Edinburgh Art Festival 2022 review: from oyster readings to Scotland’s Jackson Pollock

In its 18th iteration, the Edinburgh Art Festival is, as usual, an “eclectic” affair, “ranging from the historic to the ultra-contemporary”, said Gabrielle Schwarz in The Daily Telegraph. A loose grouping of the many exhibitions running across the city at the same time as the wider Edinburgh Fringe, the festival features everything from a scholarly exhibition of impressionist paintings at the Scottish National Gallery to a show at Inverleith House, where artist duo Cooking Sections propose to tell visitors’ fortunes through “oyster readings”.

Between these two poles, we are treated to postwar photography, contemporary sculpture and video pieces, and even a former bottle shop that the Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk has converted into a space for “a month-long programme of restorative activities such as juice-making, yoga and mindfulness”.

At its best, the festival is thrilling, said Laura Freeman in The Times. Jupiter Artland, a “sublimely strange” sculpture park outside Edinburgh, is displaying I Lay Here for You, an enormous bronze of a female body lying prone, by Tracey Emin. “If you still have Emin down as the messy-bed woman, this monumental bronze ought to convince you that when it comes to depicting the human body, Emin is the heir to Rodin.” Better still is A Taste for Impressionism at the Scottish National Gallery, a “ravishing” exhibition that features Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon and Matisse’s magnificent Jazz sequence, by way of Monet, Vuillard and a fair few of Degas’s “absinthe-limbed dancers”.

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The show’s “big reveal” is a probable van Gogh self-portrait, discovered beneath the surface of the artist’s Head of a Peasant Woman when the curators were researching the show. Elsewhere, however, the programme is often “exasperating”: many shows are heavy on convoluted artspeak. Expect pretentious work exploring “the current neoliberal capitalist landscape” and the like.

There’s some risible stuff here, agreed Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. The nadir is probably to be found at Collective Gallery on Calton Hill, where we are treated to a “Marxist cartoon” in which the Scottish-born tycoon and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie is “berated” for his “ruthless capitalism” by Dippy, the Diplodocus whose skeleton he famously bought; the animation, created by artist Ruth Ewan, is “as crap as the argument is one-sided”. Thankfully, however, things get better: at the Stills photography centre, there is a “shattering” show devoted to the “shockingly intimate” work of Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako. Among the highlights is a series of images documenting the charred and ripped clothes worn by victims of the 1945 Hiroshima bombing, an “eerily beautiful” body of work that casts a “genuinely fresh perspective” on a well-documented tragedy.

Almost as affecting is a retrospective devoted to the Scottish modernist Alan Davie, on show at Dovecot Studios. Although considered somewhat retrograde at the time of his death in 2014, his “rough”, “spattery” paintings confirm him as “an artist of biting power” – “Scotland’s Jackson Pollock”. For all its faults – and there are many – there is “real depth” to parts of this art festival. If nothing else, it presents a fantastic “excuse to explore one of Europe’s most remarkable cities”.

Various locations, Edinburgh and surrounding areas. (0131-226 6558, edinburghartfestival.com). Until 28 August