A major mid-career retrospective of the work of leading Irish artist Alice Maher opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s temporary exhibition spaces in Earlsfort Terrace on Saturday 6 October 2012. Becoming charts the development of Maher’s practice over 25 years, from her early drawings, paintings and sculptural works, to a new film work specially commissioned by IMMA for the exhibition. The title points to the evolutionary processes which are at the heart of many of Maher’s individual works and which inform her entire practice. The layered history of the Earlsfort Terrace building, as a university and a former seat of government, and its labyrinthine nature have also influenced the presentation of the exhibition, with works from different periods occupying the same spaces, creating new associations and illuminating recurring themes.

Becoming illustrates the particular philosophical arena in which Maher places her oeuvre, where things are constantly in flux or are caught at a moment of metamorphosis. Through painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and video and digital technology, she uncovers ever more complex readings of the world around and within us. The exhibition includes two new works: Cassandra’s Necklace (2012), a major film work inspired by a script sent to the artist by the award-winning Irish writer Anne Enright and a site-specific installation L’Université (2012), which addresses the history of Earlsfort Terrace as a place of learning. Cell, Maher’s iconic ball of thorns first shown in Kilmainham Jail in 1991, is being re-staged. 

One of Maher’s most enduring devices, the shifting of scale can be seen in her well-known early piece, Familiar (1994), which is part of IMMA’s Collection. In it we see a large red acrylic painting alongside a bolt of flax. In the centre of the painting the figure of small girl floats, like the Virgin being assumed into Heaven, with her hair swirling up above her head. The title alone brings with it a host of associations: it contains the word ‘femme’, the French for woman; it can describe the witch’s ‘familiar’; ‘familiar’ as it relates to the family; something easily recognisable; and also ‘over-familiar’ – impertinent or too intimate. Flax itself is a trope for inbetweenness, it is halfway between plant and linen, in a state of transformation between nature and culture.

The ingenious excavation of art history to uncover contemporary resonances is another recurring feature of Maher’s work. Her 2007 Bestiary series of drawings is based on a careful study of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510). One of these, The Coral Tent, shows the silhouette of a medieval-style tent under which four feet can be seen. Close examination of Bosch’s painting reveals the source, picked out in red at the centre of the painting. The scaling-up of such a detail creates a kind of artistic collaboration across five centuries. Maher’s major Ombre series (1997), examines among other histories, the story of Mary Magdalene who was miraculously covered by her hair when she cast off her rich clothing; Silvestro dei Gherarducci’s Assumption of Mary Magdalene (1380s) in the National Gallery of Ireland forming a historical antecedent for Maher’s iconic drawings.

Another defining feature of Maher’s work is her remarkably diverse choice of media including snail shells in The Four Directions (2004-05) and nettles in Nettle Coat (1996). Her interest in organic raw materials often sends her work into the realm of the ‘un-collectable’ or, perhaps, the ‘unbecoming’. Her organic works in particular have changed dramatically from when they were first exhibited, making visible processes of decay and putrefaction like a contemporary memento mori, recording the passage of time and repudiating the notion of a permanent artwork. Likewise, her animated 2009 drawings, such as Flora and The Double, each document an unrelenting process of erasure, as elegant and covetable drawings are rubbed-out and the detritus swept onto the studio floor, accompanied by the purposeful humming of the artist. Writing in the exhibition catalogue the curator of the exhibition Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions at IMMA, says: “Many of the themes in Maher’s work have been unbecoming as she questions received notions around art, gender, sex, and social mores. She has sought out lowly objects and abject creatures from the natural world, and made carriers of meaning of them on the fault-line between nature and culture. Simple materials are transformed by collecting a multiplicity of them together and exploding their scale. A Janus-faced Cassandra, Maher articulates the future while mining the past for its connective tissue.”

Alice Maher has had a long association with IMMA. In 1993, Keep (1992) featured in From Beyond the Pale, one of IMMA’s most important early exhibition, and her work was to reappear regularly in exhibitions such as Distant Relations, (1994); The Glen Dimplex Artists Awards, (1995); Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political, (1998); Shifting Ground: Fifty Years of Irish Art (2000); Tír na nÓg, (2004); and Altered Images, (2009). She has an equally strong presence in IMMA’s Collection, including the small, delicate organic work, Berry Dress (1994); the animated drawing, The Music of Things (2009); and the recent commission Cassandra’s Necklace (2012) all of which form part of the current exhibition. Becoming continues a long-running strand of programming at IMMA which presents mid-career retrospectives of the work of Irish artists at a point when the publication of a monograph on their practice is useful and timely. In the past decade this has included Gerard Byrne, Anne Tallentire, William McKeown, Dorothy Cross, and Willie Doherty.

Born in 1956, Alice Maher studied at the University of Limerick and the Crawford College of Art, Cork. She was awarded a Master’s degree in Fine Art from the University of Ulster and shortly after a Fulbright Scholarship to San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited widely in Ireland, England and the United States, and represented Ireland in the 22nd São Paolo Bienal. In 2008, the David Nolan Gallery in New York hosted a solo exhibition of new drawings and sculptures titled Hypnerotomachia. In 2007, a large survey show of her work, Natural Artifice, was held at the Brighton and Hove Museums. Also in that year she completed a major drawing installation, The Night Garden, for the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. Earlier exhibitions include: Orsola, an installation at the Oratorio di San Lodovico, Venice, 2006; Rood at the Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, 2005; Portraits at Purdy Hicks Gallery, London, 2003; Gorget at the David Nolan Gallery, New York, 2000; Knot at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin, 1999; Swimmers at Le Credac Centre d’Art, Ivry-sur-Seine, 1996; and Familiar at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 1994. Maher’s work can be seen in significant international collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the British Museum, London; the Hammond Museum, Los Angeles; and the Pompidou centre, Paris.

