Magdalena Abakanowicz Sculpture marks
Demarco's 80th birthday

A monumental sculpture was unveiled at the Royal Scottish Academy yesterday to mark the 80th birthday of leading Scottish art impresario Richard Demarco.

Magdalena Abakanowicz's The Court of King Arthur is being shown for the first time in the UK for the forthcoming show called 10 Dialogues: Richard Demarco, Scotland and the European Avant Garde.

The show also celebrates the 40th anniversary of Demarco's seminal exhibition, Strategy: Get Arts, in the capital.

The new show will run from November 27 to January 9 next year and is a celebration of the legacy and influence of Demarco, who has presented work at 50 Edinburgh festivals and forged artistic links between Scotland and Eastern Europe, among other areas, for decades.

The exhibition will take place in the upper gallery of the Royal Scottish Academy and is to feature work by 10 artists whom have had established relationships with Demarco. The artists are Marina Abramovic, Abakanowicz, Joseph Beuys, Tadeusz Kantor, David Mach, Alastair Maclennan, Rory McEwen, Paul Neagu, Gunther Uecker and Ainslue Yule.

The exhibition will include two new portraits of Demarco by Mach as well as new works from Ainslie Yule.

Richard Demarco Gallery

Demarco was a co-founder of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1963. Three years later he and other organisers of the theatre's gallery space left the Traverse to establish what became the Richard Demarco Gallery[1]. The gallery, which doubled as a performance venue during the Edinburgh Fringe, ran from 1966 to 1992.[2] For many years, the Demarco Gallery promoted cultural links with Eastern Europe, both in terms of presenting artists such as Paul Neagu from 1969, Marina Abramovic from 1973 and Neue Slowenische Kunst from 1986 within Scotland, organising exhibitions of contemporary Polish, Romanian and Yugoslav art and in establishing outgoing connections for Scottish artists across Europe.

Richard Demarco's involvement with the artist Joseph Beuys led to various presentations, from Strategy Get Arts[3] in 1970 to Beuys' hunger strike during the Jimmy Boyle Days in 1980.

Also particularly notable were the presentations by Tadeusz Kantor's Cricot 2 group during the 1970s and 1980s, including a celebrated unofficial performance of The Water Hen at the former Edinburgh poorhouse during the 1972 Edinburgh Festival.[4] Cricot 2 returned to Edinburgh in later years. Demarco introduced Beuys and Kantor to one another and in one performance of Lovelies and Dowdies Beuys performed under Kantor's direction.

For many years, after the Scottish Arts Council withdrew its annual grant in 1980 following controversy associated with Joseph Beuys' support for Jimmy Boyle, the Demarco Gallery led a financially-straitened existence. Since the early 1990s, Richard Demarco's activity has continued under the auspices of the Demarco European Art Foundation. In November 2008 a substantial selection from Demarco's archives, covering the period 1963-1980, was made available on-line by the University of Dundee [see below for direct link to online archive]. Images of Demarco's activities during this period, in particular collaborations with Joseph Beuys, Tadeusz Kantor, Paul Neagu and Marina Abramovic are available in the selection from the Demarco archives. Detailed documentation of the Edinburgh Arts journeys from 1972-1980 are also available in this selection.

Edinburgh Festival

Richard Demarco has attended every Edinburgh Festival. He has attended or been extensively involved with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world, since its inception. Over the years he has put on a wide variety of theatre productions, art exhibitions and cultural events. Some of the new artists appearing at his venues have gone on to become major figures in the arts.

The gallery venue, sometimes described as an artistic version of Brigadoon, was never run for profit; many performers were allowed to put on productions or exhibit at little or no cost. And Demarco himself has been no stranger to artistic and commercial risks. For instance, in 1995, his venue hosted a group of artists flown out from the then besieged city of Sarajevo alongside an opera installation by the young Damian Hirst. Demarco's venues have tended to attract a fairly bohemian clientele, often including such contemporaries in the alternative arts movement as fellow Traverse co-founder Jim Haynes and left-wing publisher John Calder. No stranger to media controversy, Demarco has challenged successive Fringe organisers' boundaries by staging events outside Edinburgh. These have included a full costume, full length production of Shakespeare's Macbeth staged on Inchcolm Island in the Firth of Forth.[5] Since the mid 90's and end of the Cold War he has lost backing from visiting arts and other sponsoring bodies. Always a controversial figure, his approach has not always sat easily with the Scottish arts establishment as the Fringe has become increasingly dominated by commercial considerations.

Demarco's most recent direct involvement at the Fringe was in collaboration with Rocket Venues at the Roxy (also sometimes known as the Demarco Roxy) Art House, a converted church on the corner of Roxburgh Place and Drummond Street on the South Side of Edinburgh, previously used by the Pleasance Theatre and subsequently renamed The Bowery after the venue was sold. It is now a regular music venue.