A major exhibition by Michael Fullerton unveiling new paintings from the Hilltop Hotel residency in Carlisle, alongside two decades of printmaking and a landmark commission responding to Scotland’s artistic heritage.
Michael Fullerton’s new exhibition at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre places lived experience and cultural memory at the forefront of contemporary art. The presentation anchors itself in a series of recent paintings made after the artist spent five months in 2023 working at the Hilltop Hotel in Carlisle, Cumbria.
At the time, the hotel served as accommodation for people seeking asylum in the UK. Fullerton worked first as a general assistant and later in the kitchen, forming close relationships with residents who had arrived from different parts of the world and carried distinct paths of displacement. The resulting portraits are grounded in these conversations and the quiet rituals of daily work, offering a close-up view of individuals who are often discussed only in the abstract.
Courtesy the artist.
The exhibition highlights Edinburgh City Art Centre’s role as a site of cultural collaboration, bringing together new paintings with an extensive selection of Fullerton’s printmaking. More than twenty years of his silkscreen practice is represented. Working frequently on newsprint, at large scale and in multiples, he treats print as a space for ideas that resist permanence. Its fragility and capacity for broad circulation allow him to probe how images move through public life and how visual culture shapes political understanding.
A new commission for the City Art Centre underscores these concerns. Fullerton has produced a gold screenprint based on John Thomson’s Abbotsford, The Home of Sir Walter Scott (1828). The work considers the Romantic lens through which both Thomson and Scott helped define Scotland, and how their influence continues to frame national identity today. By revisiting this emblematic image, Fullerton places historical mythmaking in dialogue with contemporary experience, extending his ongoing interest in how narratives are built, revised, and remembered.
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Courtesy the artist.
Michael Fullerton (b. 1971, Glasgow) is known for a practice that threads portraiture through questions of power, technology, and cultural perception. His paintings, prints, and sculptures often focus on people whose stories have been distorted or overlooked. Through unexpected connections between disparate subjects, he creates networks of images that reconsider how histories take shape and how information circulates.
Michael Fullerton at Edinburgh City Art Centre opens from 22nd November, 2025 until 1st of March, 2026 at City Art Centre 2 Market Street, Edinburgh EH1 1DE
©2025 Edinburgh City Art Centre
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