IMMA is delighted to announce today (5 July 2017) three new Freud Project Residencies which have been awarded as the result of a recent Open Call. We look forward to working with artists Laura Fitzgerald and Richard John Jones and a collaborative project with artist Bridget O’Gorman and writer and researcher Sue Rainsford. Each project has its own unique perspective on Lucian Freud and his work and we are excited by the potential in each selected proposal.

Launched in October 2016, the IMMA Collection: Freud Project, 2016 – 2021 centres around a significant five-year loan of 50 works by one of the greatest realist painters of the 20th century, Lucian Freud (1922-2011). Renowned for his portrayal of the human form, Freud is best known for his intimate, honest, often visceral portraits. The works, on loan from private collections, are presented in a dedicated Freud Centre in IMMA’s Garden Galleries for five years. With this extraordinary resource IMMA is creating a centre for Freud research with a programme of special exhibitions, education partnerships, symposia and research that will maximise this important opportunity for schools, third level students, artists and audiences all over Ireland and beyond.

A key element in this exploration is engagement with contemporary artists and art practitioners in response to Freud, revealing exciting new perspectives on this major artist today. IMMA are particularly interested in supporting process-based research though the IMMA Residency Programme. Earlier this year IMMA invited interested candidates to propose contexts and research within their own practice which would explore, contest, expand, complement or radicalise the resonance and impact of the work on show in the Freud Centre. Through this opportunity IMMA wants to support the development of studio practice and artistic production to open new possibilities around the work, and to explore with residents new ways of working with IMMA’s many audiences.

IMMA Head of Collections Christina Kennedy, a selection panellist, commented; “Through the Freud Open Call the panel were delighted to select such a diversity of contemporary practices responding to Freud, finding routes to new ideas through process led research, challenging the established to discover changes in society’s values that shift or remain pertinent through the passage of time. We look forward to the benefit of bringing these new perspectives to IMMA through the residency programme”.

Each of the selected projects are independent of each other however there will almost certainly be programming overlaps as they develop over the coming months. Freud Project Residencies will commence in August 2017 and will run through to the early part of 2018. More public events and opportunities to engage with these projects, and their process, will be announced on IMMA’s website and social media as they are scheduled.

Through a humorous lens, Laura Fitzgerald points to problematic and absurd aspects within complex political and personal situations. Her work reveals both the difficulty of proposing a solution and is yet interested and driven by a multiplicity of options or proposals for new imaginative states. Fitzgerald is curious about the similarities drawn through the act of portraiture, whether of landscape or of a person, and how these attempts at portraiture often penetrate the inner world of oneself, the artist.

Richard John Jones’ practice is concerned with works or histories that have been erased, forgotten or marginalised and what this can tell us more broadly about visibility and representation. Jones works through textiles and domestic craft techniques alongside performance, video and installation. Whilst on the Freud residency Jones is looking to produce a series of portraits in the widest possible sense, pushing the boundaries of materials and technology, looking at the portrayal of opposite or similar sexes,  the ethics of distance, how this connects with contemporary society, surveillance, and digital and AI developments.

Bridget O’Gorman is a visual artist whose work highlights destabilised or haptic deterioration within the lives of objects. Working with video, the sculptural object and live events, her enquiries focus on methods of connecting the corporeal or visceral to the inanimate to inform a dialogue around contemporary experiences of uncertainty. Sue Rainsford is a writer and researcher, her practice is concerned with hybrid texts and radical experience, as well as the intersection between visual and literary arts practices. The experimental collaboration which is O’Gorman and Rainsford will explore themes of flesh, texture and speech with an emphasis on gender, probing an antidote to vapid depictions of flawless perfection in contemporary world.

Additional Notes for Editors

 

IMMA has secured a significant five-year loan of 50 works by one of the greatest realist painters of the 20th century, Lucian Freud (1922-2011). Renowned for his portrayal of the human form, Freud is best known for his intimate, honest, often visceral portraits. Working only from life Freud’s studio was intensely private and he mainly worked with those he was close to, often asking subjects to sit for hundreds of hours over multiple sittings to better capture the essence of their personality.

IMMA Collection: Freud Project features a selection of 30 of the artist’s finest paintings, and 20 works on paper. The works, mainly dating from 1970 onwards, explore several of the artist’s key themes such as Portraiture; Self Portraiture; Still-life; Animals and Nature; works that reflect his interest in the people and the natural world.

During this unique five-year project IMMA will present a series of different and exclusive Lucian Freud related exhibitions, with a new programme of events and openings each year.  All 50 works will be on display across this first year. Subsequent exhibitions will include works and new commissions by other modern and contemporary artists in response to Freud, and will reveal exciting new perspectives on this major artist today.

The works, on loan from private collections, are presented in a dedicated Freud Centre in IMMA’s Garden Galleries. With this extraordinary resource IMMA is creating a centre for Freud research with a programme of special exhibitions, education partnerships, symposia and research that will maximise this important opportunity for schools, third level students, artists and audiences all over Ireland and beyond.

Admission for this exhibition is €8/5 (concession) with free admission for IMMA Members, full-time students and under 18’s. There will be free admission for all every Tuesday.  Monies raised through admission charges will directly contribute to the care and development of the IMMA Collection.

The exhibition is supported by the Freud Circle – BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse – and those donors who wish to remain anonymous.

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin to Ernst, the architect son of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his wife Lucie Brasch. In 1933, age ten, Freud fled with his family to England, ahead of the rise of Nazism. The family settled in London where Freud lived for the rest of his life.

Freud studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London and Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. His first solo exhibition, at the Lefevre Gallery received critical acclaim in 1944, followed by a number of hallucinatory, finely-painted portraits that marked him as an artist to watch.  Freud’s adherence to realism and focus on the human figure, when abstraction and other progressive forms of practice were more prolific, moved him in and out of the spotlight until the 1980’s when renewed international interest in painting and figuration gave his work a new significance. Since then Freud has become one of the best-known and most highly-regarded British artists of the 20th century. He was awarded the Companion of Honour and the Order of Merit. Major retrospectives of his work were held in Tate Britain, 2002, IMMA 2007, MOMA, 2008 and the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2012.

Freud visited Dublin and Connemara in Ireland in the late 1940s, partly on a pilgrimage to Jack B. Yeats whom he considered the greatest living painter and later when married to Caroline Blackwood of the Guinness family. From the 1950s he connected with Irish artists such as Patrick Swift whose Dublin studio he used and Edward McGuire whose tutor he was at the Slade Art School, as well as the literary circle of Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Brendan Behan, Anthony Cronin and their Soho milieu.  An in depth account of Freud and Ireland will be explored through the Freud Project, including his close links with the other great figurative painter of the 20th century, Irish-born and London-based, Francis Bacon – his friend, mentor and great rival of thirty years and whose studio you can visit in Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane.