A Sicilian Story highlights a particular strand of David McClure’s work spanning a decade from 1956.

The binding thread is Sicily, and the exhibition falls into three sections. Firstly, townscapes and landscapes from a stimulating six-month period when McClure lived near Palermo in 1956/7. The second, from the early 1960s, features enigmatic figure compositions of Kings, Bishops, Madonnas and Infantas drawing from experiences of Sicily, elsewhere in Italy and from Spain. The third group emerges from these but takes on a darker character. The catalyst for this is assumed to be the often-graphic media coverage of The First Mafia War.

Read more about David McClure and the Three Kings Mystery here

Read more about David McClure in Sicily here

David McClure

Born: 1926

Place of Birth: Lochwinnoch

Died: 1998

McClure was one of a group of highly regarded young painters that included James Cumming, William Baillie, John Houston, Elizabeth Blackadder and David Michie all of whom graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1950s. Their formative years benefited from the examples of a remarkable concentration of talent in the capital, both on the Art College staff and in the annual exhibitions of the RSA, RSW, SSA or SSWA. In addition, The Scottish Gallery was regularly showing established artists such as Anne Redpath, William Gillies, William MacTaggart, as well as younger artists like Joan Eardley and Robin Philipson. McClure and many of his Edinburgh College peers soon joined them. McClure had his first one-man show with The Scottish Gallery in 1957 and the following decade saw regular exhibitions of his work.

He was included in the important surveys of contemporary Scottish art which began to define the Edinburgh School throughout the 1960s and culminated in his Edinburgh Festival show at The Gallery in 1969. But he was, even by 1957 (after a year’s painting in Florence and Sicily) at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, alongside his great friend Alberto Morrocco, applying the rigour and inspiration that made the college such a bastion of painting.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1957, 1962, 1966, 1969 (Festival), 1989, 1992, 1994, 1996 (70th Birthday Exhibition), 2000 (Memorial), 2003, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2022

A Sicilian Story

David McClure

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