The influence of Bellany, in particular, together with that of Moffat as a teacher at Glasgow School of Art, was the main immediate factor behind the emergence during the 1980s of the so-called ‘new Glasgow Boys’, although their Scottish lineage can readily be traced further back. A group of young painters which included Steven Campbell (b.1956), Ken Currie (b.1960), Peter Howson (b.1958), Adrian Wiszniewski (b.1958) and Stephen Conroy (b.1964), they turned their backs decisively on the minimalism, abstraction and obscurantism that were then the prevailing fashion in favour of a new take on pictorialism, narrative, social realism, history painting and the human figure.

They along with around a dozen contemporaries seized the Scottish cultural headlines in a landmark exhibition, The Vigorous Imagination, mounted by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Urgent political convictions underlay Currie’s and Howson’s work of this period, as they grappled with the implications of post-industrialism for the west of Scotland male psyche, attempting to reconcile the individualised with the emblematic. Campbell’s, Conroy’s and Wiszniewski’s approach is cooler, more oblique and seemingly more casual in their deployment of allusion, ironic nostalgia and internal painterly dynamics.

Although The Vigorous Imagination was reported primarily as striking a blow on behalf of painting, in an increasingly conceptualist world, and as dominated by Glaswegians, it also featured a sculptural installation by the Fife-born artist David Mach, early photographic wizardry from Calum Colvin – like Mach, a Dundee graduate - and textile work from multi-disciplinarian Sam Ainslie, who trained in Newcastle and Edinburgh. Mach and Colvin have each developed strikingly individual – and highly contrasting – methodologies, which have won them sustained popularity and critical praise.

Mach is best known for his large-scale, temporary public constructions made from mundane consumer objects - life-size steam trains from bricks, nuclear submarines from tyres, giant classical pillars from newspapers – which adroitly fuse monumental grandeur, millennial wryness and terse polemic. Colvin, for his part, has pioneered an increasingly rich, complex and all-encompassing approach to photography, taking in elements of collage, installation, painting, Pop Art and digital manipulation . Ainslie, meanwhile, just a year on from The Vigorous Imagination, became a co-founder of the now-celebrated Master of Fine Art programme at Glasgow School of Art, where she has been course director since 1990.

There is a direct line to be drawn between Mach and the brilliantly idiosyncratic George Wyllie (b.1921), a former engineer and customs officer on Clydeside whose art – for which he coined the term ‘Scul?ture’ - was profoundly influenced by the ‘assemblages’ and ‘happenings’ of Joseph Beuys, with whom he worked when Beuys visited Scotland in 1981. Wyllie’s most famous creation was his 80-foot Paper Boat of 1989, which he sailed from Glasgow firstly to London, in symbolic protest at the economic and social destruction wrought by Margaret Thatcher’s government. It then journeyed on to New York, epicentre of global capitalism, carrying a copy of A Theory of Moral Sentiment, by the Scottish Enlightenment economist Adam Smith.

Straw Locomotive, two years earlier, was another eponymous full-size replica, this time suspended from a shipyard crane over the river and ceremoniously burnt, in an angrily poetic, atavistic elegy for Glasgow’s industrial heart. On a smaller scale, Wyllie’s ongoing series of Bicycles – fashioned, for instance, out of tweed - form a no less artful representation of meditations on balance, while paying homage to Scottish traditions of craft and design (the bicycle, after all, having been invented by a Scotsman, Kirkpatrick MacMillan, in 1840). In both respects, they hark back once again to the holistic social and artistic philosophy of Patrick Geddes, whose underlying influence has been so persistent throughout the modern history of Scottish art.

Outnumbered by painters as they might have seemed during the 1980s, by the following decade Mach and Wyllie – and with Wyllie the legacy of Beuys - were recast as front-runners in a new Scottish conceptual wave, in which installation and video art became the preferred media for many artists. A sense of rebellion, or resistance, both linked and helped to motivate the diverse practice of this younger generation, in that the same cultural and public institutions which had embraced the new Glasgow Boys tended to view their non-representational successors with suspicion.

Led by the example of theTransmission Gallery, which had been founded in 1983, this helped accelerate the growth in artist-led exhibiting and collaborative organisation that so distinctively underpins the city’s art scene. According to Germany’s Institute for Critical Curating, ‘since the early 1990s [Glasgow] has been the prototype for all collectively-networked art circles.’

Another key factor in these developments was the founding in 1986 of the Environmental Art department at Glasgow School of Art, from which many of Scotland’s current visual stars have since emerged. Its course objectives are to address and explore the contextual basis of art – physical, historical, philosophical, functional - as a major integral part of creating work. This involves all students undertaking their own public art projects, from first conception to execution, a test as much of their ability to negotiate challenges like planning authorities, community opposition, project management and health and safety regulations, as it is of their originality of vision. The aim is to foster a different, more holistic type of creativity from that required by studio- and gallery-based work – and one which demands, centrally, close and active engagement with the physical and human fabric in which the artwork is sited, hence revealing an underlying ideological affinity with the social engagement of Currie, Howson et al, despite their radical disparity of method.

