Alasdair Gray: Gray Stuff - Designs for Books and Posters, 1952-2010

Coinciding with the release of his new visual biography, ‘A Life in Pictures’, this exhibition offers an extensive insight into the original graphic works of Alasdair Gray. Known for his critically acclaimed dystopian, surrealist novels, such as ‘Lanark’ and ‘Poor Things’, this retrospective provides an opportunity to witness the images which surround and incite his texts.

One imagines a tension between ‘Gray the artist’ and ‘Gray the writer', but the Talbot Rice exhibition demonstrates his ability to enjoy both disciplines to their full. Aesthetically, Gray is the master of a monochrome sensibility which culminates in his unmatched manipulation of line.

The show’s downfall does not rest on the quality of Gray’s work, although his poster designs and colour studies fall flat against his monochromatic trademark, but rather on its quantity. The vast amount of works in the Talbot Rice Gallery - surely the most crowded exhibition the gallery has hosted in recent years - does not make for a consistently riveting exhibition.

Gray may have gained more notoriety for his ongoing murals and portraits, but it is in his graphic works that his artistic skills are most distinctive. His images from ‘Lanark’, and also more unpolished ones showing artistic methodologies, are in themselves arresting and fascinating. There is an excitement to be found in witnessing Gray’s interplay between text and image, between the fixed and the transient, and his preoccupation with his own self-made image.

Gray’s work is, at its monochrome best, intelligent and beguiling but interest gets lost trawling amongst hoards of posters for plays and art shows which do not demonstrate Gray’s natural and individual graphic sense. Ultimately, it cannot be said that the show is not worth seeing: just some bits more than others.