The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
PHILIP BRAHAM’S new exhibition is prompted, he says, by reflections on suicide.
In it, solitary trees stand out against poisonous skies, while stony paths wander into the centre of the composition and go nowhere.
The whole enterprise recalls the gloomy romanticism of the 19th-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich, whom Braham cites as a major influence.
Friedrich’s graveyards, ruined abbeys and visions of an icy wasteland fitted the bill when the Nazis required a new template for art to fill the galleries and to give the individual under totalitarianism the illusion that they had a soul.