Modern Institute in Glasgow, having also featured in the recent Glasgow International art biennial.
13. Alberta Whittle
Alberta Whittle’s Where the tide greets memory, 2023. (Image: Alberta Whittle)
Born in Barbados, raised in Birmingham and a long-time resident of Glasgow were she studied, Whittle’s acclaimed work takes in film, sculpture, installation and performance, and often turns on themes of history and colonialism. She had her largest show to date at Modern One in Edinburgh in 2023, and that followed a slew of other awards and honours. She won the Margaret Tait Award in 2018, named for the avant garde Orcadian poet and film-maker. She picked up the Frieze Artist Award two years later. And in 2022 she represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale. She currently has a show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and her latest work, performance piece The Last Born, will take place in Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall on August 13 as part of the upcoming Edinburgh Art Festival.
12. Nathan Coley
Turner Prize-shortlisted Scottish artist Nathan Coley with his work ‘The Future is Inside Us, It’s not Somewhere Else’ in Parliament Hall in Edinburgh (2019). (Image: Gordon Terris)
A contemporary of Douglas Gordon’s at Glasgow School of Art in the mid-1980s and a 2007 Turner Prize nominee, Coley’s ‘getability’ is one of his greatest assets as an artist. For his deeply affecting 2004 work, The Lamp Of Sacrifice, he built scale replicas in cardboard of all 286 places of worship listed in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages, and his trademark outdoor pieces – huge, site-specific, text-based sculptures made from scaffolding and illuminated lightbulbs – are now in place across the world. Last year in Berlin, mounted on a station which was a point of forced departure for thousands during the Nazi era, he placed the phrase I Don’t Have Another Land – an ambiguous piece of graffiti he first spotted on a wall in Jerusalem in 2000.
11. David Mach
Artist David Mach with his work The Flying Haggis, celebrating the global reach of the Burns Supper and Scotland’s national bard. (Image: Martin Shields)
Monumental is a good way to describe the public sculpture of the Methil-born artist, who recently turned 70. Turner Prize nominated alongside Lucian Freud way back in 1988, his Big Heids sculpture will be well known to anyone who commutes along the M8 and he once made a scale model of a Polaris submarine out of car tyres. But at the other end of the scale, he often also uses matchsticks and even pin heads to make works. He is, he told an interviewer in 2023, “greedier and greedier for size, scale, and material. It can’t be extravagant enough for me.” His large scale, ongoing work Epic People will tour next year and will bring together life-size 3D printed models of 1000 real people.
10. Aqsa Arif
Artist Aqsa Arif is photographed at her exhibition Raindrops of Rani which opens at Edinburgh Printmakers on Friday 1st August and runs until 2nd November and is part of Edinburgh Art Festival. (Image: Neil Hanna)
The Pakistan-born multi-disciplinary artist moved to Glasgow as a child in 2001 and grew up in a high-rise in Prospecthill Circus in Toryglen. Her family was rehoused in 2006 so Oscar-winning director Jonathan Glazer could shoot a controversial £2 million advert involving 1500 explosive charges and 70,000 litres of paint. It’s an experience Arif has channelled into art which also draws on her Pakistani background, family dynamics, pop culture and the cultural dissonance she feels as a migrant. She had a well-received solo exhibition in last year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, and in last month’s Glasgow International biennial presented a new show, Beneath The Ivory Is Molten Born, at the Street Level Photoworks gallery. “My work spans film, photography, sculpture, printmaking, and textiles,” she said ahead of the opening. “I create blended landscapes where folklore, mythology, and cinematic spectacle merge, using artefacts, characters, and avatars as vessels for transformation.” Definitely one to watch.
