IAN HAMILTON FINLAY: Fragments: Celebrating the Artist's Centennial | Exhibition Design by David Hartt

David Nolan Gallery is pleased and greatly honored to present an exhibition marking the centennial of the birth of Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006). One of Scotland’s most celebrated artists, poets, and philosophers, Finlay revitalized the classical tradition in a body of work that spans multiple disciplines, emphasizing the enduring power of the word. The gallery has proudly exhibited his works for over thirty years, and this exhibition is part of Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments, a major international project which includes a newly published book and eight exhibitions across the USA, England, Scotland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and Spain in May 2025, curated and edited by Pia Maria Simig. The exhibition at David Nolan Gallery is the only one in the Americas and is designed by Philadelphia-based, Canadian artist David Hartt.

Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Practice
Finlay’s work is difficult to classify. He collaborated with traditional craftsmen, architects and contemporary artists creating work across several disciplines. Some know him as Britain’s foremost concrete poet, pioneering the movement through Wild Hawthorn Press, which he co-founded in 1961. Others see him primarily as a gardener; his magnum opus being Little Sparta, a poetic garden in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh. Spread over seven acres of wild, exposed moorland, and containing over 270 sculptures, Little Sparta was the focus of Finlay’s artistic dedication since his arrival at the farm with his family in the autumn of 1966 and until his death in 2006. His art lives on in museums, parks, and gardens worldwide, resisting the conventional and simplistic labels of conceptual, postmodern, or classical. Above all, Finlay considered himself a poet with much of his work hovering on the borderline between poetry and some other medium. He worked with and through poetics, by using language, materials, and moments that he created in his Garden Temple.

Drawing from philosophy, history, and mythology, Finlay spent nearly forty years developing a rigorous and intricate body of work. His concrete poetry—where the form is as important as the meaning—confronts Western cultural values, referencing the French Revolution, World War II, and classical civilizations. Beauty, violence and the sacred coalesce in his works mirroring the dissolution of ideals in contemporary politics and culture at large. Believing that the positive Western symbols had been drained of their meaning by consumerist assimilation, he turned to emblems of power and aggression—machine guns, tanks, guillotines—symbols that, unlike commercialized imagery, retained their potency. His art explores the tension between fixed ideas and shifting moods, and between culture and nature.

The Exhibition
Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments presents works from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, ranging across porcelain, ceramic, stone, bronze, plaster, and metal sculptures, as well as prints. Each work speaks to themes central to Finlay’s practice—poetry and wordplay, romanticized notions of the classical, the limits of interpretation, and the interweaving of religious, political, and aesthetic power.

In ROUSSEAU (Sour Vase) / A Wild Flower is Ideological, Like a Badge, a cast bronze bust of philosopher and writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is paired with a ceramic vase. The bust replicates Jean-Antoine Houdon’s 1780 sculptural portrait of the philosopher who inspired the leaders of the French Revolution, while the phrase “SOUR VASE” is an anagram, in Roman letters, of “ROUSSEAU.” This linguistic play suggests a tension between the “vase” of Rousseau’s thought, which is elegant and vibrant, and its contents, which are politically provocative, even corrosive (“sour”). The wildflower placed within, emblematic of innocence, purity and liberty, alludes to Rousseau’s radical belief in nature as humanity’s most fulfilling state, untouched by society’s corrupting forces.

The Revolution is Frozen—All Principles Are Weakened. There Remain Only Red Bonnets Worn by Intrigue takes the form of an assemblage of corrugated steel, paint, and faux stone (a prefabricated Corinthian capital). The corrugated metal mimics the fluting of a classical column, while the inscribed text alludes both to the aesthetics of ancient inscriptions and contemporary urban graffiti. The phrase originates from a speech by Saint-Just, a major figure of the French Revolution. Finlay also references Hegel’s Philosophy of History, particularly its critique of religion’s diminishing engagement with beauty. The work is a multi-layered reflection on the aftereffects of revolution, where radical ideals disintegrate, leaving behind only their emptied symbols.

In Aphrodite of the Pastoral, the goddess of love, beauty, and fertility wears a jacket patterned with U.S. army desert camouflage, as though she is ashamed of the power of her own nakedness or subsumed by militaristic power. Camouflage, a means of and metaphor for concealment, here conveys the moral ambiguity of unchecked force. Traditionally, pastoral poetry idealizes a rural landscape where shepherds sing of love and harmony. Yet, in Finlay’s vision, Aphrodite has been exiled from Mount Olympus and finds refuge in a landscape shadowed by loss and violence. The work suggests a corrupted pastoral, where materialism and secularism are concealing beauty and transcendence.

Dryad recalls classical mythology, where dryads were wood nymphs inhabiting oak trees. The earliest Greek temples, whose unadorned Doric columns mirrored sacred oaks, retain this symbolism. Here, a column with proportions modeled on the human body bears a rippling carved bark pattern, suggesting the tree that once was. A pair of golden sandals, left behind in the dryad’s hasty metamorphosis into tree and then column, marks her divine presence. In this poetic transformation, where the tree becomes a goddess, and the goddess becomes stone—her physical form has departed, yet vividly re-conjured through metaphor.

Ian Hamilton Finlay’s works provoke meditation, linking the Classical, Renaissance, and Modern eras into an intricate web of cultural resonance. His legacy is not just in the objects he created but in the intellectual and poetic space they open—a critical reflection on the evolution of Western civilization. By its very structure, his work enacts the cultural fabric it dissects, activating history through form, text, and metaphor.

Exhibition Design
Designed by David Hartt (b. 1967), the exhibition reflects his signature approach—bridging past and present through meticulous historical research. Exhibition design has increasingly become part of Hartt’s artistic practice, and this project emerged from a shared kinship between Finlay’s work and his own. After visiting Little Sparta in 2022, a trip he describes as a pilgrimage, Hartt embraced the connection between his and Finlay’s work, and this connection is now formalized in this exhibition. Both artists share a deep engagement with language and design, encoding their works with layered historical references. Finlay frequently employed the technique of détournement, or subverting existing objects or ideas by erasing and rewriting their histories to critique their underlying ideology. His works often resemble relics from antiquity, inviting deeper examination. Hartt, while not using détournement in the same way, uncovers buried histories, a process which similarly requires intervention.

For this exhibition, Hartt draws inspiration from Italian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa, whose elegant integration of contemporary design with historical artifacts provides a model for mediation between past and present. Hartt further considers how the work is socialized, both amongst the different pieces but also in relation with the viewer, creating an experience that reflects Finlay’s own preoccupations on how meaning shifts over time, and how history, language, and landscape shape our perception of the world.

- Tharini Sankarasubramanian

Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments takes place in May 2025 at: David Nolan Gallery, New York; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh; Kewenig Gallery, Palma de Mallorca; Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia; Victoria Miro, London; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg; Stampa Galerie, Basel; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna.

Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments (Book release)
Published on 8 May 2025 by ACC Art Books and edited by Pia Maria Simig, Fragments draws together one hundred works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, each accompanied by a short, fragmentary text by the artist and myriad distinguished writers who wrote about Finlay’s work during his lifetime. It features introductory essays by Stephen Bann (CBE, Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol) and Tom Lubbock (chief art critic of The Independent from 1997 until his death in 2011) and includes 100 full colour plates. Additional texts by: Yves Abrioux, Stephen Bann, Prudence Carlson, Patrick Duncombe, Julia Eames, Patrick Eyres, Alec Finlay, Ian Hamilton Finlay, George Gilliland, Harry Gilonis, and Tom Lubbock. Designed by John and Orna Designs.