Scottish George Wyllie created major pieces of public art that the public can’t avoid across the city that raised socio-political questions in the minds of the people of Glasgow.
George, a retired Customs and Excise officer turned full time artist, had a knack for masterminding big events. He was articulate and he was a showman and felt that art should be taken out of art galleries and into the wider public realm.
Works include a second version of the famous Straw Locomotive, George Wyllie’s powerful full scale rendition of a classic steam train which hung from Glasgow’s Stobcross crane during The Glasgow Garden Festival in the summer of 1987.
This work is widely credited as one of the defining moments in Scottish art in the 20th Century. It secured Wyllie’s reputation as an artist of international standing. The seeming insubstantiality of the piece was widely understood and appreciated as a commentary on the loss of the West of Scotland’s traditional heavy industries. Wyllie’s subsequent Viking funeral for the piece was typical of his bravura theatricality but did nothing to diminish the standing of a work whose public impact has never since been equalled.