In New York, David Nolan Gallery presents a centennial exhibition on the pioneering artist, poet, and gardener.
Artist, poet, philosopher, gardener, the multihyphenate Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) created a body of work that defies the boundaries of disciplines. Engaging with history as well as wordplay and themes of power, Finlay’s work presented an innovative, malleable approach to language and the written word, which has influenced what art can be and accomplish.
Marking the centenary of the Scottish artist’s birth, David Nolan Gallery in New York is presenting “Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments,” an exhibition that showcases a diverse range of works dated from the late 1970s through the late 1990s. On view through June 7, 2025, the show includes pieces made in porcelain, ceramic, stone, bronze, plaster, metal, and examples of his prints, highlighting the variety of mediums he used to express his ideas.
With notable works such as Little Sparta (1966), a seven-acre garden containing more than 270 sculptures, projects such as Wild Hawthorn Press, which he co-founded in 1961, and numerous collaborations with other artists, architects, and craftsmen, the exhibition offers a glimpse into the wide-ranging creative endeavors Finlay undertook in his lifetime.
The show coincides with the release of a book of the same title featuring 100 works by Finlay, with each complemented by a short, “fragmentary” text by one of the several writers who wrote about his work over the course of his career. Additionally, there are several commissioned texts by leading art historians and critics such as Stephen Bann and Tom Lubbock, as well as Finlay’s son and artist Alec Finlay.
“Having worked with Ian Hamilton Finlay—especially his idea of the one-word poem as a kind of haiku, and the nature of his collaborations both with people and his garden—I’ve become increasingly moved by the care with which he approached everything,” said Tharini Sankarasubramanian, gallery associate at David Nolan Gallery and artist liaison for the Ian Hamilton Finlay Estate.
“His collaborations with others are particularly touching, given that he suffered from agoraphobia and couldn’t travel to work directly with the various media his art required,” Sankarasubramanian added. “His ability to marry language with landscape, and treat his art like plants, as something to be nurtured, and sometimes left to grow wild, has stayed with me and influenced my own relationship to artmaking.”
The curated selection of works in “Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments” underscores some of the themes and subjects Finlay continually returned to throughout his career. The Revolution is Frozen—All Principles Are Weakened. There Remain Only Red Bonnets Worn by Intrigue (1991) featuring corrugated steel with “graffiti” text behind a broken Corinthean capital. Here, contemporary urban aesthetics juxtaposed with an icon of the Classical world and text from the French Revolution offer a multifaceted, symbolic exploration of societal conditions across the ages.
“His work captures, in the most wonderful way, the many different dimensions of the Western civilization—and, by extension, civilization at large,” Sankarasubramanian continued. “He was able to visualize the synchronous presence of beauty and violence. His work makes us pause and reconsider what we think we know—and in that pause, questions emerge. Questions, in my opinion, are far more valuable than answers.”
“Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments” is on view through June 7, 2025.