The exhibition is curated by Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA.

Winter Lecture 2012
Thursday 13 December, 6.00pm, Lecture Room, IMMA @ NCH, Earlsfort Terrace
As part of the IMMA established Winter Lectures series which had featured prominent Irish and  international artists, Alice Maher discusses with Sean Kissane (Curator, Exhibitions, IMMA).  Maher’s ongoing artistic practice and mid-career retrospective titled Becoming, presented in the IMMA temporary galleries at the National Concert Hall at Earlsfort Terrace. (Please note this event takes place in the Lecture Room at the National Concert Hall at Earlsfort Terrace.)

Alice Maher is represented by the Green on Red Gallery Dublin, Purdy Hicks Gallery London and David Nolan Gallery New York.

A fully-illustrated catalogue, published by IMMA and distributed by D.A.P. New York, will accompany the exhibition, with texts by Dr Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain; Booker Prize-winning author, Anne Enright; Dr Ed Krčma, Lecturer Modern and Contemporary Art, UCC; Dr David Lloyd, Professor of English at the University of Southern California; Dr Catherine Morris, Cultural Coordinator, Trinity College Dublin and National Library of Ireland; and curator of the exhibition Seán Kissane. Price €30.00.

To celebrate the opening of Alice Maher: Becoming IMMA is producing a Limited Edition by Alice Maher. Price €25.00 (unframed). To order email: [email protected], tel: 01 6129951.

The exhibition is supported by THE IRISH TIMES.

Becoming continues until 3 February 2013. Admission is free.

Opening hours:
Tuesday: 10am – 5.30pm
Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Thursday: 10.00am – 7.00pm
Friday and Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sunday and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
Monday: Closed

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900, Email: [email protected]

26 September 2012

Captivating Brightness, an exhibition from the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art celebrating the 35th anniversary of Clifden Arts Festival, opens to the public on Thursday 20 September 2012. The title, Captivating Brightness, taken from the poem Ballynahinch Lake by Seamus Heaney, recognises the strong multi-disciplinary approach of the festival. The exhibition brings together some 20 works that enter the heart of the West through an exploration of major Irish and international artists all of whom have either responded directly to or have strong links with Connemara. Presenting a selection of historical works by artists such as Jack B Yeats, Paul Henry and Mainie Jellett, alongside contemporary artists such as Richard Long, Dorothy Cross and Michael Craig-Martin, further highlight the enduring ability of the West of Ireland to excite and captivate the imagination of the artist.

Commenting on the exhibition, Desmond Lally, Arts Committee, Clifden Community Arts Festival, said: “It is to IMMA’s credit that they have allowed these works to breathe in the Connemara air and travel west to Clifden. It demonstrates the inclusive nature of this institution and its openness to giving art back to the people. Some of the works in this exhibition will be familiar and accessible, others will be challenging and new but all hold a place in our national artistic heritage and for the first time are gathered together outside Dublin in a place that played a part in their creation”.

Paul Henry has been credited with the creation of a particular notion of Irish identity in the 20th-century, based on the landscape and lifestyle of the West of Ireland. The treatment of light, the expansive sky and cloud formations together with a sense of stillness are typical features of his art. In Barrie Cooke’s painting Megaceros Hibernicus, 1983, the elk emerges majestically from the gloomy bogalnd with its enromous antlers treated like massive antennae transmitting, as it were, a message from the past. Meanwhile in Camille Souter’s paintings even the most random of marks may indicate the direction of a plane or a bird in full flight. Her tones are muted and mysterious, and the layering of paint suggestes depth and hidden riches. 

Michael Craig-Martins, Film, 1963, was shot at Lettermore and Lettermullen in Connemara during the summer of 1962. During this period of his early career he had no experience of making films. There is a reflection of his basic approach to film making in his subject matter and his capturing of the emptiness and stillness of the countryside and landscape. Mundane and routine experiences of daily life in Connemara are evoked and celebrated. As with many of Dorothy Cross’s sculptures Saddle, 1993, is made up of found objects. While dealing with loaded issues of gender, Cross introduces an element of humour, and playfully attaches an up-turned cow’s udder to a horse-riding saddle, subverting its intended use in a surreal and physically arresting way. Richard Long’s art takes the form of walks, sculptures and mud works, making work in the landcape and of the landscape. Kilkenny Limestone Circle, 1991, was commissioned for the opening exhibition of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1991. Twenty years previously Long made a work Connemara Sculpture, 1971, documentation of which is part of the Tate Collection.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Clifden Arts Festival and the IMMA National Programme. IMMA’s National Programme is designed to create access opportunities to the visual arts in a variety of situations and locations in Ireland. Using the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and exhibitions generated by the Museum, the National Programme facilitates the creation of exhibitions and other projects for display in a range of venues around the country. The National Programme establishes the Museum as inclusive, accessible and national, de-centralising the Collection, and making it available to communities in their own localities, on their own terms, in venues with which the audience is comfortable and familiar.

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Price €2.

Captivating Brightness continues until 30 September 2012. Admission is Free.

Sponsored by Leader. Brochure kindly sponsored by Bobby and Truly Gilmore.

Captivating Brightness
Old Super Valu Building
Market Street
Clifden
Opening Hours: Open everyday from 11.30am to 5.00pm
T 091 442 730
E [email protected]
W www.clifdenartsweek.ie

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel : +353 1 612 9900, Email : [email protected] 

20 September 2012

All at Sea, an exhibition developed in partnership with the Art Committee at St Patrick’s University Hospital and the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s National Programme, opens to the public at the Art Gallery at St Patrick’s University Hospital, Dublin 8 on Thursday 30 August 2012. The Art Gallery at St Patrick’s University Hospital was opened in February 2011. It had been developed over the previous two years by the members of the Art Committee at SPUH. The purpose in developing the gallery was to facilitate the appreciation of visual art by the SPUH community, its staff, service users and visitors. Many great Irish artists have suffered from mental health and addiction problems during their lives, and yet they have risen above their difficulties to produce engaging, expressive and uplifting visual art that has enriched those who view it. The gallery has hosted exhibitions from leading Irish artists and galleries, from the permanent art collection at SPUH. This exhibition features leading Irish and British artists who have produced work with a nautical theme. The works are varied in influence ranging from literature and social/political to the pure depiction of nature and the landscape in which we live.

