Glasgow Group

The Glasgow Group is a Glasgow based artists’ cooperative whose prequisite for membership is that one was born or currently resides in that city and that one is a practising artist. Founded in 1958 by three students from Glasgow School of Art namely James Morrison, Anda Paterson and James Spence. They and many other art students were irritated by the conformist, unadventurous policies of the local exhibiting societies namely the RSA and the RGI and at the dearth of commercial outlets in the city. Their action was to request other like-minded students to exhibit with them at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow. Initially thirteen artists including the founder members joined. They included Ian McCulloch, James Watt, Carole Gibbons, Douglas Abercrombie, Ewen McAslan, Margery Clinton, William Birnie and Alan Fletcher. The Group mounts annual and in recent times bi-annual exhibitions which since the 1990’s have included invited artists from the European mainland. Other members have included Ronald Birrell, Alexander Allan, Bet Low, Philip Reeves and Fred Stiven. During his lifetime, sculptor Benno Schotz was elected as the Group's Honorary President. The Group held a Jubilee exhibition in 2008 and invited every member that had exhibited since its inception to submit a work. As this would have meant over 400 exhibits in all, it became an impracticality so a virtual gallery was published on the internet thus solving the problem. Just seventy exhibits were shown at the Royal Concert Hall.