9. Peter Doig
Peter Doig image in his Studio New York. (Image: Peter Doig)
With his early paintings now fetching millions at auction – 1990 work Swamped sold for £25.4 million in New York, and that was five years ago – you might think the Edinburgh-born artist would rest on his laurels. Not a bit of it. He continues to produce his enigmatic and mesmerising paintings, and to push in new directions. Just last year he took over London’s Serpentine Gallery to mount House Of Music, which transformed the gallery into a listening space as Doig incorporated sound into his practice for the first time and displayed new works with music as their subject. It’s over a decade since the National Galleries Scotland mounted No Foreign Lands, his first major show in the land of his birth, which means we’re long overdue another one. Until then, a display of 28 etchings by him is currently on display at National Galleries Scotland: Modern One in Edinburgh until January 3.
8. Ilana Halperin
Ilana Halperin, self portrait with Ammonites. (Image: Ilana Halperin)
Born in New York, educated at the Big Apple’s storied High School of Performing Arts (the setting for 1980 film Fame) and trained initially as a stone carver, Halperin moved to Glasgow in the late 1990s to take up a place at Glasgow School of Art and never left the city. Her work mixes sculpture, drawing and photography and, though her practice still involves stone, she is now equally concerned with the Deep Time geological processes which formed the stuff. She has undertaken visits to Icelandic volcanoes, participated in a ‘virtual’ field trip to Mars, and dived deep into the life and work of 18th century Scottish geologist James Hutton. It all feeds into work which is accessible, insightful and impactful, as shown in her recent solo show at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket gallery, What Is Us And What Is Earth.
7. Douglas Gordon
Douglas Gordon Image: Robert Perrry (Image: Robert Perrry)
A giant of conceptual art whatever country he’s in, the Glasgow-born and Glasgow School of Art-trained artist long ago decamped to Berlin, but he left his mark on his home town in the form of Empire, a neon green artwork perched on the side of a building in the Merchant City. That work as well as 24 Hour Psycho, which won him the 1996 Turner Prize, reflect his fascination with film and Alfred Hitchcock in particular. Today he exhibits all over the world, most recently in Gagosian’s Rome gallery and as part of a group show at the historic (but now crumbling) Variety Arts Theater in downtown Los Angeles. For a strong flavour of the man and his work, check out Douglas Gordon By Douglas Gordon, an incoming documentary by Edinburgh-based film-maker Finlay Pretsell shot in the artist’s Berlin studio. It had a splashy world premiere at February’s Berlin International Film Festival and can be seen in next month’s Edinburgh International Film Festival.
6. Luke Fowler
Still from A Sensation Never Yet Known by Luke Fowler. (Image: Luke Fowler)
Trained in printmaking at Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design and now based in Glasgow, Fowler works primarily in 16 mm film and has made a series of artful, documentary-style works about key avant-garde figures and intellectuals of the mid-20th century such as Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing, Orcadian poet and film-maker Margaret Tait and experimental composer Cornelius Cardew. His 2025 work, Being Blue, was about Derek Jarman and followed a residency at Jarman’s famous cottage on England’s south coast, while in last month’s Glasgow International art biennial he exhibited A Sensation Not Yet Known. It ran at the pioneering Glasgow Library of Synthesised Sound, and was a film about equally pioneering electronic music composer Janet Beat. In a parallel music career, he collaborates regularly with feted, Glasgow-based experimental guitarist Richard Youngs.
5. Calum Colvin
This Living Hand by Calum Colvin. (Image: Calum Colvin)
Colvin’s highly distinctive modus operandi is to assemble a room of what might look like clutter and paint onto it so that, when viewed from a certain point, an image appears. His subject matter often deals with Scotland and Scottish culture with an eye which is alternately neutral, sardonic and affectionate. Check out Burnsiana, his ongoing series of works dealing with the life and work of Robert Burns, or Jacobites By Name, an intricate set of photographs examining what the Glasgow-born artist calls “the complex legacy and secret symbolism” of 18th century Jacobitism. His work is widely held in the national collection, and regularly displayed. He exhibited at Summerhall during the 2024 Edinburgh Festival and in 2020 the Royal Scottish Academy mounted a major (and very welcome) retrospective. Another artist with a high ‘getability’ factor.