For centuries, the Irish landscape has been a source of inspiration for artists. One such artist is Barrie Cooke, whose fascination with Ireland has informed his work since moving here from England in 1954. Water and Rocks is part of an early series of studies of water from the 1960s focussing on lakes, streams and rivers, where drips and splashes of paint capture the surface of the water.  Cooke carries a sketchbook with him and constantly records scenes, which he will refer to in his paintings whether it is a rock, a stream or an animal. In the absence of a sketchbook he has stated that he traces the line on his hand with his finger, training the eye to capture and record the image through memorising the line, which later becomes the brushstroke.  Cooke’s other passion is fishing which is also a major influence on the work of John Bellany, one of the leading Scottish colourists. 

Bellany’s father and grandfather were both fishermen and growing up in the seaside town of Port Seton, and Avail demonstrates how the sea and the special light effects of a seaside environment influenced all of his paintings. His work is strongly autobiographical and narrative with strong, and often symbolic, references to the forces that dominated his life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Old Man and The Sea a series of 14 prints inspired by the Ernest Hemingway novel. The story tells of a fisherman who has caught nothing for weeks and then hooks the largest marlin he has ever seen and the struggles he has to land the fish. It can be seen as a parable of self-discovery. The gallerist Charles Booth-Clibborn invited Bellany to make a publication of his own choosing and this theme of a man being driven to the brink of death seemed apt as Bellany was seriously ill at the time. Bellany later commented that the ‘imagery itself just flowed like a tidal wave from start to finish; the passion in the work was magnified by the fact that I was struggling for my own life at the time.’

Like Bellany, William Crozier was also raised in a sea side town. Mediterranean Night is a wonderful example of his expressive painting and is the result of nine months that he spent in Malaga during 1963. This experience was to prove pivotal to Crozier‘s development as an artist, in particular his concerns with the landscape and the painting of the human figure. While based in West Cork he travelled extensively gaining inspiration and often treating the Mediterranean and Irish landscapes with the same vibrancy. This vibrant palette challenged the traditional muted shades employed by many artists while depicting Ireland.

Also an inveterate traveller, Michael Mulcahy, creates highly abstracted paintings of the many remote places he has lived through an intense use of abstract form and sizzling colour. The Navigator is at once figurative and autobiographical with a very sketchy, but accurate self-portrait of the artist in the title role. The title of the painting may be a play on the name given to the sixth-century Irish saint, Brendan The Navigator, so called because of the belief that he sailed the then uncharted waters of the Atlantic. As such, it recalls a world where man, nature and religion were more closely entwined. This story supports Mulcahy’s vision of the artist as the Shaman or healer who suffers for, and guides society to a better state. In The Navigator the grandeur of his task is suggested by the mysterious landscape and the fiery cave opening ahead contrasted with the ghostly pallor of the artist.

The use of the historical to convey a contemporary message is also deployed by Stephen McKenna in The Irish Coast. McKenna combines the classical and academic approaches to painting with the great, 17th century Dutch tradition of marine painting, to comment on a very contemporary, yet universal subject. Painted in 1981 during the height of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, The Irish Coast, brings together two different layers of conflict – a huge battle between the forces of nature, land, sea and sky – and the smaller, but no less dogged struggle, between two men on the jetty. In the immediate foreground a bird, like the narrator in a Greek tragedy, appears oblivious to their petty quarrel.

All at Sea is the result of a collaboration between St Patrick’s University Hospital and the IMMA National Programme. The National Programme is designed to promote the widest possible involvement with the Museum’s Collection and programmes, through creating access opportunities to the visual arts in a variety of situations and locations in Ireland. IMMA’s Collection is the focal point for each project. The National Programme is also committed to working with venues normally outside the scope of the contemporary art world. This core principle involves a process of encouraging people to view and enjoy ownership of their national collection, as held by IMMA, in their own locality and on their own terms.

All at Sea continues until 1 November 2012. Admission is free.

St Patrick’s University Hospital,
Steeven’s Lane,
Dublin 8
Email: [email protected]
Tel: 01 249 3200

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900, Email: [email protected]

27 August 2012

A unique film-based installation, Not I, directed by Neil Jordan and featuring the American actress Julianne Moore, opens to the public in the Irish Museum of Modern Arts temporary exhibition space in the Annex at the National Concert Hall site in Earlsfort Terrace on Friday 10 August 2012. The private view for Not I takes place on Thursday 9 August at 6.00pm, Neil Jordan will discuss his work in conversation with Dr Maeve Connolly before the opening at 5.00pm. As part of the ongoing IMMA Collection exhibition Time out of Mind, a film installation by Clodagh Emoe, Parodos, 2009, is presented in the entrance space of the Annex.

Based on Samuel Beckett’s play Not I, 1972, the film installation presents an actress seated on a stage with just her mouth visible. The mouth then delivers a long monologue, a constant stream of consciousness. Beckett’s friend, and one of his favourite interpreters of his work, Billie Whitelaw recalled her performance of the original work: “I defy anyone to come up with a more intense theatrical experience than Samuel Beckett’s Not I.  In otherwise complete darkness, a disembodied female mouth, known as Mouth, about eight feet above the stage, delivers a hyper-rapid stream of consciousness, a mixture of reminiscence and evasion, an existentially terrifying babble, hinting at deep trauma and extinction of self”.

