Edinburgh Art Festival is back with its largest programme yet; 30 venues across the Scottish capital are showcasing the works of more than 200 artists from across the world. Stepping out of a tranquil art gallery into the "feverish melee of tourists and street performers" that fill the city for the Fringe at this time of year is a "strange experience", said Samuel Reilly in The Telegraph . But the festival has a character that "chimes with the ethos" of the Fringe; it is clear from paying a visit to the city's galleries and museums that the processes that go into making these works of art are "exceptionally rich and varied".
The core theme for this year's show is a celebration of "persistence", spanning everything from personal histories to post-colonial landscapes and the global political stage. However, the best artists "touch on" such political questions as just one part of their complex works. At Ingleby Gallery on Barony Street, Hayley Barker's "shimmering, brooding" paintings of the gardens surrounding her studio in LA throughout the seasons are a "revelation".
A short stroll away at the Royal Botanic Garden, a locally crafted table constructed from a diseased cedar tree becomes a "literal and conceptual space for discussion", said Giles Sutherland in The Times . Here, the Colombian cultural foundation Más Arte Más Acción is hosting a series of performances and readings to examine the interconnections between humans and plants in times of dramatic biodiversity loss. And in the "great, dark quadrangle" at the University of Edinburgh, said Laura Cumming in The Guardian , you'll find one of the most "dramatic curtain-raisers in contemporary art" – Ghanaian artist El Anatsui has crafted a shimmering "masterpiece" from the flattened metal caps of liquor bottles that have been tied together with copper wire.
Step through the door and climb the stairs to the Talbot Rice Gallery and there is plenty more of Anatsui's "stupendous" art to discover. At this year's "particularly strong" edition of the festival, its director Kim McAleese has "somehow managed to persuade" the council to let her take over the City Art Centre right beside Waverley station. The "hitherto austere monument" has been transformed with colourful banners helping to inject the festival with "vital focus and direction".
Young artists have been given a "proper stage here"; I especially liked Tamara MacArthur's glittering installations. Not everything works, though. Sir John Lavery is "eventless froth": he goes to painstaking efforts over soldiers' wounds but "can't make a snake look scary or a woman look like more than a doll".
The most "urgent" show at this year's event is the exhibition of contemporary Ukrainian photography at Stills. From "semi-abstract images of charred landscapes" to "gravely beautiful" portraits of citizens in bunkers, "every work is a revelation of life right now, an art made with extraordinary urgency, as nowhere else in the festival"..
