Various Artists

The Behrens Family

2 October 2025 - 25 October 2025

We are delighted to celebrate the Behrens family’s remarkable artistic journey. This rare exhibition brings together the work of Reinhard Behrens, Margaret Smyth Behrens, Kirstie Behrens, and David Behrens, each pursuing a distinct practice yet bound by shared values of imagination, craftsmanship, and curiosity.

At its centre is Reinhard Behrens, creator of Naboland, a visionary parallel world that has captivated audiences for half a century. His wife, painter Margaret Smyth Behrens, offers lyrical and meditative works rooted in nature and memory. Their daughter, Kirstie Behrens, brings refined sensitivity to etching and drawing. Their son, David Behrens, blends music, sculpture, and movement in playful automata and mobiles, and unveils five new film-portraits, created for this exhibition, offering a moving study of family life as art.

Best known for their presence at the Pittenweem Arts Festival, the Behrens family open their lives to the public with generosity and creativity. This exhibition honours that spirit, revealing a lineage of invention and inspiration across generations.

Discover the exhibition in our blog here and further works by Kirstie Behrens here.

 

About Margaret Smyth (Behrens)

Margaret Smyth (Behrens)
Born: 1961

I hope that my paintings elicit curiosity, allowing the viewer to fill them with their own narratives, with their own memories real or imagined, like fairy tales. My aim is to try to evoke that moment of anticipation in a theatre, when the curtain lifts on the stage and reality is suspended.

Margaret Smyth (Behrens) is a painter whose richly atmospheric works balance memory, theatre, landscape and imagination. Raised in the Renfrewshire countryside in a house filled with books, paintings and an eclectic menagerie of animals, she developed an early sensitivity to storytelling, observation and the natural world. These formative experiences continue to inform paintings that feel at once intimate and dreamlike, inviting viewers to bring their own narratives and associations to the work.

A graduate of Edinburgh College of Art in 1983, where she later completed a postgraduate scholarship, Margaret studied during a remarkable period under influential artists including David Michie, Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston. Alongside a long teaching career at St Leonards School in St Andrews, she has exhibited extensively throughout Scotland and beyond, with solo exhibitions in Edinburgh, Brussels, Crail and Henley-on-Thames. She is a regular exhibitor with the Royal Scottish Academy, Society of Scottish Artists and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour.

Now based in Pittenweem, Fife, Margaret works from the family home and studio she shares with fellow artist Reinhard Behrens . The surrounding coastline, expansive skies and ever-changing light of the East Neuk have become central to her visual language. Her paintings often combine figures, musicians, theatrical interiors and imagined characters with coastal landscapes and symbolic motifs, creating suspended moments that hover between reality and fairy tale. As Margaret describes: “My aim is to try to evoke that moment of anticipation in a theatre, when the curtain lifts on the stage and reality is suspended.”

Margaret and Reinhard are parents to artists Kirstie and David Behrens, and together the family has become closely associated with the creative life of Pittenweem and the Pittenweem Arts Festival, where they have opened their studios to the public for decades.

The Scottish Gallery will present a joint solo exhibition of Margaret Smyth Behrens in November 2027.

View all works by Margaret Smyth (Behrens)

About Kirstie Behrens

Kirstie Behrens
Born: 1991

Kirstie Behrens (b.1991) is an award-winning artist and printmaker based in Pittenweem, Fife. A graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 2019, she has quickly established herself as one of the most distinctive young voices in contemporary Scottish printmaking. In 2021, she received the Roy Wood Prize for Printmaking, the Art in Healthcare Award and the W Gordon Smith & Jay Gordon Smith Award from the Royal Scottish Academy.

Working primarily in etching and drypoint, Behrens’ practice is rooted in close observation of the natural world, particularly the meeting points between land and water. Coastlines, forests, peat bogs and shifting weather systems become subjects through which she explores time, memory and transformation. Her work often incorporates time-based processes, allowing natural elements such as wind, rain, sea water and landscape itself to leave physical traces upon the surface of her prints, creating a dialogue between artist and environment.

Behrens is deeply drawn to the physical and meditative nature of traditional printmaking. Using etching needles to draw directly into grounded metal plates before immersing them in acid baths, she embraces the slow and unpredictable qualities of the medium. The resulting works balance precision with atmosphere, often capturing the quiet drama of trees, coastal light and remote Scottish landscapes. Her practice combines technical skill with an intuitive sensitivity to place, reflecting both careful observation and emotional response.

Since 2021, she has been Artist in Residence for the Manx Beauty Project in Cellardyke, a community initiative restoring the historic fishing boat Manx Beauty. The project has further deepened her engagement with coastal histories, material processes and the passage of time.

In 2025, Kirstie Behrens exhibited alongside her family in The Behrens Family at The Scottish Gallery, celebrating a remarkable multi-generational family of artists.

View all works by Kirstie Behrens

About David Behrens

David Behrens
Born: 1998

David Behrens is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans kinetic sculpture, music composition, and film. Raised in the artistic community of Pittenweem, Fife, he grew up immersed in the imaginative world of his father Reinhard Behrens’ Naboland and began exhibiting early works during the annual Pittenweem Arts Festival. After studying music at the Reid School of Music, Edinburgh College of Art, David worked on creative outreach projects in The Gambia and Greece, and spent four years with the East Neuk Festival. He is currently undertaking a Master’s in Composing for Film at the National Film and Television School in London. For The Behrens Family exhibition at The Scottish Gallery, David Behrens will present a new series of kinetic sculptures accompanied by original music and a short film reflecting on his family’s creative legacy.

View all works by David Behrens

About Reinhard Behrens

Reinhard Behrens
RSW RGI PPSSA
Born: 1951

Reinhard Behrens is a German-born artist who has lived and worked in Scotland since the late 1970s. He studied Drawing and Painting at Hamburg College of Art from 1971–78 before receiving a German Academic Exchange Grant to undertake postgraduate studies in Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 1979. Between 1982 and 1986, he lectured part-time at Edinburgh College of Art, Glasgow School of Art and Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen.

For over fifty years, Behrens has developed Naboland, an extraordinary fictional world shaped by imagination, archaeology, environmental reflection and the aesthetics of exploration. Conceived in the mid-1970s after the chance discovery of a toy submarine and the word “Naboland” in a newspaper photograph, the project has evolved into one of the most distinctive artistic mythologies in contemporary Scottish art.

Part expedition archive, part theatre installation and part poetic invention, Naboland exists through paintings, drawings, etchings, sculpture, animation and immersive installations. Behrens adopts the role of explorer, documenting imagined polar landscapes, archaeological discoveries and found artefacts with a compelling sense of authenticity and wonder. His recurring toy submarine has become a symbolic motif within the work, drifting through icy terrains and historical references as a quiet observer of human curiosity, displacement and environmental fragility.

Drawing inspiration from Scotland’s coastlines, ancient sites and northern landscapes, as well as travels to Iceland, Nepal, Venice and beyond, Behrens creates works that balance humour, melancholy and ecological awareness. While deeply rooted in storytelling and play, his practice also reflects on humanity’s relationship with the natural world and the traces we leave behind. In 2025, The Scottish Gallery celebrated the 50th anniversary of Naboland with a major retrospective exhibition.

Reinhard Behrens will be the subject of a joint solo exhibition alongside Margaret Smyth Behrens at The Scottish Gallery in November 2027.

View all works by Reinhard Behrens
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