The Scottish Gallery is honoured to present 50 Years of Naboland, a landmark exhibition celebrating Reinhard Behrens’s extraordinary imaginative journey. Since arriving in Scotland in the late 1970s, the Hamburg-born artist has built a singular artistic universe, rooted in personal mythology, archaeology, environmental reflection and a distinctive northern sensibility.
Naboland is both a place and an idea – a parallel world shaped by play, memory and dream. Central to this vision is a brightly coloured toy submarine, discovered in 1974, which drifts through Behrens’s works as a symbol of curiosity, displacement and human frailty. Across painting, etching, installation and animation, he documents this realm as if it were both fact and fiction, blending whimsy with archaeology and environmental reflection.
At once playful and profound, Naboland offers a meditation on fragility, ecology and imagination. As the project reaches fifty years, Behrens invites us to enter his enduring world and share in its evolving mythos.
