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

An exhibition from IMMA’s Collection engaging with scientific themes in celebration of Dublin City of Science 2012; the  famous Ned Kelly paintings by the renowned Australian artist Sidney Nolan; a mid-career retrospective of the work of leading Irish artist Alice Maher, and a series of lectures on major developments in architecture to mark its tenure at the NCH site, are all part of wide-ranging programme being presented throughout 2012 by the Irish Museum of Modern Art and announced today (Thursday 29 March) by Fergus O’Dowd, TD, Minister of State with Responsibility for the NewERA Project, in the National Concert Hall. The 2012 programme also includes a film work inspired by the siege of Sarajevo by Albanian artist Anri Sala; an ambitious project by prominent Irish artist Garrett Phelan, involving the bell ringers of Christchurch and St Patrick’s Cathedrals; and a Neil Jordan film installation based on Samuel Beckett’s play Not I. The exhibitions and associated events are being presented across the NCH and RHK sites, due to the closure of the main building in Kilmainham for major refurbishment works during 2012.

Speaking at the launch of the programme in the NCH, Minister O’Dowd said: “This exciting programme offers an ideal opportunity to showcase this prime city centre location. Today’s announcement is only the beginning of what will prove to be an innovative and stimulating programme. The fact that these diverse and engaging exhibitions will be spread across two wonderful and contrasting sites both here in Earlsfort Terrace and the Royal Hospital sites will ensure that IMMA’s 2012 programme can be enjoyed and accessed by a much wider audience.” 

Exhibitions – IMMA @ NCH

The programme at the NCH begins on 31 May with two contrasting exhibitions. In the ground floor spaces in the main building IMMA will present Time out of Mind, drawn from the Museum’s own Collection. Taking its location in the former UCD Medical School as its starting point, the exhibition explores connections between the worlds of art and science to mark Dublin City of Science 2012. Exhibition-making from a collection creates its own particular temporality; revealing new qualities and relationships in and among a selected group of artworks, while also recalling past associations. Time out of Mind focuses on the many and varied ways in which individual artists have engaged with time, space, perception, change and similar concepts. The exhibition, which is kindly sponsored by Dublin City of Science 2012, presents the work of 30 leading Irish and international artists, including Dorothy Cross, Grace Weir, Marcel Duchamp, Isaac Julian and Cristina Iglesias. An important work by Tacita Dean is being loan from the Crawford Art Gallery collection for the exhibition.

Alongside Time out of Mind, a collaborative film project entitled 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, which lasted for 1,395 days between 1992 and 1996. We see the horror of this situation through the eyes of an elegant young woman as she makes her way through an empty city, along what came to be known as Sniper Alley. She is given the courage to carry on by hearing in her head excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, being played by the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra, which had continued to perform throughout the siege.

This will be followed on 1 August by another film-based project Not I, a strikingly original multi-screen film installation directed by Neil Jordan and based on the play of the same name by Samuel Beckett. It features American actress Julianne Moore in the role originally made famous in the legendary stage performance by Billie Whitelaw. The camera focuses only on the actress’s mouth, which is shown from multiple angles delivering a stream of consciousness monologue.  The work, which was part of the celebrated Beckett on Film project, was donated to IMMA by Neil Jordan in 2000.

Also at the NCH from October we will have Becoming, a mid-career retrospective of the work of Alice Maher, one of Ireland’s most respected and influential visual artists. Including painting, sculpture, photography and animation, the exhibition will present a number of Maher’s seminal works, such as Berry Dress, 1994 and Familiar, 1995. The title Becoming points to some of the artist’s main preoccupations and to the themes that will be explored in the exhibition. It indicates a point of transformation, where something becomes something else. Maher’s work has always placed itself at this nexus, a point of metamorphosis as states shift and the familiar becomes otherworldly or unknown – where the inappropriate and the unacceptable are constantly called into play.

Exhibitions – IMMA @ RHK

Meanwhile in the New Galleries at the Royal Hospital, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection continues until 20 May. This exhibition documents the evolution of photography since the 1850s and presents the work of some of the most notable photographers of the 19th and 20th-centuries. These are displayed so as to create “conversations” – between images by individual artists and also across a wide range of themes, such as portraits, landscapes and abstraction.

