Edinburgh has more statues per square mile than most cities dare count. Walk from the New Town to the Grassmarket and you'll pass generals, philosophers, monarchs, and the odd dog. Jamie Fitzpatrick, an Edinburgh-based artist with a sharp eye for civic mythology, has made that landscape the subject of his latest exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, asking, with characteristic bluntness, who decided these figures deserved a plinth, and what that tells us about class and authority in a city that sells its history like a product.
The show lands at a significant moment. Edinburgh Printmakers, based in the former North British Rubber Company building on Union Street, has become one of the city's most quietly serious contemporary art spaces since reopening in its current home. It's the kind of venue that attracts work with something to say, and Fitzpatrick's practice fits that brief. His printmaking draws on documentary traditions, close observation, repeated marks, images that accumulate meaning the longer you look at them.
The class and authority angle is not abstract. Edinburgh's built environment is a ledger of who held power when the stone was being carved. According to Historic Environment Scotland, the city contains one of the densest concentrations of listed statuary in the UK, the vast majority of which commemorates men from military, mercantile, or aristocratic backgrounds. Fitzpatrick's work invites viewers to read that landscape as a political document rather than neutral decoration.
For Edinburgh businesses and their teams heading into Festival season, there's something worth sitting with here. The city will be full of visitors in the weeks ahead, many of them walking past monuments they'll photograph without questioning. Work like Fitzpatrick's is a reminder that Edinburgh's cultural offer extends well beyond the Fringe programme, and that the spaces between the big ticketed shows are where some of the most honest conversations about the city happen. Creative Scotland has consistently argued that visual art and printmaking are undersupported relative to their economic and social contribution; exhibitions like this one make that case without needing to say so directly.
If you're looking for something to take a client to during August that isn't a comedy show or a whisky tour, Edinburgh Printmakers is worth your time. It's free to browse the gallery, it's central, and the building itself is a piece of industrial history the city nearly lost. Fitzpatrick's show gives you something to talk about on the way out, which is more than most business lunches manage.