While lending a new clarity of framework or focus to the profound and sometimes chaos-inducing freedoms offered by contemporary conceptual art, the environmental art model simultaneously expands the realms of possibility yet further. As well as the more conventional disciplines like painting, drawing, photography, printing, sculpture and their modern descendants, many of today’s artists mix and match from a seemingly endless range of technical and referential approaches. Recent exhibitions of contemporary Scottish work have, for instance, incorporated aspects of glass-blowing, statistical surveys, carpentry, electron microscopy, forensic analysis, cartoons, live performance, audio technology, weaving, poetry and entomology.

An early statement of intent by Environmental Art students and graduates, in association with Transmission, was the 1991 Windfall exhibition in Glasgow, housed in the former Seamen’s Mission by the Clyde, which featured 26 artists from Scotland and five other European countries. The event’s self-curating ethos suggested simply that the contributors each responded in some way to the part of the building they chose to work in. Its success drew a number of international dealers and curators to check out the new Scottish scene, via early work by such now-stellar names as Claire Barclay, Julie Roberts, Nathan Coley and Martin Boyce, and helped attract the attention of other opinion-forming Glasgow venues, notably the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) and Tramway.

Another influential show was Tramway’s Trust, co-curated in 1995 by the artists Douglas Gordon, Christine Borland, Roderick Buchanan and Jacqueline Donachie, with Tramway director Charles Esche and curator Katrina Brown. It aimed for those same contextualist ideals in its very process, introducing this new wave of ideas, methods and media, with Scottish artists placed alongside their international role-models and contemporaries, to a still-sceptical Glasgow and Scottish audience. The media and public debate sparked by Trust in turn led to a number of extra discussion forums and social events, a dynamic exchange very much in keeping with environmental art goals.

Tramway is a hugely symbolic building within Glasgow’s cultural landscape. Built in 1893 as the main terminus, depot and factory for the city’s bustling tram network, it is now one of the biggest, most unusual, and most versatile contemporary arts spaces in the world. It thus literally embodies Glasgow’s bootstraps-style regeneration since the mid-1980s, harnessing the energies of arts and entertainment as an alternative to those once proudly derived from the area’s now-demolished industries. After some twenty years in its second incarnation as the Museum of Transport, the building was slated for demolition before it was chosen as the only UK venue capable of staging Peter Brook’s momentous production The Mahabharata, in 1988. The following year, Andy Goldsworthy – the UK’s environmental artist par excellence – mounted his celebrated Snowballs in Summer project in the huge main Tramway space, helping pave the way for the building’s potential to be fully realised, both during and since Glasgow’s pivotal year as European City of Culture in 1990.

The seismic impact of 1990 was felt significantly in the visual arts field, with Tramway and other galleries taking the opportunity to exhibit probably a wider range of international contemporary art – as well as home-grown talent – than the city had even seen in such concentration, helping to develop a new audience for such work, as well as exposing Scottish artists to new ideas and influences. Having mounted a major group exhibition of Italian artists, Temperamenti, and a solo show by David Mach in 1990, for instance, the Tramway has gone on to showcase such overseas stars as Thomas Hirschhorn, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Raymond Pettibon, João Penalva and Pipilotti Rist, alongside Scottish-sourced exhibitions by Janice McNab, Ilana Halperin, Alan Michael, Sally Osborn, Carol Rhodes, David Sherry, Joanne Tatham and the Henry VIII’s Wives collective.

The opening of Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in 1996 was also highly illustrative in its way. Born of and into heated controversy, the new gallery came to be seen as a touchstone of municipal and cultural rivalries between Glasgow and Edinburgh, as well as in the debate between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, not least in the context of then-current developments on the Scottish art scene.

Leaving aside the finer points of such arguments, it’s another clear sign of strength in the Scottish art world that debates over its direction, its funding and its responsibilities attract such consistently lively attention, such widespread expression of so many passionately held views among the general public as well as culture and media professionals.

And meanwhile the last decade has seen a steady succession of Scottish, Scottish-based and Scottish-trained artists – many but by no means all Environmental Art graduates; some of them even figurative painters – ascending the international career ladder. Prominent among heir number are the 1996 Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon, Becks Futures winners Roderick Buchanan, Toby Paterson, Rosalind Nashashibi, Toby Paterson and Hayley Tompkins, together with Christine Borland, Simon Starling, Alison Watt, Jenny Saville, Callum Innes, Ross Sinclair and Jim Lambie. The introduction of a dedicated Scottish Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale was hailed as due recognition for Scottish art at the highest international level, that inaugural appearance being headlined by Lambie, Starling and Claire Barclay, together with more than twenty other artists who participated in the accompanying Zenomap project. The following year, Jason E. Bowman and Rachel Bradley were announced as curators for the 2005 project.

In the fast-moving world of contemporary art, though, ten years is easily long enough for the next new wave to start snapping at the ankles of those whom success is deemed to have turned into the latest establishment. Building on the curatorial innovations pioneered by Glasgow’s gallery triumvirate of Transmission, Tramway and CCA, latterly bolstered by the opening of Dundee Contemporary Arts in 1999, the leading edge of contemporary art activity in Scotland has now extended to other, smaller, often artist-run spaces and groupings such as Edinburgh's Collective Gallery, Doggerfisher and the Embassy, Glasgow's Modern Institute, Project Room, and Intermedia, and Stirling's Changing Room. Of the highly diverse artists involved in this circuit, leading names include David Sherry, Lucy Skaer, Kirsty Whiten and Blair Thomson.