Following on from this and beginning on 21 June is NEW FAITH LOVE SONG by prominent Irish artist Garrett Phelan, whose distinctive art practice embraces a wide spectrum of media. This ambitious project, commissioned by former IMMA Director Enrique Juncosa, involves Phelan working with the bell ringers from both Christchurch Cathedral and St Patrick’s Cathedral to create a live dialogue between these two iconic religious monuments. Taking place on Mid-Summer’s Evening (21 June) it is designed to signal the arrival of New Faith, which follows a loss of faith and period of faithlessness. The project is accompanied by a site-specific installation in the New Galleries.

From 24 October, the New Galleries will present Sidney Nolan: Ned Kelly Series, by the renowned Australian artist Sidney Nolan, who died aged 75 in 1992. Painted in 1946-47, the series takes the form of a stylised depiction of the exploits of the notorious bushranger Ned Kelly in the Australian outback, which Nolan uses for a meditation on the universal themes of injustice, love and betrayal. Sidney Nolan was of Irish extraction and made several visits to Ireland where he painted his Wild Geese series, inspired by the soldiers who had fled Ireland after the Jacobite wars in the 1690s. Six of these paintings were donated to IMMA on its foundation in 1991. A further work, Gallipoli, 1955, was donated the following year.

Education and Community

IMMA continues to make its activities ever more accessible, with specially-designed programmes for children, young people, families and adults through free guided tours; talks, lectures and seminars; gallery and studio-based workshops.

Starting in June 2012 a new series of public discussions entitled ART + will be initiated. The first discussion in this series, Art + Science will be presented in association with the Collection exhibition, Time out of Mind. This will comprise a keynote address by Siân Ede, Arts Director of the Gulbenkian Foundation, followed by a panel discussion on the subject of collaborations between art and science. This new ART +  strand of talks will have resource material developed in association with the exhibition and will coincide with Dublin City of Science events in July 2012.

Other new initiatives for 2012 include a family programme being developed in collaboration with The Ark, the Children’s Cultural Centre, Temple Bar, to mark the link between art and science. There is also a new children’s trail of IMMA’s artworks in the grounds written by Siobhán Parkinson, Laureate na nÓg, with an accompanying video on IMMA’s website, while a number of collaborations are in development with the National Concert Hall.

To mark IMMA’s tenure in the NCH building, a series of lectures under the title Agents of Architecture is being organised 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. The series will uncover architecture’s impact on  society and will explore its connection to culture, revealing new critical approaches to engaging audiences.

National and Artists’ Residency Programme

In addition to the programmes at the NCH and the RHK, more than 80 works from the Museum’s Collection are already selected to be shown in locations around Ireland through IMMA’s National Programme. These include the Wexford Arts Centre; the Burren College of Art, Co Clare; the Clifden Arts Festival, Co Galway; the Linenhall Arts Centre, Co Mayo, and the Roscommon Arts Centre.

One of the exhibitions being facilitated by the programme is 474: the aesthetics of restriction, showing from 29 March at The Drawing Project, Dun Laoghaire.  The result of a collaboration with Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT), 474: the aesthetics of restriction features works from IMMA’s Collection and responses to these works, selected by a curatorial team of final year students from IADT from works considered, in one way or another, as having been generated according to the logic of a set of definite restrictions. 
 
In May, the National Programme will collaborate with the Burren College of Art to present Who do you see when you look at me?, an exhibition which aims to promote greater engagement with, and access to, the visual arts within primary schools. The exhibition will provide an opportunity for a younger audience to discuss and engage directly with representations of people, portraiture and notions of identity.

IMMA’s Artists’ Residency Programme (ARP) provides opportunities for artists, curators, critical writers and art professionals to research and develop their practice, it supports both emerging and established professionals, working in any medium, participation is by application or invitation and is open to Irish and international applicants.

In 2012 the ARP is introducing a new online application process, which will be open to prospective applicants for the 2013 programme for six weeks from Friday 18 May and will be accessible through IMMA’s website, with supporting application guidelines. For the duration of 2012 the ARP will focus on developing its resources for 2013 onwards. Due to the refurbishment, activities will be limited, however, the full provision of facilitating art professionals living and working on-site will recommence following the reopening of the main building.

