FOR A few months every summer Mount Stuart, on the Isle of Bute, one of Scotland's grandest private houses, plays host to a guest from the contemporary art world. It's a happy collision of the old and the new, and a reminder that for all its ancient
pedigree, the ancestral home of the Marquess of Bute was once a shiny new proposition itself.
When the old house was destroyed by fire in 1877 the 3rd Marquess embarked on a building project that has really never ended. The current Mount Stuart is a neo-gothic pile, endlessly tweaked and styled, which also incorporates the white heat (and light) of new technology. The house has an ancient-feeling chapel and a grand marble hall with a painted night sky charting the constellations of the ecliptic. Its decorative schemes celebrate astrology and ancient wisdom.
But Mount Stuart also had the first heated indoor pool in the country and was the first home with electricity in Scotland. Bute was reputed to the richest man of his age and if he devoted himself to the arts and increasingly esoteric spiritual quests, he never stinted on gadgets and wizardry.
This year, on one of those blustery west coast days which seem to promise rain but instead deliver unexpected sunshine, the German artist Katja Strunz launched her exhibition The Great Bear, which unusually is sited in Mount Stuart's slick modern visitor centre rather than the historic house.
Initially Strunz might seem like an odd choice for a slot that has traditionally been filled by artists who respond to the rich and layered history of the site. Her art is a stripped down, low-key affair, crafting deceptively simple geometric forms from metal or wood and making modest works on paper that refer to high utopian points of art history such as Russian Constructivism or the minimalist sculpture of the 1960s.
Strunz lives in Berlin, has shown in Scotland before at Edinburgh doggerfisher and the Modern Institute in Glasgow, and is in this year's Carnegie International. She trained as a painter, but it is for her wall-mounted sculptures, folded forms like awkward origami, that she is best known.
Her show is at first a slight and slender thing. An array of modest sculptures crafted from found and crafted objects to look like a fleet of open parasols or a little colony of mushrooms springing forth both in the cool white gallery space and among the plants visible through the glass outside.
Upturned serving dishes, enamelled lampshades and the rusty bases of oil drums and tanks are perched on slender stems. There's a folded copper flower shape, a brass platter, even a music stand upturned to form an umbrella. On reflection, however, this little metal garden is home to more complex ideas. On the wall Strunz has carefully placed a striking found photograph in a frame. It is from Nantes, dated 17.03. 1929 and shows a group of young people and children decked out in thick leafy camouflage.
Their faces oddly masked, they are holding a handwritten banner bearing the words je meurs ou m'attache: I will die where I take root. It is a proverb closely associated with the image of ivy and a celebration of the often parasitical strength of nature, it's a simple refusal to budge, but also a rallying call for the French resistance to Germany, commonly used during the Franco-Prussian War and again in the First World War.
This curious little patriotic pageant leads us to see Strunz's sculpture as a metaphor for time, an examination of the persistence of ideas and artistic language, the simple forms she creates having pushed up like so many mushrooms in different ages.
The entire installation is arranged to echo the shape of the constellation the Great Bear, and through this second metaphor we see the works link both to the schemes of the historic house and to the question of history itself.
The theorist Walter Benjamin urged historians to think not in straight lines but in constellations, events and ideas that might cluster together rather than simply rise and decline. Looked at this way, they might be seen to form important patterns, even though like distant stars visible together in the night sky, they may have actually have been born in vastly different historical eras.
At Mount Stuart the radically different timescales of ancient thinking such as starlight and electric lamp shine side by side. If you are prepared to stick with it, Strunz's exhibition, despite its apparently underwhelming appearance, casts a further glow.
• Until 30 September,
www.mountstuart.com