Dean Gallery Shop

I have to agree with Sarah-​Jane, this little gallery shop is pretty good at making the most of its small space. The Dean Gallery is one of my favourite in Edinburgh and I like looking around this shop after a visit.
The shop has most of the expected gallery gifts. You will find postcards and posters mostly relating to gallery art and current exhibition. You can also purchase expensive art books. That’s the one problem with shops like this, unless your sticking to a postcard of pencil, it can get a little pricey.
Yet this is still a nice shop and if for nothing else, it suits students like me for browsing around and getting a little artistic inspiration. I should also add that the staff are particularly smiley and friendly.

I like this shop by virtue of its association to the Dean Gallery, which is by far my favourite in Edinburgh. As far as gallery shops go, it’s pretty standard. They sell posters, postcards, as well as books of and about art (of course). As in any gallery shop, things are more on the pricey side than otherwise, though I’ve always been of the opinion that a postcard is just as good, if not better than getting a whole book. More compact, and you can post them real cheap.
I have two objections to this place: one of them is the aforementioned price. The second is the fact that when I went to the Diane Arbus exhibition, I ran expectantly to the shop in the hope that there would be postcards of Diane Arbus’ photos, but there were none. I’m a photo-​postcard addict, so when I found out there were none there, I was really disappointed. But otherwise, pretty good, pretty standard art gallery shop.

It might be small but the staff at the Dean Gallery still manage to cram a lot of good stuff into their shop. Alongside posters and prints from recent exhibitions, they have a cracking selection of books by contemporary photographers and artists working in different mediums from film and video to painting, sketches and performance. Look closely and you’ll find weighty tomes on Jenny Holzer, Sam Taylor Wood and Tracey Emin between books on Frieda Kahlo and Man Ray.
As the current exhibition is Another World: Dali, Magrite, Miro and The Surrealists, they also have a selection of prints, cards and books on both Surrealism and Dadaism.