Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years – a 'beautiful and raw' exhibition

Andy Goldsworthy has been making art for 50 years, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. He identifies the "magical" qualities of the natural world and fashions "delightful" works from the simplest of materials: rocks, leaves, mud, twigs. He is "imaginative, inventive, poetic, hard-working, big-hearted and brave", a creator of often monumental pieces responding to the natural landscapes that inspire him. I love him and so does the general public – yet for some reason, he has never been given full credit by the art establishment.

Goldsworthy's work is simply too "easy to love", too rural and too popular to be fashionable; and its apparent simplicity is misinterpreted as a lack of profundity. His doubters would do well to visit this superb career retrospective in Edinburgh, which confirms him as one of our finest landscape artists. Bringing together more than 200 works produced since the 1970s, including photographs, films, drawings and some of the major installations for which he is best known, the show is a corrective to the idea that Goldsworthy is merely a crowd-pleasing "softie".

Although Goldsworthy loves nature, he doesn't "sentimentalise" it, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Instead, his work plunges you into "the raw sadness and beauty" of the British countryside. The first thing we see here is a long sheepskin rug laid up the classical gallery's grand staircase; it's made from the scraps thrown away after shearing, stained blue or red with farmers' marks, all stitched together with thorns. At the top of the stairs, there's what appears to be a perforated screen, through which you can just glimpse the galleries beyond. It feels "mystical and calming" – until you realise that he has fashioned it from "rusty barbed wire" strung between two columns.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Similarly, he presents a "seductive" group of purple watercolours – made "with hare's blood and snow". Since much of his work has been created specifically for outdoor settings, many pieces are represented by photos and videos – of his "Grizedale Wall", for instance, an "elegantly curving stone line in a forest", or the giant snowball he brought from the Scottish Highlands to London's Smithfield meat market in June 2000.

Goldsworthy's critics also miss the political dimension in his art, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. He is an artist of "agricultural land and labour", addressing "contentious rural issues" including land ownership and access. He represents this with evocations of walls, fences, "cracks and fissures", all recurring motifs here. And sometimes he deals with loftier themes still: "Gravestones" (2025), for instance, is an "expanse of lumpy stones" displaced from cemeteries across Dumfries and Galloway, where the artist lives. It's a moving meditation on the "inevitability of death". Goldsworthy's art is both "beautiful and raw". This wonderful exhibition gives a misunderstood artist his due.

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. Until 2 November