Martin Boyce has asked himself ‘do my sculptures dream?’ His sleepy installations quietly transform Fruitmarket, injecting an infectious dedication to 20th-century modernist design into the gallery space. Each room in this survey exhibition offers a new dimension to the Glasgow-based artist’s practice. 

In the Warehouse, Boyce plays with the task of readying artwork for public display. Storage units and stacks of concrete haphazardly clutter the room with the exposed brick and steel frame of the old fruit and vegetable market emphasising the rawness of his sculptures. There is gentle humour here, too: while museums and galleries are sometimes privy to accusations of hoarding objects and keeping them hidden from the public, Boyce invites us into a secretive stage of the curatorial process. These sculptures could be interpreted as an attempt to demystify and deconstruct that process. While the Warehouse conveys bold artistic intentions, elsewhere the objects on the ground floor lack some cohesion in their presentation. 

Upstairs, Boyce attempts to turn the light-flooded room into a bourgeois apartment with elements of the outside world creeping in. The exhibition's title (Before Behind Between Above Below) is curiously represented through ventilation grills around the room, and carefully placed geometric leaves fall from the cherry blossom ceiling. At a distance, a fireplace titled ‘Same Day’ (2015) appears to be an illusionistic painting, but upon closer inspection, it inverts to sculpture.

Parallels can be drawn between Boyce’s transformation of the upper gallery with the Glasgow-born artist Lucy McKenzie and her mesmerising use of trompe l’oeil to create otherworldly interiors. Contrastingly, Boyce leaves us slightly unsatisfied. There’s a sense that his sculpture is in limbo, waiting to be pushed into a dream-like realm.

Before Behind Between Above Below, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, until Sunday 9 June.