Two very different exhibitions inspired by the 1980s inner-city landscapes of Edinburgh and New York caught the eye at Glasgow International. At The Modern Institute’s Bricks Space, five large-scale works by Keith Haring chart the rapid-fire perpetual motion of life underground in all its bustling busyness in the Big (if slightly rotting) Apple. Across the river, in the top floor of the former school at 5 Florence Street, photographs by the late Sandra George (picture above) bring things closer to home by way of a series of black-and-white documentary portraits about life on the margins in Auld Reekie.  

Despite being created oceans apart geographically, in sociological and political terms, Haring and George’s respective canons reveal them as frontline near-neighbours, who ended up being regarded in vastly different ways. On the one hand, Haring’s street-smart guerrilla interventions were already lionised by the hipster art establishment prior to his early passing in 1990 aged 31. On the other, George, who died in 2013 aged 56, never exhibited during her lifetime, those images all but forgotten. Only when George’s vast and still largely unseen archive was put into the care of Edinburgh community-based arts organisation, Craigmillar Now, was it rediscovered. As the work shows, both artists possess a sense of place in all the messy state of urban decay that defined their time.

Haring’s chalked and spray painted-on figures have become familiar totems of 1980s pop iconography that seem to dance to a hip-hop beat. The restless energies of their overcrowded cartoonscapes map out an all-encroaching world of TV overload and dangerous liaisons. Done quickly on blank advertising hoardings between rentals, Haring’s hit-and-run aesthetic subverted its commercial backdrop with a messy life that the red-brick walls of this show’s Glasgow venue goes some way to honouring.

At much the same period that Haring was riding the subway, George (who was one year older) photographed communities in areas of Edinburgh rife with social deprivation. Gala days, free concerts, people’s protests, public meetings and playgrounds all come under George’s lens. Amid the barren cityscapes and shuttered-up community centres, George captures the residents of a women’s hostel, a group of disabled musicians, students of the Royal Blind School and much more. The buildings may be long gone, but the human heart remains in George’s crucial collection, just as it does in Haring’s dance of life.

Sandra George, reviewed at 5 Florence Street, Glasgow ★★★★★

Keith Haring, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Thursday 5 September ★★★★☆