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Brazilian artist Jac Leirner (born 1961) presented her first solo exhibition in Scotland, combining work from major collections with new work made especially for Fruitmarket audiences.

Leirner makes her work from a limited range of everyday materials. Playing with ideas of repetition, obsession and addiction, she uses the same objects over and over again, combining them into astonishingly beautiful sculptures that reveal the material poetics of the mundane.

Highlights of this exhibition included Little Light (2005/2017), a work made from a lightbulb and several miles of copper wire; Corpus Delicti (1992), an installation connecting aeroplane boarding passes with ashtrays taken from the aeroplanes on which the artist flew; Skin (Randy King Size Wired) (1992), an ethereal grid made from hundreds of cigarette papers; 120 Cords (2014), a work made from as many one metre lengths of different colour and type of rope that Leirner could find. These works were joined by a selection of luminously beautiful watercolours (1980–2016), small works in which the artist layers a limited selection of colours over and over each other with the same additive aesthetic which informs her sculptures.

Download the Exhibition Guide

Download the Bulletin

Listen to Jac Leirner: Artist’s Talk

Listen to Jac Leirner: ‘The Potential of Things’ Panel Discussion with Natasha Adamou, Alistair Rider and David Batchelor

Images: Ruth Clark