IAN HAMILTON FINLAY – Fragments
IAN HAMILTON FINLAY
Fragments
8 May – 30 August
Sfeir-Semler Gallery Hamburg
hamburg
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We are delighted to present on May 8, 2025 an exhibition marking the centenary of the birth of one of Scotland’s greatest artists, Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006). Fragments is both a major new book and eight exhibitions that will take place internationally during May 2025 in Basel, Brescia, Edinburgh, Hamburg, London, New York, Palma de Mallorca and Vienna, curated and edited by Pia Maria Simig.
An artist, poet and landscape designer, Ian Hamilton Finlay reinvigorated the classical tradition in a body of work that encompasses a variety of creative forms to celebrate the sustaining power of words. He is best known for his garden at Little Sparta, set in the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, where he lived and worked for the last 40 years of his life, and for his guillotine installation, A View to the Temple, at Documenta, Kassel, 1987. He significantly influenced the concrete poetry movement, and his extensive printed poetical and graphical works were published by Wild Hawthorn Press, which he co-founded in 1961. His visual artwork, achieved in collaboration with expert artists and craftspeople, can be found in museums, parks and gardens worldwide.