Peter Russell's exhibition "Building 2000 - Millennium Fun and Games" was shown at the Smith Art Gallery and Museum in Stirling (March-April 1995) and subsequently in Dunfermline. This review was written after seeing the Stirling version of the show.
Work shown outside the main cities in Scotland is usually overlooked by media ratcheted to the Waverley-Queen St. line, so this is a brief notice about what is interesting about this show.
On past showings, Russell's paintings are usually large canvases featuring a complex and busy interplay of different planes across the painted surface. Some recent sequences of works brought the complexities of change experienced in Berlin and Prague onto the painted surface.
However, an interesting thematic departure appears in the main body of works in "Building 2000". Here, Russell (whose Stirling home lies between the torched Wolf Craig building and the monstrous new multi-storey car-park which looks like something out of Speer's planned Berlin) has grasped the theme of the rebuilding going on around us.
Buildings are neglected until they have to be demolished and replaced by new concrete blocks or roads; the idea of the town is degraded to just a shopping centre, heritage centre and road system. Russell's works on the walls of the Smith's main gallery incorporate photograph, collage and painted surface to pull in the facets of labour, change and of neglect. And the entire centre of the floor is occupied by a sculpture constructed from builders' scaffolding, etc.
All in all, "Building 2000" is a world away from the coy, referential "issue-based" work which dominates the galleries, and deserves to be seen.