Kirsty Whiten

Based in Fife, Scotland, Kirsty Whiten’s portraits of the ‘imagined anthropological’ recall the writing of Pliny, the mythological figures summoned up by Homer, the psychoanalytic Wolfman, and the moralist paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. In her own words, Whiten makes ‘frank images of people, dealing with their psychology and socially constructed behaviour;
making the viewer aware of the sexuality, control and neuroses underneath appearance [...] I aim to discomfort the viewer by presenting a character very directly and intimately’.


These are paintings that, unlike Bosch, are secular prostrations of the human animal: savage, but by no means noble, civilised but only inasmuch as it is able to repress it’s instinct. In short, Whiten’s work unspools the surreality of human self-image. In her series Sexyland, the artist makes the genteel brocading of the 19th century stately home co-habit the much more beastly act of masturbation. The series is a kind of visual homage to the first chapter of Michel Foucault’s seminal text The History of Sexuality, titled ‘We Other Victorians’, and, like that text, is akin to hearing a deeply repressed secret loudly broadcast on national television.


These recurring clashes are perhaps partly ...

Edinburgh College of Art '99

Residency at La Cite International des Arts, Paris,
1999-2000

Selected Exhibitions:

2018

Stories for Ways and Means
group exhibition
Corey Helford Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
I C O N O R A C L E
solo exhibition
Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh
North East Fife Open studios
open studios event

2017
Young Night Thought audio-visual album project
With Kirsty Law (song-writer) and Daniel Warren (film-maker)
funded by Creative Scotland

This Will Ruin Everything
group exhibition
Lighthouse Design centre, Glasgow, curated by RECOAT
It Works!
group exhibition
curated by Dr Ruth Pelzer-Montada, Edinburgh Printmakers

London Art Fair, Islington, London
group exhibition
with Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh

2016

WRONGER RITES book project crowdfunded publishing
Hardcover Artistbook, edition of 750
Cupar Arts Festival
curatorial committee
Cupar, Fife
LIMINAL
group exhibition
Cupar Arts festival
You want the Moon
group exhibition
Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh

2015
SSA Annual Open Exhibition
group exhibition
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
RSA Open Exhibition
group exhibition
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Wronger Rites | The Quing of the Now People
solo exhib...