LeithLate is delighted to announce the second phase of the highly successful Shutter Project, a public arts initiative in Leith, Edinburgh that matches up emerging artists and local Leith businesses to create a bespoke work of art, to be displayed on the shutter of the business outside opening hours. The second phase of The Shutter Project will involve the installation of a further 3 artworks in addition to the existing 6 artworks completed to date.

The first shutter artwork will be installed by Omar Zingaro Bhatia, (winner of The Skinny Award at the RSA New Contemporaries in 2010), whose Spuriosity Shop installation in Leith Walk Barbers was a highlight of LeithLate13. Omar recently completed a 19m long mural in a Roma/Gypsy village in the far north of Hungary. His Leith artwork will be on the shutter of Café Nemrut, a Turkish restaurant based at 255 Leith Walk. Work will start on the first shutter in Feb/March 2014, with the remaining two shutters (artist/venue as yet tbc) to be completed prior to the LeithLate14 event in June.

Games Master – Jamie Johnson

Origano – Rich and Simon

Word Of Mouth – Fraser Gray

For full details on the completed shutters to date, please visit Leith Late website.

All images copyright Eoin Carey.

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‘Omar’s Spuriosity Shop’ (degree show) was a huge scale installation which contained over 200 drawings, paintings and perhaps as many as 3000 objects. The show was completed in the last week of April and opened to a record breaking public of 7500 viewers and was met with wide acclaim. The Scotsman, The Skinny, D.U.M, The List and The Courier all featured the work in their publications. Art World magazine ranked it in their top 20 Degree shows in the U.K and The Embassy Gallery in Edinburgh ranked it in their top 8. I was also selected to feature in the Catlin Guide (a catalogue of the 40 most promising emerging artists of 2009). On top of all that I was chosen to be in the Royal Scottish Academy ‘New Contemporaries’ exhibition in Edinburgh 2010.
Omar’s Spuriosity shop hints at an uneasy colonial past of Savagery, cultural rape and explotaion of non-whites. The viewer is transported back to Great Britain’s shameful past. “False narratives, characters and interiors are created by a ‘master collagist’ who is reacting against minimalism, deconstuction and substanceless ‘high concept art”‘. The installation contains; curios, mannered portraits, mythical landscapes, morbid photographs, glittering curiosities and a stuffed magpie named Morris.

”Omar Zingaro Bhatia paints and draws in a variety of styles: portraits with a nod to Chagall or Soutine, invented Tolkienish landscapes and witty captioned drawings à la Edward Gorey, but all this is dwarfed by the way he transforms his space into a ‘Spuriosity Shop’ crammed full of trinkets, photographs, books and clothes. Oh, and a stuffed magpie.” -THE SCOTSMAN, JUNE 2009

View more work here: www.zingaromar.blogspot.com