Neil Jordan filmed his interpretation, which is 13 minutes in duration, from multiple angles in long, complete, 13-minute takes, since the piece only reveals itself through the pressure and physical demands of the uninterrupted performance of the text. Realising that each take had its own integrity Jordan developed his original film version into a multi-screen installation in which Moore’s mouth appears on six screens arranged in a circular configuration. For this installation while the artwork maintains its essentially circular configuration, the scale of the Annex, enables the use of especially large screens to create an enhanced, spatially immersive experience.

Jordan describes the process: “We had these enormous two-thousand foot film rolls and we filmed Julianne from different perspectives. They all were a different record of the same event…each angle was also the complete version…If  I could pull them all into one synch and present each angle, simultaneously, to the viewer, the multiplicity with which cinema presents the world would be accessible to the viewer in a unique manner.  Artists have long engaged themselves in a dialogue with the grammar and aesthetics of cinema, but the dialogue has rarely gone the other way. And Beckett’s luminous piece could be presented in a context that was neither cinema nor theatre, but something different”.

Maria Pramaggiore, Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, has written about how, more generally in his work, Neil Jordan uses citation and repetition, borrowing and recycling, to critically engage with postmodernism’s challenge to authenticity and originality, and to address the complex relationship between cultural boundaries, art and violence.  Jordan’s realisation of Not I acknowledges Beckett’s notion of a divided self.  It emphasizes the multiplicity and dividedness of postmodern identity and the capacity of cinema to represent that fragmentation. The individual cannot resolve herself into a single image or a valid sentence because the forces of instability are too great.

Not I is part of a unique and ambitious project, Beckett on Film, the brain-child of Michael Colgan, Director of the Gate Theatre, in which each of Becketts’s 19 plays were committed to film in 2000-2001. Each had a different film director, charged with adapting the demands of Beckett’s plays to film while adhering to his exacting stage directions. Not I was adapted for film by Neil Jordan as part of the project and donated to IMMA in 2001.

Born in 1950 in Sligo, Neil Jordan began his career as a writer. His first book of stories, Night In Tunisia (1976) won the Guardian Fiction prize.  Since then he has published five novels, The Past (1979), The Dream Of A Beast (1983), Sunrise With Seamonster (1994), and Shade (2005). His most recent novel, Mistaken was published in early 2011. Neil Jordan’s film career began with the role of creative consultant on John Boorman’s Excalibur in 1981. In 1982 Jordan wrote and directed his first feature film Angel. Since then he has written, directed and produced more than fifteen films, including Company of Wolves (1984), Mona Lisa (1986), The Crying Game (1992), Interview With The Vampire (1994), Michael Collins (1995), The Butcher Boy (1996), The End Of The Affair (1999), The Good Thief (2002), Breakfast On Pluto (2005) and Ondine (2009). His films have been honoured with numerous awards worldwide, including an Oscar, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, A Golden Lion from The Venice Film Festival and a Silver Bear from Berlin. He has been awarded five honorary doctorates and in 1996 he was appointed Officer of the French Ordres des Artes et des Lettres. Neil Jordan has more recently written, directed and produced the television series The Borgias, with Octagon Films, and Showtime.  His latest film Byzantium is currently in post-production.

As part of the ongoing IMMA Collection exhibition Time out of Mind, a film installation by Irish artist Clodagh Emoe, Parodos, 2009, is presented in the entrance space of the Annex. Emoe works within this transitional area of the building to create an atmospheric installation where sight, sound and heady scent combine. The term liminality plays a significant part in informing Emoe’s work. Liminality is derived from the Latin limen, meaning threshold, and foregrounds some kind of departure or crossing over of boundaries. Liminality is understood in ritual theory as a temporary symbolic suspension of normative structures that become mobilised through staging and forms of gathering or collective assembly. Emoe seeks to evoke a similar ‘threshold’ state in her work by using strategies associated with ritual. In aligning the space of art with the symbolic realm of ritual, Emoe’s works seek to prompt a consideration of art as a moment of encounter that, like ritual, can potentialise new forms of thought and experience.

Parodos is drawn from Emoe’s larger project Cult of Engagement in which Emoe deals with the dramatic tradition of Tragedy. Parodos is the term used for the entrance song of the chorus introducing the event that is about to take place. The processional chorus in Emoe’s film is, however, silent – an absence suggesting the role of the viewer within this dynamic to imagine what unfolds. Cult of Engagement, 2009, was commissioned by the Project Arts Centre and donated to IMMA in 2010.

In Conversation
At 5.00pm on Thursday 9 August Neil Jordan will discuss his work in conversation with Dr Maeve Connolly, in the Lecture Room at the NCH building. Admission is free but booking online is essential at www.imma.ie/talksandlectures

The film installations Not I and Parodos are co-curated by Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA, and Marguerite O’Molloy, Assistant Curator: Collections, IMMA.

Not I: An installation by Neil Jordan and Parodos by Clodagh Emoe continue until 9 September 2012. Admission is free. Late opening on Thursday evenings until 7pm.

Opening hours at the NCH:
Tuesday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Thursday: 10.00am – 7.00pm
Friday and Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sunday and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
Monday: Closed

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected]

23 July 2012

NEW FAITH LOVE SONG gets underway in Dublin City Centre and IMMA

A new project by leading Irish artist Garrett Phelan involving the bell-ringers of two cathedrals and a site-specific installation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art gets underway on Thursday 21 June 2012. NEW FAITH LOVE SONG begins with a live sound work with the bell-ringers of both Christ Church Cathedral and St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin city centre, which can be heard along Nicholas Street from 9.00 to 9.25pm on Thursday 21 June.  Following on from the performance, an exhibition of drawings, sculptures, animations and photographic documentation by Garrett Phelan will open at the New Galleries at IMMA on Friday 22 June.

