The Major Periods

1962 – 1965: Early Pop Paintings

As one of the original wave of Pop artists Gerald Laing produced some of the most significant works of the British Pop movement. His paintings reproduced images of popular heroes such as starlets, film stars, drag racers, astronauts and skydivers. His 1962 portrait of Brigitte Bardot is an iconic work of the period and regularly features in major Pop retrospectives alongside Lincoln Convertible from 1964, a commemoration of the assassination of JFK.

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1965 – 1970: Utopian Abstract Sculpture

From 1965 Gerald Laing's painting evolved into abstract sculptures using the techniques and materials of car customisation - lacquering, spray-painting and chrome-plating on metal.

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1970 – 1973: Sculpture In The Landscape

A move from New York to the Highlands of Scotland in 1970 saw Gerald Laing's sculpture respond to the beauty, roughness and power of the surrounding landscape.

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1972 – 2010: Public Sculpture

Public sculptures include the the Bank Station Dragons; the Rugby Sculptures at Twickenham Stadium; the Cricketer at Lords; the Highland Clearances Memorial in Helmsdale, Sutherland and Axis Mundi in Edinburgh.

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1973 – 1980: Galina Series

Inspired by the figurative sculpture of the First World War Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner, in 1973 Gerald Laing began to model in clay and cast in bronze. The Galina Series and associated sculptures were his first works from this period.

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1982 – 2007: Portrait Heads

Gerald Laing's portrait work includes heads and reliefs of Luciano Pavarotti, Andy Warhol, Paul Getty and Sam Wanamaker.

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2002 – 2005: War Paintings

The Iraq war and the publication of images of torture at Abu Ghraib prison drew Gerald Laing back to painting for the first time in over three decades. The War Paintings series sees the starlets and all-American heroes of his early paintings take on new, more sinister roles.

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2004 – 2011: New Paintings

Returning to the style and subject matter of his early pop art paintings, Gerald Laing's latest paintings feature media images of contemporary celebrities including Amy Winehouse and Kate Moss.

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Search the Catalogue

Cr504 dunphailobelisksundial bwp

The Dunphail Obelisk Sundial

Catalogue No. 542

Artist's CR 504

December - March, 1989

Kinkell

Bronze

74 x 12 x12 inches / 188 x 30 x30 cm

Collection: Unknown

These obelisk dials have not been found outside Scotland and the earliest was made in 1630 for the 2nd Earl of Perth at Drummond Castle by John Mylne, Master Mason to King Charles I. For some unknown reason no other dated obelisks have been found until 1692; during the 17th century the predominant fashion was for lectern dials, so-called because of their sloping tops which have some resemblance to a reading desk. There are two fine examples of these at Darnaway Castle. But the last lectern to be dated is 1684 (except for a few whose dates are suspect) and obelisks then replaced them in fashion. The last is no later than 1731 and 25 complete examples are known to survive at the present time, though there are many incomplete fragments. Apart from these two very standardised types, there are many other less easily classified complex dials in Scotland, usually grouped together as ‘facet-heads’ and all of them are either unique to
Scotland, or more numerous, and earlier, than similar dials in other countries.
The reasons for this fashion, which lasted only about 100 years, are obscure. England in the same period also had complex dials, but of a very different type, more like astronomical compendia which gave information about the altitude and azimuth of the sun, times of sunrise and sunset, a more detailed calendar scale, corrections for use as a moon-dial and for estimating the time of high tide, tables for calculating the date of Easter and other festivals etc. The Scottish dials are much simpler than these and are not even very practical time-keepers as their faces are so small and often awkwardly placed.
My belief is that they were made primarily for symbolic reasons. This period in Scotland was still an age of transition between magic and science and it was also the time when the lodges of working masons were being transformed by the acquisition of members from the landowning and educated classes, apparently in search of esoteric knowledge which the masons were believed to have guarded from the days of Solomon’s Temple. Freemasonry, in the modern ‘speculative’ sense, is believed by some
historians at least to have arisen in Scotland at this time. Many of the dials have symbols such as the sun, moon and five-pointed star, which represent the Hermetic Trinity of Mens, Intellectus and Amor, and the Heart, used by the mystics to symbolise the ‘Way of Love’ for achieving ‘Renaissance’ or re-birth. One of the prime objects of the early Freemasons was to find some way of uniting men of goodwill, despite the splits in the Church following the Reformation, and a characteristic of these multiple dials is that all the gnomons must point to the Pole Star regardless of the orientation of the faces. It seems to me that this symbolises the constant element of Faith which is common to all the different creeds, and the essential unity of mankind.

'The Dunphail Sundial', Gerald Laing, unpublished manuscript, 1990