VIDEO: Andy Goldsworthy - Fifty Years

Most people are familar with Andy Goldsworthy's artworks via his photographs of his land art.  Very few have seen his art in exhibitions - and yet there is an exhibition of his artwork on right now - and it is unique!

Never seen before and never to be seen again, this exhibition is set to cement Goldsworthy’s position as one of the leading artists of our time.

Oak Passage by Andy Goldsworthy

The exhibition Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years can currently be seen at the Royal Scottish Academy until Sun 2 Nov 2025. It's open daily, 10am–5pm - but with the opening hours extended for the final two weekends.

What is unique about it is that it is the largest ever indoor exhibition by Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years has been conceived by the artist as a single immersive artwork in response to the space, materials and character of the RSA building. Occupying all of the upper rooms and most of the lower floor, the exhibition is at once beautiful and ambitious in scale. The interrelationship of humans and the working land is a recurrent theme in Goldsworthy’s art and in the exhibition. He often presents the land as a hard, hostile and brutal place. Fences and barriers feature prominently, in the form of rusted barbed wire stretched across a room, and a massive, cracked clay wall. As in nature, beauty and danger co-exist.

Or you can view this 7 minute video of Andy Goldsworthy talking about the work in the exhibition - which I HIGHLY RECOMMEND! 

The show is a combination of 

• 200 works in total
• stunning installations made in situ in response to the iconic Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) building, 
• drawings, photographs, films, sketchbooks and archival items dating back to the mid-1970s.

All of the artworks installations have been constructed in the space. I found the section on how they created Red Clay Wall absolutely fascinating. There are few men who can envision artworks so big and yet be so meticulous about how they are made!

It's very appropriate that this major "restrospective" should be an exhibition in Scotland as Andy Goldsworthy, although born in Cheshire and worked in Yorkshire, has been living in Dumfries and Galloway (south west Scotland) for the last 40 years. 

South west Scotland, he says, was affordable and welcoming. "I liked the right to roam, the openness of the farmers, and the ability to enjoy the land."

He spent weeks transporting all the portable art from there to Edinburgh for the exhibition

Reviews of the Exhibition

Wool Runner (2025) by Andy Goldsworthy

These are the reviews of the exhibition

• A life's artwork: 50 years of Andy Goldsworthy | BBC

The relationship between humans and land is a constant theme in his work. Fences and barriers feature prominently, including a rusted barbed wire piece which extends across an entire room.

• Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years review – a wild walk between life, death and sheep-shearing | Jonathan Jones - The Guardian

This is the Clarkson’s Farm of art retrospectives, plunging today’s urbanites into the raw sadness and beauty, the violence and slow natural cycles of the British countryside. Goldsworthy may love nature but he doesn’t sentimentalise it.

• Andy Goldsworthy’s lasting ephemera | Laura Cumming - The Observer

the most potent work here also carries the strongest meaning. This is Gravestones, from 2025. A tide of broken stones fills the floor of one gallery, immediately invoking bare churned fields, Paul Nash’s nightmare seas, or the fallen headstones of an old cemetery. And it is precisely from such cemeteries that these stones are culled. The dead once displaced these stones – red granite, so evocative of Enlightenment Scotland – and now they are displaced all over again, gathered here as commemoration of the people of the past. Seen on a dark Edinburgh day, lit by nothing but the sepulchral gloom of the gallery, you witness the work – and the artist – at their best.

My previous posts about Andy Goldsworthy

• Andy Goldsworthy Retrospective at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2007)
• Goldsworthy and Gormley - 21st century British sculpture (2008) - about an information website I created about him - which is no longer published (but I might resurrect!)
• Video: Andy Goldsworthy speaks about his work (2012)