NEW FAITH LOVE SONG is a striking embodiment of the modern day dilemma that many feel in relation to faith and the quest for an explanation for the mystery, marvel and miracle of the world around us.  As two of Dublin’s most iconic institutions, Phelan sees the cathedrals as transmitters pronouncing the arrival of ‘new faith’. The ambient sound work becomes a living sculpture intertwined with the existing fabric of Dublin’s frenetic soundscape. It is ephemeral, at times distinct and at times fused with the sounds of Dublin city, it reveals itself in different ways to the listener as they make their way along Nicholas Street, but at all times the conversation continues between these two great monuments. The bell towers broadcast this sound beyond its natural limits, staving off its own decay. The sound waves are projected into the ether, with the message that ‘All is OK’ – a modest yet reassuring affirmation of faith. 

Phelan views both the live sound work and the exhibition as one piece, the exhibition at IMMA acting as an artefact of the temporal live performance. Exhibited are drawings, sculptures, animations, and photographic documentation of the bell-ringers torsos, ropes and mechanisms within the bell towers. A number of the drawings are a meditation on the process of arranging the sound work; visually rendering the ropes, and notation. ¬The exhibition is an extension of Phelan’s sentiment of NEW FAITH LOVE SONG; a testimony and celebration of our very own mortality and our humanity in these uncertain times.

Born in 1965 in Dublin, Garrett Phelan has exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally, including the 11th Lyon Biennial, France; 4th Auckland Triennial, New Zealand; SMART Project Space, Amsterdam; ICA, London; The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Kunstverein, Hanover; Art Statements, Basel 39; Manifesta 5, San Sebastián, Spain; and previously at IMMA.

This exhibition was commissioned by former Director of IMMA Enrique Juncosa, and is co-curated by him and Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA.

This exhibition is accompanied by publication designed by Peter Maybury.

The St Patrick’s Cathedral Amateur Society of Change Ringers:
Web http://www.stpatrickscathedral.ie

The Christ Church Cathedral Bell Ringers:
Web http://www.christchurchdublin.ie  

Admission is free.

Public Tours
These are informal tours providing a general introduction to the exhibition on Tuesday 4.00pm, Wednesday 2.30pm, Thursday 4.00pm, Friday 2.30pm, Saturday 12 noon and 4.00pm, Sunday 2.30pm. Each tour lasts approximately 20 minutes. No booking required.

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sunday & Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
Monday: Closed

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected] 

15 June 2012

A striking film work inspired by the siege of Sarajevo will go on show as part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural programme in its temporary exhibition spaces at the National Concert Hall in Earlsfort Terrace on Thursday 31 May 2012. 1395 Days Without Red, by Albanian artist Anri Sala and American composer Ari Benjamin Meyers, will occupy the Annex at the NCH. The film takes as its subject the siege of Sarajevo, one of the most emblematic events of the violent breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The siege began 20 years ago this year, in 1992, and lasted for 1,395 days making it the longest siege in modern warfare.

During the siege thousands of citizens had to cross streets threatened by snipers everyday: to go to work, to buy food, to visit a relative. The citizens wore dark colours, for fear of alerting the snipers watching from the hills to their movements. In Sala’s film an elegant young woman makes her way through an empty city. At every crossing she stops, looks and listens. Should she wait or should she run? Should she wait for others or take the risk on her own? The city is Sarajevo, and the route the woman takes became known as Sniper Alley. Played by Spanish actress Maribel Verdú, she relives the trauma experienced by the citizens over almost four years. The 43-minute film is her individual journey through the collective memory of the city.

Throughout the siege, the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra continued to play. In Sala’s film, the orchestra rehearses Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique. The musicians stop and start, repeating different sections of the symphony, just as the woman stops and starts in her journey across the city. Hearing the music in her head, she finds the courage to carry on.

On Friday 22 June at the NCH the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, in a first collaboration with IMMA, will performing Tchaikovsky’s ravishingly beautiful Pathétique symphony, heard to such effect in Sala film. Being presented under the title Beauty and brilliance, the concert is conducted by Christian Kluxen and also includes Rachmaninov’s soaring Third Piano Concerto performed by prize-winning Korean pianist, Ann Soo-Jung. The concert, part of the NSO’s Summer Evening Concert Series, begins at 8.00pm and will be broadcast live on RTÉ lyric fm. Tickets from €10.

Born in Tirana, Albanian, in 1974, Anri Sala is one of the most outstanding young artists working today. His works are meditations on slowness in which camera movement is practically non-existent. In contrast with the speed of images in the media, Sala often freezes scenes into still-shots in order to highlight apparently trivial details. Anri Sala was educated at the National Academy of Arts, Tirana; at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; and at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Tourcoing.  Sala has exhibited extensively, including the Tate Gallery, London, 2004; ARC, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 2004; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2003; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, 2002; and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2002. He is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Young Artist Prize at the 49th Venice Biennale, 2001; the Prix Gilles Dusein, Paris, 2000; the Best Documentary Film Award from the Tirana International Film Festival (TIFF), 2000, and the International Film Festival +in Santiago de Compostela, 1999.

Artist Talk
At 6.00pm on Wednesday 30 May Anri Sala and Ari Benjamin Meyers discuss their collaboration with Declan Long, Lecturer in Visual Culture at the NCAD, in the Lecture Room at the NCH building. Admission is free but booking online is essential at www.imma.ie/talksandlectures

1395 Days Without Red, 2011, was made in collaboration with Liria Begeja, from a project by Šejla Kameriæ and Anri Sala in collaboration with Ari Benjamin Meyers. It was commissioned by Artangel. It is curated by Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA.

An exhibition guide accompanies the exhibition.

