Scott Myles

Scott Myles is a Scottish artist based in Glasgow, UK. His practice is strongly gestural and consists of sculpture, painting, printmaking, artist’s books, photography and performance-based projects: a kind of reactivation of ideas relating to the value of art and social reality by means of reusing already established codes. Early works explored circulation, exchange and value. For example, in an extended performance in 1999, Myles intervened into corporate culture by using a number of newspaper kiosks as lending libraries. He stole publications from a chain store, replacing them at different locations of the same retailer, without leading to any commercial loss for the respective chain. Since 2008, in the wake of the global recession, Myles has produced a number of projects and sculptures wherein he allegorizes symbols which have become ruins. These have ranged from large-scale sculptural works to dematerialized artworks within site-specific locations such as galleries, department stores and the outdoors. Additionally, Myles has appropriated and adapted works by other artists, exploring gift-exchange while continually deviating from the original reference point in a way that not only reflects the original idea but is also an authentic presentation of something else, something personal. As a whole, his artworks constitute a complex network of responses to social and physical infrastructures, and examine the subject in their own environment. Myles’s most recent body of work is a series of paintings thematising a pictorial device which is at once a partial reiteration of the canvas stretcher frame, an illusionistic suggestion of the picture as a perspectival window, and a sinister intimation of the gibbet or gallows.

Scott Myles’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich (2005); The Modern Institute, Glasgow, UK (2010, 2014, 2017); Dundee Contemporary Arts, UK (2012); Mumbai Art Room, (2014); Maison Lafayette (in collaboration with Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris (2014); Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo (2016); and Meyer Riegger Galerie, Karlsruhe, Germany (2019). His work has also been featured in group shows at Secession, Vienna (2003); Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London (2006), Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany (2008); Tate Liverpool (2011), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015); The Menil Collection, Houston (2016); Luhring Augustine (2017); and the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2019). Myles’s works are held in many private and public collections, including: Tate Gallery, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The British Council Collection, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Myles has been awarded two Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowships at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, Richmond (2016, 2019). He is currently undertaking on-going research into one of eight extraordinary structures designed by James Wines of SITE architects for American catalogue showroom BEST Products, owned by Sydney and Frances Lewis – prolific art collectors and philanthropists, whose papers are held at the VMHC.