What's On in Edinburgh This Month
Edinburgh’s contemporary art scene is currently flourishing, we have always benefitted from a great museums that are willing to take risks on their programming and bring high quality exhibitions to Scotland, but recently there have been a number of cutting edge exhibitions raising the quality even further.
This spring there is no shortage of incredible exhibitions to see, whether you're a seasoned gallery-goer or simply curious about what's happening on your doorstep, this is a great moment to get out and explore. Here's a guide to the best exhibitions on offer this spring.
Ingleby Gallery: Winston Roeth
Until 28 March | Barony Street
If you haven't yet made it to Ingleby's current exhibition, you have only a matter of weeks. Tucked away in the magnificent Glasite Meeting House — a category A listed former place of worship in Edinburgh's New Town — the gallery is one of the most beautiful exhibition spaces in the world, every artists that comes to Colstoun Arts visits Ingleby Gallery and is blown away by the space and warmth of its environment and it consistently puts on some of the most thoughtful and grounding breaking exhibitions in the UK.
Winston Roeth - Shades of Darkness, 2014. Exhibited at Ingleby Gallery Image Rights belong to the artist and gallery, photographed by John McKenzie
The current exhibition features American painter Winston Roeth, whose luminous, meditative works reward careful looking, it is one of those exhibitions that warrants visiting in person because the textures on Roeth’s work don’t express themselves through photography as they do in real life. Roeth works with unusual pigments and resins to create surfaces that seem to glow from within, occupying a quiet space between minimalism and something altogether more sensuous. unlike so many painters today Roeth uses the material texture upon which he paints as a focal point for the work, the combination of his extremely contemporary and minimalist work with the historic architecture of the Meeting House is particularly striking.
When this closes, look out for Callum Innes returning on 11 April, followed by a Frank Walter centenary show in June — so Ingleby's programme offers plenty to keep coming back for throughout spring and summer. Upstairs in the beautiful ‘Feast Room’ is Charlene Scott who’s series of Botanical Minimalist works are part of the galleries ongoing instalments series, Scott is the fourteenth artist to be featured in this smaller more intimate exhibition series focusing on artists who are not fully represented by Ingleby Gallery.
Charlene Scott - fragment 019, 2025. Exhibited at Ingleby Gallery Image Rights belong to the artist and gallery, photographed by John McKenzie
Collective: Paloma Proudfoot
6 March – 24 May | Calton Hill
Perched on Edinburgh's iconic Calton Hill, Collective has just reopened after its winter break with a show that feels genuinely exciting, attending the private view on Thursday night it was evident as despite the storm like weather drenching everyone who ventured up the hill, Collective’s two galleries were full of people. Paloma Proudfoot — an Edinburgh College of Art graduate — is presenting her first solo exhibition in Scotland, and it's one to mark in the diary.
Proudfoot works primarily in ceramics and performance, and her large-scale friezes are extremely powerful as they include real objects, made objects and float somewhere between realistic and animated in their visual impact. The works depict contemporary puppet-like figures in strange, uncanny medical poses — skin and organs revealed, examined, stitched together — drawing on a fascinating combination of sources: the Celtic tradition of keening (ritual mourning), and the 19th-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's notorious use of hypnosis to study women diagnosed with 'hysteria'. It sounds challenging on paper, but the work is compelling, deeply felt, and visually arresting.
Paloma Proudfoot’s work exhibited in a gallery space. for image credits please contact Colstoun Arts
The gallery itself — housed in a historic observatory with views across the city — is free to enter and well worth the walk up the hill alone.
Talbot Rice Gallery: The dead don't go until we do
7 March – 30 May | Old College, South Bridge
Opening this weekend, this group exhibition at the University of Edinburgh's public gallery brings together four artists whose practices share a common thread: the act of remembering those who have been lost, erased, or overlooked.
Malgorzata Mirga-Tas, Amol K Patil, Kang Seung Lee and the South African collaboration MADEYOULOOK each approach this theme from a very different direction — Roma history, working-class Mumbai, Edinburgh's queer heritage, and the displaced Koni people of South Africa. What unites them is a determination to honour those who might otherwise be forgotten, to stand in solidarity across generations.
The show takes its title from a poem by Scottish writer Jackie Kay, and that literary sensibility runs through the whole exhibition. It's political, poetic, and — in the current climate — quietly urgent. The Talbot Rice is free to enter, though do note that the main lift is currently out of action during refurbishment.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art: Artist Rooms & Joan Eardley
Modern One: On now | Modern Two: opens 2 April | Belford Road
The National Galleries complex on Belford Road is always worth a visit, and there's plenty to see right now. At Modern One, the Artist Rooms series presents works by three towering figures in modern art — Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, and Robert Mapplethorpe — in focused, intimate displays that allow each artist's vision to breathe.
Modern Two is currently closed while curators install what promises to be one of the most significant shows of the year: Joan Eardley: The Nature of Painting, opening on 2 April. Eardley — who died in 1963 aged just 42 — is one of Scotland's most beloved artists, celebrated for her raw, expressive paintings of Glasgow tenement children and the wild coastline of Catterline. This major retrospective offers a chance to see her work in depth and from a fresh perspective. Mark the date.
Jupiter Artland: Florence Peake, Tai Shani & Extraction from April
Thursday – Sunday | Nr Wilkieston, just outside Edinburgh
A short drive from the city, Jupiter Artland is a world unto itself — 120 acres of woodland and meadow scattered with permanent works by Antony Gormley, Tracey Emin, Anish Kapoor and many others, alongside a rolling programme of new commissions.
Right now, two compelling works are on view. Florence Peake's To Love and To Cherish fills the Glasshouse with a floor-based sculptural work created from the movements of four dancers, its looping form playing with ideas of ritual, vows, and embodied memory. Out in the orchard, Turner Prize-winner Tai Shani's The Spell or The Dream presents a luminous blue figure breathing in suspended rhythm, accompanied by a soundscape from composer Maxwell Sterling — a meditation on catastrophe, resistance, and collective dreaming.
From 11 April, the Ballroom and Steadings Galleries host Extraction, a new group exhibition exploring the cultural and environmental legacies of energy systems. Works by Carol Rhodes, john gerrard, Marguerite Humeau, Siobhan McLaughlin and John Latham are brought into dialogue with Jupiter's own layered landscape — where the traces of shale oil, North Sea pipelines, and modern renewables exist side by side. It's a timely and ambitious show.
exhibition flyer from Extraction at Jupiter Artland for more information visit their website
Also Worth Knowing About
The Royal Scottish Academy has a packed year ahead as it celebrates its bicentenary. RSA New Contemporaries — showcasing 64 of Scotland's most promising emerging artists — opens on 28 March and runs until 22 April. The landmark 200th Annual Exhibition follows in May.
Over at the City Art Centre on Market Street, artist-in-residence Mona Yoo has spent the past year researching the building's own history, and her resulting multi-media installation is due to open in the coming weeks — one to watch.
