"IN TIME' is the theme for the 200th RSA Annual exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA).

The RSA was founded by a group of 11 artists and architects on the 27th May 1826. This was the first formal meeting and was held in the Stewart’s Rooms at Waterloo Bridge, to the east of its current location at the base of the Mound in the centre of Princes Street in Edinburgh.

The central cultural and architectural locus is also significant geologically in that the RSA building itself stands close to an extinct volcanic. This geological biography of substrate could be understood in parallel with the dynamic foundation of the RSA and how the aims and principles are embedded in its constitution and interpreted by the careful governance of RSA members.

The RSA’s physical foundation evokes geological time and it is this underlying process of material and deep time transformation which is at the heart of what the curator Annie Cattrell wants to emphasise during and for the convening of the ‘IN TIME ‘RSA 2026 Bicentennial Annual.

This significant year for the RSA also coincides with the tricentenary of the birth of locally born James Hutton (1726-1797) the ‘father of modern geology’. Hutton wrote the ‘Theory of the Earth’ (published in1788) in which he proposed the term Unconformity. This explained his astute observations of rock cycles which ultimately proved that the Earth was considerably older than it was understood to be at that time.

Hutton noted at Glen Tilt: ‘that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’.

This exhibition will be open to the public from 9.5.26 until 14.6.26.

LGT Wealth Management have sponsoring the 200th RSA Annual Exhibition and exhibition catalogue, and Culture & Business Scotland have also sponsored the exhibition catalogue.