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

29 March 2012

IMMA-ginary Space, an exhibition developed through the continued successful partnership between Art Alongside and the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s National Programme, opens to the public at Wexford Arts Centre on Tuesday 13 March 2012.  Art Alongside is an initiative of Wexford County Council Arts Department and is co-funded by the Arts Council and participating primary schools, in partnership with the Wexford Arts Centre and IMMA’s National Programme. Art Alongside is a visual arts programme carried out in an education setting which brings together artists and children in local Co Wexford primary schools to work ‘alongside’ each other based on a chosen theme. Its primary purpose is to allow a framework where artists can work authentically as artists while contributing to the local community.

In IMMA-ginary Space a selection of the children’s work, created during the Art Alongside 2011-2012 programme, is exhibited alongside works by Art Alongside artists Helen Robbins and Mary Claire O’Brien, and works from the IMMA Collection.

For this project primary school pupils from Our Lady of Fatima School, Wexford, and St Senan’s National School, Enniscorthy, were shown high quality reproductions of art works from the IMMA Collection. Guided by artists Mary Claire O’Brien and Helen Robbins, the children were facilitated in looking carefully at each of these reproductions to make their choice of works to be included in the exhibition. Following this period of research, the classroom art projects were devised, based on the students’ understanding of and responses to their chosen piece of work.

The pupils selected works from the IMMA Collection by Irish based artists Stephen Brandes, Maud Cotter and Grace Weir, and international artists Antonio Dias, Stefan Kürten and Jesús Rafael Soto. The focus for selecting the art works was to explore notions of scale, imagination and the universe.

Referencing the visual language associated with cartography, diagrams, fairy-tale illustration and comic books, Stephen Brandes’ practice frequently explores the notion of a perpetually developing fictional world. In Chandelier, 2004, one of a series of large-scale marker pen drawings on lino, the artist explores the journey his grandmother took to escape the pogroms in Romania in 1913.

Grace Weir often uses natural phenomena such as clouds, water and wind in her works, and engages with ordinary events, to illustrate complex scientific theories. In the film work Dust Defying Gravity, 2003, Weir uses a single unedited tracking shot, which takes the viewer on a slow contemplative journey of enquiry through the tranquil interior spaces of Dunsink observatory. The solitude of the space is intensified by the acoustics, and as the camera passes down the corridor a clock ticks loudly in the stillness. The medium of film allows the artist to record movement in relation to space and time. As with many of Weir’s works there is an element of portraiture or human presence in this piece.

This year’s Art Alongside continued its hugely successful partnership between Wexford County Council, the Arts Council of Ireland, the National Programme of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Wexford Arts Centre and primary level schools. Art Alongside provides an exciting opportunity for participating classes to become familiar with the IMMA collection, and in a meaningful way the children explore a piece of contemporary art of their choice.

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.

Wexford County Council and the Arts Council have co-funded the Art Alongside programme since 1999. Its ethos is embedded in Wexford County Council’s Arts Strategy which promotes investment in youth arts. Such investment acts as a key driver in enhancing a young person’s development by cultivating individual expression regardless of background, in a safe environment.

IMMA-ginary Space continues until 31 March 2012. Admission is Free.

Wexford Arts Centre
Cornmarket, Wexford
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday 10.00am to 5.30pm.
Tel: 053 9123764, Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.wexfordartscentre.ie/

Wexford County Council Arts Department
County Hall, Carricklawn, Wexford
Tel: 053 9196000 ext 6369 / 6440
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.wexford.ie/arts

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

27 February 2012

Celebrated ‘Conversations’ Photography Exhibit to Open at IMMA in Dublin
Over 100 Photographs from Around the World Document the Evolution of Photography since the 1850s

Photographs from renowned Bank of America Collection at IMMA

An exhibition of more than 100 photographs drawn from the renowned Bank of America Collection, opens to the public in Dublin at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 22 February 2012. Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection documents the evolution of photography since the 1850s and presents some of the most notable photographers of the 19th and 20th-centuries. Hand-picked from thousands of photographs, the works are displayed so as to create “conversations” between images by individual artists and across a wide range of themes, including portraits, landscapes, street photography and abstraction. The exhibition will be opened by the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Jimmy Deenihan, TD, at 6.00pm on Tuesday 21 February.