1395 Days Without Red, 2011, continues until 15 July 2012. Admission is free.

The exhibition is supported by the Conrad Hotel Dublin and Feast Catering.

Opening hours at the NCH:
Tuesday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Thursday: 10.00am – 7.00pm
Friday and Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sunday and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
Monday: Closed

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected]

14 May 2012

An exhibition exploring connections between art and science will mark the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s first presence in a city centre location when some 35 works mainly from the IMMA Collection go on show in the Museum’s temporary exhibition spaces at the National Concert Hall site in Earlsfort Terrace on Thursday 31 May 2012. Time out of Mind focuses on the many and varied ways in which artists have engaged with ideas about time, memory, space, perception, change and similar concepts. The exhibition is being organised in celebration of Dublin City of Science 2012. IMMA’s inaugural programme at the NCH also includes a striking film project by the Albanian artist Anri Sala and the American composer Ari Benjamin Meyers, inspired by the siege of Sarajevo, which is being shown in the nearby Annex.

Time out of Mind brings together the work of 27 leading Irish and international artists, mainly in works created from the 1990s onwards. These include Lynda Benglis, Dorothy Cross, Michael Craig-Martin, Marcel Duchamp, Barry Flanagan, Isaac Julien, Cristina Iglesias, Callum Innes, William McKeown, Elizabeth Magill, Eva Rothschild, Grace Weir and Daphne Wright.

Installed in the 14 galleries on the ground floor of the North Wing of the NCH building, the exhibition responds to the various cultural and intellectual layers of Earlsfort Terrace, in particular the building’s former scientific function as part of the National University’s Medical School.

Works are installed so as to offer new encounters and readings. For example, affinities may be felt between the filmed Liquid Archive animations of Carlos Amorales and the black Perspex sculpture Stalker by Eva Rothschild; while Tree by Niamh McCann, of reconfigured oars that arch over the space complete with a gilt-bronze flock of humming birds and white neon twig, relates to the minimally treated white panel diptych of Michael Craig-Martin, with small ‘readymade’ landscape paintings inserted in the top corner of each.

Since the 1960s many artists have adopted the type of serial methodologies associated with the objectivity of science. Some range across diverse scientific fields such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, astronomy, acoustics and computer science. Yet while they may draw on scientific concerns and ideas, the artist’s central aim is to remain open to the experiental and to the possibility of failure, that turns out to be enabling rather than disabling: what the artist Tacita Dean calls ‘objective chance’.

Time and associated notions of permanence, impermanence and metamorphosis occur at many levels in contemporary art and are variously reflected in the exhibition. Tacita Dean, in Presentation Sisters, 2005, which is on loan from the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, and Isaac Julien, in his three-screen video Paradise Omeros, 2002, demonstrate an awareness of the complexities of memory and time, such as the ambiguity of actual versus ‘felt’ time, and question assumptions about how memory operates. They are also concerned with how knowledge and ideas are transmitted within cultures and across time. Grace Weir’s film work, made at Dunsink Observatory, employs natural phenomena to investigate complex scientific theories of time and space. While Marie Foley’s sculptures, including The Last Judgement, 1991, explore the spirit within natural and man-made forms that reveal an inexorable transformation across time. 

Dorothy Cross’s video piece Medusae, 2000, is inspired by her research in marine biology in collaboration with her brother, the scientist Professor Tom Cross. While Cristina Iglesias in Untitled (Vegetation Room X), 2002, and William McKeown in Hope Painting (Going Through the Looking Glass), 2005, make materially manifest that which is there but not always noticed in the physical world. They demonstrate an understanding of biological life-forms, not just in terms of appearance, but also in how they interact with the world around them. Like scientists both are drawn to these forms by a metaphysical agenda, such as the quest to understand the essence of life.

Art and science through the ages have been affected by the development of mirrors and optics. Through strategies and motifs of mirroring, reflection, distortion, duplication and proliferation, the effect on one’s perception of the world and of the self within it are explored in the works of Marcel Duchamp, Carlos Amorales, Lynda Benglis, Cristina Iglesias, Eva Rothschild, Mark Manders, Elizabeth Magill, Anita Groener, Stephen McKenna and Chung Eun-Mo. Some of these phenomena are seen in literal resemblances within and among artworks, others through subjective speculation. In other works notions of time, space and memory are signalled by the use of  music or sound – either as structural elements or, implicitly, by means of  a perceived cadence in works by artists such as Fergus Martin and Sean Scully.

As part of the exhibition programme, IMMA will invite artists to reflect on their works in the exhibition in the context of current developments and new directions, through discussions around the cultural aspects of science, the impact of science on art, and their ideas and personal philosophies. Curator Jobst Graeve has been invited to make a selection of works by Marie Foley in an installation which will accompany her sculpture The Last Judgement, 1991, which is in the IMMA Collection.

Cult of Engagement, 2009, by Clodagh Emoe will go on exhibition as part of Time out of Mind in the Annex at the NCH from 1 August, coinciding with the opening of Not I by Neil Jordan, also in the Annex building.

Time out of Mind is curated by Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA, assisted by Brian Cass, Curatorial Co-ordinator, Collections Department, IMMA.

To coincide with the exhibition, the first in a series of public seminars entitled ART + will explore the subject of collaboration between art and science on Tuesday 10 July 2012 at Earlsfort Terrace. This includes a keynote address by Siân Ede, Arts Director of the Gulbenkian Foundation, followed by a discussion with panel speakers including Dorothy Cross and Tom Cross, Marie Redmond from Creative Technologies at Trinity College, Michael John Gorman, Director of the Science Gallery, and Mick Wilson, GRADCAM Fellow at NCAD.

