Gerald Laing: Myth & Muse – The Cult of Celebrity at the Fine Art Society, Edinburgh is a selection of sculptures, paintings and prints by the British Pop artist Gerald Laing (1936 – 2011), focusing on the myth-making of individuals and their elevation to muses through an abstracted sense of their public image. 

Newcastle-born, and based in Kinkell in the Highlands for much of his life, over five decades Gerald Laing made the myth and mystery of stars his subject. Enigmatic and depersonalised through dot art and abstraction, their public image – disseminated through mass imagery – often belies tales of tragedy.

In his first Pop image, Anna Karina (1962), he transformed the French New Wave film star from a newspaper photograph measuring 1.5 inches to a canvas twelve feet high. He went on to do something similar to the original pin-up girl, Brigitte Bardot, in 1968.

Another work, Lincoln Convertible (1963-64, pictured) is a vast and irregularly-shaped canvas depicting the car in which the President John F Kennedy has been hit and is slumped forward, with Jackie leaning over him. During the 1970s Laing created a series of bronzes of his wife, Galina Vassilovna depersonalising her through curves and arches.

The mass-media imagery which struck Laing upon his arrival in the US in the 1960s stayed with him all his life. In the early years of the 21st century, his interest was stirred again, and the lives of Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse were committed to canvas.