In 2025, the centenary of Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay is being marked in a way that reflects the very structure of his life’s work: layered, distributed, and full of resonances. Titled Fragments, this ambitious international exhibition unfolds simultaneously across eight galleries in Europe and the United States, each presenting a distinct yet interwoven chapter of Finlay’s radical, poetic universe.

Curated by Pia Maria Simig, Fragments is not a retrospective in the traditional sense. Instead, it offers a constellation of encounters—sculptures, poems, neons, tapestries, and assemblages—allowing Finlay’s recurring themes to reverberate across time and space. His enduring concerns—classical antiquity, revolution, language, violence, nature, and the sea—are reimagined through the lenses of Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh; Victoria Miro, London; David Nolan Gallery, New York; Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna; Kewenig, Palma de Mallorca; Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia and Galerie Stampa, Basel.

At the heart of Fragments is Finlay’s unique way of working with language—not just as content, but as material. For him, a single word carved in stone or wood, cast in bronze, or illuminated in neon could carry immense weight. Across all eight venues, visitors encounter the many dualities that define Finlay’s practice: war and peace, beauty and brutality, the classical and the contemporary, the pastoral and the political.

Though deeply rooted in Scotland, Finlay’s work resists national borders. His garden at Little Sparta, perhaps his most famous creation, is echoed in these gallery spaces as a fragmented, conceptual landscape. The exhibition doesn’t seek to unify Finlay’s legacy into a neat narrative; instead, it embraces its contradictions, silences, and radical clarity.

Accompanying the exhibition is a richly illustrated publication, Fragments, which brings together Finlay’s own writings alongside new essays by Stephen Bann, Tom Lubbock, and others. This book, like the exhibition itself, resists closure—inviting new interpretations, new provocations, and renewed attention to a body of work that continues to speak, in carved stone and flickering neon, to the urgencies of our time.

In a world saturated with noise, Fragments reminds us of the power of brevity, the danger of beauty, and the quiet authority of words well placed.

(Je vous salut marat, 1989)