4. Jasleen Kaur
Jasleen Kaur is a Glasgow-born artist and winner of the Turner Prize for Alter Altar, a 2023 show at the city’s Tramway. (Image: Suzannah Pettigrew)
The Glasgow-born artist hit the headlines in 2024 when she won the Turner Prize for Alter Altar, a 2023 show at the city’s Tramway. Draped in the colours of the Palestinian flag, her impassioned acceptance speech called for a ceasefire in Gaza and for divestment from organisations with links to the Israeli government. The crowd-pleasing show, meanwhile, gathered together family photographs, an Axminster carpet and a vintage Ford Escort covered with a massive doily (among other things) to comment on both Kaur’s Sikh heritage and the culture of her Scottish homeland. Now based in London, she unveiled a large new public artwork there last year – a poem etched into the pavement and a spinning, weather-vane style signpost – but returned to her home city last month for the launch of Superstructure, a similar series of sculptures on the north bank of the Clyde which turn in the wind and each bear a word or phrase. It’s a major new commission for the Glasgow 2026 Festival, which runs until August 9 and is part of the Commonwealth Games.
3. Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy is a land artist and sculptor (Image: Agency)
A land artist and sculptor who has long been based in rural Dumfries and Galloway, Goldsworthy is another artist whose work is majorly accessible and whose subject matter – the environment, essentially – is one which assumes more and more importance with every year that passes. Not fashionable, perhaps, and his inclusion this high in the list may have the purists sniffing. But he’s a definite crowd-pleaser, as shown by the reaction to the show mounted by National Galleries Scotland at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh in 2025 – an engrossing retrospective of his 50 year career and one which was met with acclaim from critics and punters alike. You can see his outdoor works on permanent display in many places, though Jupiter Artland near Edinburgh is one of the best.
2. Rachel Maclean
Rachel Maclean in front of her work Don’t Buy Mi, installed in Ayr following its exhibition at Jupiter Artland. (Image: Neil Hanna)
Weird, eerie, often funny and determinedly day-glo and hyper-saturated, Maclean’s crowd-pleasing videos and theatrical installations have marked her as one of the rising stars of Scottish art since her 2012 film The Lion And The Unicorn dipped into ideas of nationalism and identity two years before the independence referendum. Other influences include pop culture, social media – check out another early work, Lolcats – and, increasingly, AI. She represented Scotland at the 2017 Venice Biennale, has also turned her hand to pop videos in the past, and few who saw it will forget her jaw-dropping solo show at Jupiter Artland in 2023. A new exhibition, They’ve Got Your Eyes, opened in Liverpool in March, and she also has concurrent shows in London and Sweden. Maclean is Scotland’s sharp-eyed Queen of the Green Screen.
1. Wendy McMurdo
“Now Scotland’s pre-eminent fine art photographer, McMurdo originally trained in painting at her home town school, Edinburgh College of Art”. (Image: Elena Mendoza)
Now Scotland’s pre-eminent fine art photographer, McMurdo originally trained in painting at her home town school, Edinburgh College of Art, and it wasn’t until a period studying in New York in the mid-1980s that she picked up a camera in earnest, inspired by the work of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler and Jenny Holzer. She also had an important encounter with the written work of American artist and academic Sandy Stone, particularly her theories about how the coming digital era would change and shape identities, including gender. From there, McMurdo never looked back. Her growing interest in photography soon fused with her parallel interests in computers and digital media, and in the ways in which children learn and play. Bringing all that together has resulted in a considerable body of work which grows more and more relevant with every day that passes, and touches on everything from the online safety act to the upcoming social media ban for under-16s. A large retrospective has just opened in Edinburgh at National Galleries Scotland: Portrait, bringing together highlights of her considerable portfolio alongside never before seen works. Do not miss it.