The exhibition featuring the works of Charles Rennie Mackintosh was jointly organised by the International Cultural Centre and the Glasgow School of Art – a place of special significance as it remains one of the most recognised symbols of Mackintosh’s oeuvre.

The Scotland-based artist (an architect, interiors and function art designer), together with Herbert MacNair and the two sisters, Margaret and Frances Macdonald, comprised the artistic group known as “The Four”. Their aesthetics was commonly referred to as the Glasgow style. Mackintosh’s work associated with the art nouveau style revealed the symptoms of some later phenomena such as Bauhaus and De Stijl.

Be it the new edifice of the Glasgow School of Art, Hill House in Helensburgh, or the Tea Rooms designed for Catherine Cranston, his projects are deprived of flamboyant ornamentation. Instead, they are characterised by simplicity, clarity and tendency towards geometrical solutions. Though underappreciated in his own country, Mackintosh enjoyed enormous popularity in continental Europe and his oeuvre influenced the Vienna artistic milieu.

Today any visitor to Glasgow can rest body and soul in Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms and for a few pence drink tea, have breakfast and dream that he is in fairy land. [Hermann Muthesius on Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s interiors]