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Brian Catling & the Head of Bobby Awl

Brian Catling & the head of Bobby Awl was a solo exhibition, which was held at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh in January 2008, and consisted of sixteen egg tempera paintings by the artist and a nineteenth-century death mask (http://www.inglebygallery.com/exhibitions/brian-catling-the-head-of-bobby-awl/). The exhibition was part of a series in which individual artists (including Sean Scully, Rachel Whiteread, Howard Hodgkin, Cornelia Parker, Ceal Floyer and Ian Hamilton Finlay) were invited to show work in relation to something else of their choosing, be that the work of another artist, an object, a film or a piece of music.

Catling’s show was conceived as an installation in which the imagined portraits were contrasted with the trace of an actual life. The artist’s small icon-like paintings of cyclopses were shown alongside the original death mask of the nineteenth-century Edinburgh ‘idiot’ Bobby Awl, on loan from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Catling first came across the figure of Awl in an 1820 chapbook on his life, which he discovered in the National Library of Scotland. His research towards the exhibition included making drawings of the death mask and a commissioned performance at the site of the Scottish Parliament. The text for the latter was published in Without Day‬: ‪Proposals for a New Scottish Parliament‬ (Polygon Press, ISBN 9780748662777)‬‬.‬

The Ingleby show developed out of Catling’s studies of so-called pathological specimens and the installation was designed to interrogate notions of normality through generating an uncomfortable intimacy with objects of abnormality. During the course of the private view, Catling read from his retelling of Awl’s life in a book called The Authentic Narrative of an Imaginary Conversation Between the Death Mask of Bobby Awl and B. Catling, Contemporary Author and Sculptor (Etruscan Books, ISBN 1901538613).