Adrian Wiszniewski RSA: Paintings for the Front Room
Adrian Wiszniewski creates work characterised by a strong drawing element and fertile imagination.
Populated with contemplative figures set in vividly coloured Arcadian landscapes, his paintings are rich with symbolic, political and philosophical depths.
Adrian Wiszniewski RA was born in Glasgow in 1958 and trained at Glasgow School of Art from 1979 to 1983. He was a leading figure in the revival of figurative painting in a group known as the New Glasgow Boys. His work can be found in many international collections such as the Gallery of Modern Art in New York, Metropolitan Museum, New York, Setagaya Museum, Tokyo, Japan, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Tate Britain, London and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Wiszniewski has had solo exhibitions in London, Sydney, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Ghent and Tokyo.
'This exhibition/installation is tailored to a significant space -the front room at the end of a Georgian terrace, in Edinburgh that was conceived and built during the Age of the Enlightenment.
The paintings for the exhibition share a unifying background of black against which a series of images inform the function of the space. It is a place where colleagues gather on a Sunday and form alliances as in Building Bridges, and break former ones as in Black Balling Bertie.
Sunday afternoon is a time for looking at paintings and sitting for portraits (Looking at a Painting and Drawing from Life) and for comforting the sick (Creature Comforts and Comforted by Nature). It is also time for making that long distance phone call to a distant relative or friend (Long Distance), or for spending a lazy afternoon contemplating the previous weeks work and events (Dear Diary and The Sculptors Day Off). But most of all it’s a day of ritual and reflection. We relax reviewing the world in the Sunday papers and getting a much needed injection of colour into our lives (Colour Supplements)and we reflect on who we are our place in the world (Life Between Art and Nature) and the universe (Between Saturn and the Moon).
The exhibition was, in the main, inspired by the unearthing last year of a significant space in a Roman house in Pompeii which seems to have performed a function similar to that of The Front Room, with the intention of transcending that time frame and shining a light on both the past and the present.'
Adrian Wiszniewski RSA, 2025
