Scott Kilgour is a Scottish-American artist whose linear style is grounded in Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Art Nouveau aesthetic.
Encouraged by the first curator of 20th Century Art at the MET, Henry Geldzahler, to move to New York City in the early 80's, Kilgour experienced first hand the frenetic contemporary American art scene. By the end of the decade, after absorbing the eclectic New York sensibility, Scott's lines and curves had evolved due to contact with Pop Art, Minimalism, New Wave, Graffiti and modern dance. His work was further influenced by Edmund Carpenter, a prestigious anthropologist, who galvanized his interest in continuous line drawing and knot-work designs. Gallery exhibits in the ‘80s included 56 Bleecker Street Gallery, DIA Foundation and Holly Solomon Gallery.
In the 90's, Kilgour would further expand his body of knot-work designs, embarking on a decade-long study exploring the spatial relationship of continuous line drawing in Scottish Celtic Interlace. This exploratory culminated in a 1999 exhibition at the Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art, as part of the Glasgow UK City for Architecture & Design celebration.
In the 2000's, Kilgour conceived an environmental body of work focused on trash and its embodiment of societal excess. This collection of work, known as Trash Trilogy, evaluated trash as an extension of ourselves and the values and the relationships we assign to its existence. Once again, Scott tapped his linear aesthetic to draw a compelling book series using American Sign Language to sound a call to action to own the problem and be part of the societal solution. This body of work was featured on TreeHugger.com.
Botanicals are also the ideal subject for Scott’s continuous spatial patterns based on rosette whorls & luminous rose petals, and most recently a large scale sunflower body of work signifying the intrinsic energy all around us, further exploring the dynamic encounter expressed by the forces of nature.
Line for Kilgour is his primary medium for representation. By compressing seeing and feeling into line - the combination of the eye and the hand - Scott delineates the world he experiences into expressive ideas.
Henry Geldzahler, curator, modern art historian and art critic, in an introduction for a suite of prints published in 1990, best describes Kilgour's particular aesthetic -
"His sense of composition and draughtsmanship, that absolute balance of ground and line, is Scott's benefaction."
Kilgour attended the Glasgow School of Art and has been featured in media outlets including Interview Magazine, New York Magazine and Elle Décor. For a list of gallery work, see the Exhibitions Page.