IAN HAMILTON FINLAY

********An artist, poet and landscape designer, Ian Hamilton Finlay reinvigorated the classical tradition in a body of work that encompasses a variety of creative forms to celebrate the sustaining power of words. He is best known for his garden at Little Sparta, set in the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, where he lived and worked for the last 40 years of his life, and for his guillotine installation, A View to the Temple, at Documenta, Kassel, 1987. He significantly influenced the concrete poetry movement, and his extensive printed poetical and graphical works were published by Wild Hawthorn Press, which he co-founded in 1961. His visual art work, achieved in collaboration with expert artists and craftspeople, can be found in museums, parks and gardens worldwide.

Ingleby Gallery’s exhibition will focus on a group of significant sculptural installations in stone dating from the 1980s and ‘90s, including Three Columns, Capital, and Five Finials - a celebration of the architectural device most commonly found flanking the gate posts of grand houses and country parks in a spirit of welcome, but adapted here in a typically Finlay-esque manner to suggest a poetic metaphor. As Prudence Carlson has noted: “These Five Finials, the first four of which are customary shapes, exhibit a progression from abstract to naturalistic, from less to more articulated: perfect sphere, Vanbrugh-ian ball (sliced by a square through its middle), simplified acorn, full-bodied pinecone/pineapple and, shockingly, grenade. The last stage of the metamorphosis, though wholly unexpected, is both formally and verbally consistent... We are now not so much invited to enter as to beware if we do.”

Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments book

****Published on 8 May 2025 by ACC Art Books and edited by Pia Maria Simig, Fragments draws together one hundred works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, each accompanied by a short, fragmentary text by the artist and myriad distinguished writers who wrote about Finlay’s work during his lifetime. It features introductory essays by Stephen Bann (CBE, Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol) and Tom Lubbock (chief art critic of The Independent from 1997 until his death in 2011) and includes 100 full colour plates. Additional texts by: Yves Abrioux, Stephen Bann, Prudence Carlson, Patrick Duncombe, Julia Eames, Patrick Eyres, Alec Finlay, Ian Hamilton Finlay, George Gilliland, Harry Gilonis, and Tom Lubbock. Designed by John and Orna Designs.