In addition, to mark IMMA’s tenure in the NCH building, a series of lectures continues under the title Agents of Architecture in collaboration with the Irish Architecture Foundation. High profile international speakers have been invited to represent their involvement in the subject, their understanding of its definition, from the typical to the most unorthodox views. International speakers confirmed to present in the Autumn series 2012 at Earlsfort Terrace, include Anne Lacaton, Lacaton Vassal, Paris; Eva Franch, Director, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; alongside other national and international participants.

Admission to talks and lectures is free but booking is essential on www.imma.ie/talksandlectures

As part of a new audience building initiative for the NCH site, free guided tours of the exhibition for individual visitors and small groups will be available on Tuesday and Saturday at 4.00pm, Wednesday and Friday at 1.15pm and Thursday at 6.00pm. The exhibitions will remain open until 7.00pm on Thursdays.

An exhibition guide with texts by Georgie Thompson, Acting National Programmer, IMMA; Hilary Murray, Collections Online Project Co-ordinator, IMMA, Marguerite O’Molloy, Assistant Curator: Collections, IMMA, and Brian Cass, will accompany the exhibition, with an introduction by Christina Kennedy. 

The exhibition and related programmes are sponsored by Dublin City of Science 2012.
The exhibition is supported by THE IRISH TIMES and Feast Catering.

Time out of Mind continues until 2 September 2012. Admission is free.

Opening hours at the NCH:
Tuesday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Thursday: 10.00am – 7.00pm
Friday and Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sunday and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
Monday: Closed

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected]

14 May 2012

What Do You See When You Look At Me?, an exhibition developed in partnership with the Burren College of Art and the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s National Programme, opens to the public at the Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Co Clare, at 3.00pm on Saturday 12 May 2012.  This exhibition comprises some 20 artworks from the IMMA Collection specifically curated for children and explores ideas around representation, both in the form of portraiture and in less conventional ways, posing questions about how we view ourselves and others. Artists featured include John Doherty, David Godbold, Brian Duggan, Robert Ballagh, Louis le Brocquy, Andrew Folan, James Hanley, John Kindness, Nevan Lahart, Alice Maher, Caroline McCarthy, Nick Miller, Tom Molloy, Isabel Nolan and Martin Parr. 

The works range from self-portraits by Tom Molloy and Isabel Nolan, to portraiture of others, some famous for cultural or political reasons such as Louis le Brocquy’s portrait of Samuel Beckett and Nevan Lahart’s depiction of former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu. As well as looking at the representation of a subject’s environment, the exhibition explores portrayals of objects, references to the history of art, and questions what is represented through absence or missing information in portraits. A series of workshops for primary school children from the Burren area will take place during the exhibition facilitated by members of IMMA’s Mediator team. 

The works forming Irish artist Nevan Lahart’s ongoing Static TV series, from 2001, are set in isometric TV structures, a framing device for referencing his personal feelings, art history and things as seen on TV, particularly socio-political media images. Included in the series and this exhibition are Ch.26: Sub-Commandant Marcos, The Friendly Terrorist (After R. Hamilton), 2002, and Ch.76: 3 Cheers for the Psalms of Mordechai Vanunu (Before R. Hamilton), 2007. Both these titles reference the British artist Richard Hamilton, frequently known as the Father of Pop, who, like Lahart, uses appropriated media imagery in his work. The former alludes to Hamilton’s The Citizen, 1981–3, from his Northern Ireland series. The latter was conceived and painted as a contemporary update of Hamilton’s Swingeing London 67, 1968–9, depicting the arrest of Mick Jagger and the art dealer Robert Fraser following a drug raid. Coincidentally, Hamilton’s Unorthodox Rendition, 2009–10, used the same media images of Vanunu’s arrest as Lahart had.

Scraping the Surface and Dulce et Decorum est…, both 1990, are part of a series by Belfast-born artist John Kindness, made during his residency at PS1 in New York. Kindness is interested in the detritus of human life, in Scraping the Surface he has etched a familiar New York taxicab bonnet that he found abandoned in the street. The yellow paint of the door was scraped away and then darkened with a metal oxide resulting in a black image on a yellow background – deliberately reminiscent of classical Greek Attic vases. Throughout his career Kindness has used traditional methods of working such as mosaic and fresco painting; exploring contemporary themes and defying conventional notions of the fine art object while drawing on established traditions. By deliberately mimicking the visual styles of ancient Greek vase-painting that survive through archaeological excavation, Kindness suggests that the residues of contemporary life will be the artefacts of the future.

In the double screen video work Greetings, 1996, by Irish artist Caroline McCarthy, the artist inserts herself abruptly and repeatedly into a typical Irish landscape, familiar to us from tourist brochures and traditional Irish art, in a deliberately awkward and comic way. The reference to picture postcard messages in the title suggests the artist is only visiting the location. McCarthy questions where she belongs in our rapidly changing culture from the once rural to the new urban focused contemporary Ireland.

IMMA’s National Programme is designed to create access opportunities to the visual arts in a variety of situations and locations in Ireland. Using the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and exhibitions generated by the Museum, the National Programme facilitates the creation of exhibitions and other projects for display in a range of venues around the country. The National Programme establishes the Museum as inclusive, accessible and national, de-centralising the Collection, and making it available to communities in their own localities, on their own terms, in venues with which the audience is comfortable and familiar.

What Do You See When You Look At Me? continues until 2 June 2012. Admission is free.

Burren College of Art
Ballyvaughan, Co Clare
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday from 9.30am to 5.30pm
Tel: 065-707 7200.
Website: www.burrencollege.ie

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane at Tel: +353 1 612 9900, Email: [email protected]

8 May 2012

The Chairman, Board, Director and staff of the Irish Museum of Modern Art today (Thursday 26 April 2012) extend their sympathies to the artist Anne Madden, wife of the great Irish artist Louis le Brocquy, and their sons Pierre le Brocquy and Alexis le Brocquy, on the death of Louis Le Brocquy.

