JOE HARGAN SOLO EXHIBITION

Scottish artist Joe Hargan was born in 1952 in Glasgow. He studied Drawing and Painting at Glasgow School
of Art from 1970 – 74 under Danny Ferguson RSW. RGI., James Robertson RSW. RGI. RSA. PAI. and Dr David
Donaldson RSA. RGI. D.LITT (Queen’s Limner). A well recognised and respected figure on the Scottish art
scene, Joe has been the recipient of numerous awards, from the Glasgow School of Art Painting Prize back in
1972, the Royal Scottish Academy Maude Gemmell Hutchison Award in 2002 and more recently the Paisley
City of Culture Bid Award in 2021. And plenty of others in between.

Joe is from a generation of artists who value their own work as part of a bigger picture; a generation that
recognises the important role that regional and national arts bodies can play in the encouragement of young
talent and the development of professional artistic careers. With a sense of responsibility and reciprocity,
Joe has worked tirelessly over the years to protect and promote the visual arts for the artists and public of
today, as much as those of tomorrow.

These values, coupled with his great aptitude for paperwork and deciphering legalese, have resulted in his
frequent election to leadership roles within art institutions. Among many other leadership positions over
the years, Joe has been President and Chairman of the Paisley Art Institute from 1989 – 2000 and President
of the Glasgow Art Club from 2017- 2020, again returning to the Presidency of the Paisley Art Institute in
2022 (ongoing).

The last few years have been a challenging time for Joe and many others, and a legal battle with Renfrewshire
Council surrounding the future of the Paisley Art Institute’s building, exhibition spaces and its large £4
million collection of Scottish paintings, has taken up a lot of his time and energy. Joe has been at the centre
of all of this, working round the clock to ensure that the permanent collection and the contemporary
annual exhibitions have a future, and most importantly, that the young artists of tomorrow have some of the
same opportunities that he and his peers have had in the past.

This is a rather long and serious introduction to an artist who many people associate first and foremost with
the tongue-in-cheek ‘Sniffy’ paintings – masterfully colourful paintings featuring the ‘sniffy’ rotund butler
within gallery and stately home settings, always surrounded by old masters and an air of the ridiculous.
Not only finely executed, these paintings offer humorous and sometimes surreal vignettes of the good life
– wine flows and there is always cake, as we are treated to a painting within a painting, a Canaletto or a John
Singer Sargent from the end of Joe’s brush.

There is always a little more than meets the eye however, and these ‘Sniffy’ paintings are a commentary of
sorts, with Joe’s playful juxtapositions of the traditional and the modern raising questions about the value
of contemporary art, and his humorous ‘vignettes’ providing us with a visual picture of some of the debates
that take place in the strange and wonderful place that is the art world today. Even with all of its challenges
and contradictions – and perhaps because of them – it is Joe’s world, the place he has inhabited creatively
for decades and the source of his inspiration.

The ‘Sniffy’ paintings can be enjoyed on their own, but it is in the context of a solo show like this that we
can really appreciate them as part of the larger narrative of Joe’s life and work. The solo exhibition is also
an opportunity to show the breadth of Joe’s creative output, and in particular, some of his larger figurative
paintings, which reveal Joe’s life-long study of Western art and culture and his ability to see and make
connections between its past, present and future.

In his early 70s now, Joe’s unshakable energy and commitment to the arts is admirable and the future will
undoubtedly remember his contributions as an individual artist and for the work he has done to promote
visual art in the West of Scotland and Scotland more generally. For now though, we are able to delight in
his paintings themselves, and to entreat ourselves to a full exhibition of work by one of Scotland’s most
accomplished painters. From the largest gestural abstracts to the smallest of his character studies, Joe’s
brushwork is irresistible and feels like painting at its most fluent.

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