Grandfather of pop art puts Venice on ice

　　Sir Peter Blake's new print of Andy Warhol, a comprehensive exhibition of the skills of Alan Davie, the veteran Scottish artist, and a graffiti project inside the otherwise august and echoing halls of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery are among the highlights of this year's Edinburgh Art Festival, which opened yesterday.

　　The youngest of the summer festivals, the month-long event was founded six years ago. This year's emphasis on digital arts reflected the festival's desire to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary arts, said Tessa Jackson, chair of the festival board.

　　That aspiration aside, it is Sir Peter's exhibition, at the Edinburgh Printmaker's Gallery, that harks back to the heydays of pop art in the 1960s, which is certain to prove one of the most popular shows. It features some of his most famous images alongside Venice Suite, new prints of 20 collages which were created after the artist's visit to the Venice Biennale in 2007.

　　These latest works, he conceded, delivered a sense of foreboding, some filling the city's canals with a variety of ominous objects and people, including an iceberg, dredging vessels and colonial explorers, and one featuring an unlikely image of the Northern Lights.

　　Venice Suite is displayed alongside Alphabet, included only in part, in which five letters spelling out the artist's name in trademark collage compositions, while Love, a series of images of rock'n'roll heroes, includes photographs of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles.

　　Among other new shows are installations at doggerfisher, featuring the work of Turner Prize nominees, Rosalind Nashashibi, and Lucy Skaer, while Davie's exhibition at Dovecot Studios, before his 90th birthday is a sizeable exhibition of the artist's work.

　　The Portrait Gallery, which though closed for renovation, hosts a graffiti project called Rough Cuts, featuring the work of 12 young artists.

（来源：TIMESONLINE，点击参看译文）