In terms of his own work, and in what he has done for art in this country, Louis le Brocquy has been a defining figure for more than 70 years. His work has received much international attention and many accolades over a lifetime of creative practice. He has been widely acclaimed for his evocative heads of literary figures and fellow artists, including his friends Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon and Bono. In recent years his early Tinker and Family series have attracted headline attention on the international art market, placing him in the same select group as Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney. His work has been celebrated by museum retrospectives worldwide, including the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the New York State Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and here at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1996. In 2006 IMMA celebrated the artist’s ninetieth year with a display of seven major works by the artist.

Louis le Brocquy’s work is represented in the collections of numerous museums in the USA, the UK, France, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Japan, India, Korea, New Zealand and, of course, Ireland. IMMA holds some 40 works by le Brocquy in its Collection. Highlights of his career include winning the prestigious Premio Acquisto Internationale at the Venice Biennale in 1956, where he represented Ireland, and the first IMMA Glen Dimplex Award for a sustained contribution to the visual arts in Ireland in 1998. In 1975 he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Dublin, the National University of Ireland, Dublin City University, Queen’s University, Belfast, and in 1994 he was elected Saoi of Aosdána. He was awarded the Freedom of the City of Dublin in 2007 and was conferred with an Honorary Associate from NCAD in 2006. In all of this he has had the unfailing support of his wife, the distinguished artist Anne Madden, and of his sons Pierre and Alexis.

In addition to being the perfect ambassador for Irish art abroad, he has also been a wonderful representative of his chosen profession among his fellow countrymen. His painting A Family is included in the RTE documentary Masterpiece: Ireland’s Favourite Painting. He is greatly loved and admired not only for his outstanding body of work but also for himself – for his graciousness and courtesy, seen to such effect in Joe Mulholland’s major documentary on his life and work.

26 April 2012

A series of talks aimed at expanding the public’s understanding of the wider role of architecture in society is being curated by the Irish Architecture Foundation, in partnership with IMMA, in a number of venues in Dublin over the coming months. Starting on Wednesday 25 April and continuing into the autumn, Agents of Architecture, marks IMMA’s use of the exhibition spaces at the National Concert Hall site in Earlsfort Terrace, beginning on 31 May next. High profile national and international speakers have been invited as agents of architecture to represent their involvement in the subject, their understanding of its definition, from the typical to the most un-orthodox views. The series aims to uncover architecture’s impact on society, analyse architecture’s connection to culture, and reveal new critical approaches to engaging audiences.

25 April, 7.30pm, Beatrice Galilee, Curator Lisbon Architecture Triennale
Harry Clarke Lecture Room, National College of Art and Design
Beatrice Galilee is a London-based curator, writer, critic, consultant and lecturer in contemporary architecture and design. Trained in Architecture at Bath University and in History of Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, Gallilee specialises in the dissemination of architecture through media, curatorial practice, research, editing and teaching. She is the Chief Curator for the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, co-founder and director of The Gopher Hole, an exhibition and event space in London, architectural consultant and writer at DomusWeb, and associate lecturer at Central St Martins. She was a curator at the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale in Korea, directed by Ai Wei Wei and Seung H-Sang, and is a freelance contributor to a number of international publications on architecture and design.

24 May, 7.30pm, Zoë Ryan, John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College
Zoë Ryan is the Chair and John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. Ryan had previously been Senior Curator at New York’s Van Alen Institute, an independent not-for-profit architectural organisation dedicated to promoting inquiry into the processes that shape the design of public spaces. While at the Van Alen, Ryan organised numerous exhibitions and conferences including The Good Life, New Public Spaces for Recreation; VARIABLE CITY: Fox Square; OPEN: New Designs for Public Space; Renewing, Rebuilding, Remembering; and The Politics of Design: Competitions for Public Projects, and was also the editor of the Van Alen Report. Prior to joining the Van Alen, she served as a curatorial assistant at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

18 September, 7.00pm, Anne Lacaton, Lacaton Vassal, Paris
IMMA @ NCH, Earlsfort Terrace
Anne Lacaton was born in 1955 in Saint Pardoux la Rivière, France. She has a degree in town planning and is part of Lacaton & Vassal Architects, founded in 1987 with Jean Philippe Vassal. The practice has gained numerous awards and international recognition. One of their most emblematic and famous buildings is the Palais de Tokoyo in Paris. This talk is supported by the Institut Français.

1 November, 7.00pm, Eva Franch, Director Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York
IMMA @ NCH, Earlsfort Terrace
Eva Franch is a Catalan architect, researcher, teacher and founder of OOAA (office of architectural affairs). She has spent the last two years at Rice University where she was awarded the Worthman Fellowship and has been teaching as the Masters Thesis studio director. Previously she taught at the University of Buffalo. Franch’s work has been exhibited at the Center for Architecture, New York, Korean Institute of Architects, Daegu, FAD Barcelona, NAI Rotterdam, Shenzen Biennale of Architecture, SOA Princeton, COAR Rioja and ETSA Barcelona. Selected publications include Terminal B Barcelona Creative Database, 2008, CityThemeCity and Content A, 2006-7, Dementia, 2004, Pause Pavillion, 2004, Generative Metaphors, 2007 and R.E.D. studies, 2007. Awarded the Howard Crosby Butler Travelling Fellowship, 2006 by Princeton University, Franch also received an Akademie Schloss Solitude research grant, 2009, the Incubadora del FAD prize for emerging architects, 2007, a Pasajes-iGuzzini prize, 2004 and a Dragados Foundation prize, 2005.

Other national and international participants will also be invited to contribute to this talk series during spring and autumn 2012.
Booking is essential. Tickets are free and available online at www.imma.ie/talksandlectures 

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected]

13 April 2012