In 2009 Sally McGuire, the wife of the artist Edward McGuire (1932-1986), donated 130 key items from the studio contents of Edward McGuire to the National Collection at IMMA. Reminiscent of a Renaissance Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, McGuire’s studio objects reflect an esoteric interest in natural history such as the glass-cased and mounted specimens of taxidermied birds, shells, a sheep’s skull, a mummified cat. His method was organised and scientific: sitters recall a sense of the laboratory as the artist regarded them from beneath his green visor.

In considering how to curate these biographical objects and what it might mean to exhibit them alongside McGuire’s paintings and to avoid a detached, museological approach, IMMA invited Nick Miller to be the eyes and sensibility that respond to the older artist’s studio and practice, to create a ‘portrait’ of McGuire in absentia.

Miller has always held the older artist in high esteem. As part of the process, earlier this year Miller spent some weeks in residency in an IMMA studio, amid a selection of McGuire’s studio items. A number of McGuire’s former sitters were invited to sit for a ‘meeting’ as Miller terms it, with ‘their recollections of McGuire as a starting point for a connection’. Miller worked on his still life paintings while listening to McGuire’s jazz collection.

Alongside contents from the Edward McGuire studio this exhibition includes a number of portraits, by both artists, of sitters such as Anthony Cronin, Garech de Brún and Tresa Browne, for example. Other sitters included Wanda Ryan – Smolin who sat for McGuire when she was a child, his first official commission and Paul Durcan who memorialised McGuire in a poem Portrait of the Painter as a creature of Paintstaking Courtesy.