Anna King 2008

I love to explore empty, feral places: wastelands, abandoned buildings and barren pieces of scrub-land.

I find myself in a no-mans land. Unclaimed territory, that, for a while anyway, I can have as my own. It’s an adventure playground that nobody meant to build, a desolate, wild
expanse of cracking concrete and decaying structures. Once a hive of human activity, these forgotten places have no purpose left –
but no rules either – and nature is slowly and relentlessly taking the land back.

Anna King

Since graduating in 2005 Anna King has proven herself to be one of the most promising artists to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. She has won several major art awards including The Anna Miller Scholarship, Ian Eadie Award for drawing and painting, and the Royal Scottish Academy Landscape Award. She is winner of the prestigious Jolomo Lloyds TSB Award 2007, and her inaugural exhibition at 108 Fine Art in 2008 attracted praise from Financial Times critic jackie Wullschlager with an article appearing in the FT.

Her recent paintings are based on visits to abandoned spaces and buildings in East Germany, and at the Scottish ghost town of Polphail, built in the 1970's to house 500 workers and their families, though the buildings were never used, falling quickly into a state of neglect and decay.

Anna King has exhibited widely in Scotland, and we are delighted to be exhibiting her new work at 108 during May 2010.

"This gifted young artist has spent the past two winters working at Joan Eardley's clifftop studio at Catterline. The results are very different from Eardley's wild, densely painted seascapes: cooler, more cerebral, with an almost icy range of colours. Yet something of Eardley's response to nature as an untameable force is echoed in King's bleakly attractive images of post-industrial landscapes: empty feral places where nature is slowly reclaiming the land."

FINANCIAL TIMES REVIEW 12th April 2008

Exhibition images 2008