Exhibition review: John McLean
When I went to London as a student in 1979, one of the first things I did was look up John McLean, a London-based Scottish painter. (I’d seen his work already at the Fruitmarket Gallery, in a show for which the American critic Clement Greenberg had written an introduction: John’s painting was avant-garde and colour-based, the cutting edge of British painting at the time.) Now 71, John is having his first sculpture show which can be seen – along with a number of paintings – at Bourne Fine Art in Dundas Street until 3 April. The sculptures all involve colour cutting into space: “Polychromy in sculpture never died out, but since Cubism it has had new vigour”, John has said. “No matter what the medium, I work towards such an interdependence of parts that nothing could be added or taken away – a kind of absolute. When it happens, the eye and the spirit join up…”
John McLean: Traffic Yellow, 2009 Steel and aluminium, h.260cm