The free exhibition presents works by some of photography’s most celebrated names, from 19th-century innovators Gustave Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron and Carleton Watkins, via 20th-century luminaries: Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, and Irving Penn, to contemporary image makers: William Eggleston, Thomas Ruff and Cindy Sherman. Modern works are juxtaposed with older works, European with American, and staged subjects with documentary images. These conversations create unique visual groupings, including images of visitors responding to art in museums, such as Thomas Struth’s Audience 4 (2004), which shows people gazing upward at Michelangelo’s statue of David at the Academia Gallery in Florence, and Musée du Louvre 4, Paris (1989), where visitors contemplate Théodore Géricault’s famous Raft of the Medusa in a Louvre gallery.

Commenting on the exhibition, Peter Keegan, Ireland Country Executive, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said: “Bank of America Merrill Lynch is delighted to make this exhibition available to the public at IMMA, and we are extremely grateful for this unique opportunity to expand our long-term programme of arts support in Ireland with such a highly-respected museum. IMMA has a very impressive track record with photographic exhibitions, including Picturing New York in 2009-10 and Magnum Ireland in 2006. This also complements our other activities supporting the Arts in Ireland, including the restoration of Maclise’s iconic The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife at the National Gallery of Ireland; The ‘New Stream’ programme with Business to Arts and the first display in Europe of the Bank’s Art Books of Henri Matisse at the Chester Beatty Library last year.”

Some of the most striking works in this exhibition focus on people and portraiture, Julia Margaret Cameron’s distinctive profile of her niece, Untitled (Mary Emily “May” Prinsep) (1870), is seen alongside Edward Weston’s portrait, Tina Modotti, Mexico (1924), which offers a compelling view of his sitter’s psychological state. Both images show women gazing downwards in compositions that are elegant and lyrical. Nevertheless, they are clearly women of different times: the Victorian Prinsep, although surprisingly candid for such an early photograph, is soft and demure, while Modotti, the modern woman, has allowed her photographer-lover to capture her emotional state at close quarters. Another group  explores the uncanny in the everyday, as seen in William Eggleston’s iconic image of a tricycle, Untitled (Memphis) (about 1970), and Lee Friedlander’s T.V. in Hotel Room, Galax, Virginia (1962), which shows an eerily disembodied child’s face on a television screen.

Landscapes and seascapes are well represented in the exhibition, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn’s Snow in Canyon, Grand Canyon (1911) and Art Sinsabaugh’s Midwest Landscape #32 (1961). Both of these works explore the artistic possibilities of the American landscape in photography, from very different periods and perspectives.

The exhibition is also rich in street photography, including Helen Levitt’s New York (about 1940), an image of three children wearing Halloween masks on a tenement stoop, and Garry Winogrand’s World’s Fair, New York City (1964), a candid black and white photograph of a group of people, talking and gesturing on a bench, seemingly frozen in midsentence.

Historic monuments and travel to exotic locales are documented in several photographs, including Francis Frith’s documentary image, The Ramesseum of El-Kurneh, Thebes, Second View (1857–58), which captures the grandeur of ancient Egypt—a sight available only to a very few intrepid travelers in the mid-19th-century—and Richard Misrach’s Ticket Booth and Pyramid, Giza, Egypt (1989), which shows, in wry contrast, the modern tourist experience of these ancient sites.

Works of abstraction and experimentation also are on view. Light Abstraction (about 1924–25) illustrates Jaromir Funke’s use of soft focus that enabled him to create Cubist-inspired compositions out of everyday objects with light, shadow, and reflection. The blurring of subject matter is demonstrated in Thomas Ruff’s d.p.b. 08 (2000), in which he digitally manipulates the image creating a fusion of both architecture and landscape.

Bank of America’s critically acclaimed photography collection has its beginnings in the 1960s, when The Exchange National Bank of Chicago, a legacy Bank of America institution, acquired a diverse and particularly fine collection of photographs. Scholars Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, who were the foremost historians of photography at the time, were charged with the task of curating a photography collection for the bank. The images purchased by the Newhalls in 1968-69 form the nucleus of what is today a deep and wide-ranging collection spanning the full historical and technical range of the medium, from mid-19th-century salt prints to early 21st-century digital prints. Beaumont Newhall was the first curator of photography at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), where he organised a landmark 1937 retrospective of photography’s first century, helping to establish its acceptance as a vital art form. Newhall later served as curator and director of the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, and was a professor at the University of New Mexico, where he helped initiate the first doctoral program in the field. His wife, Nancy Newhall, took her husband’s place at MoMA during World War II, and was the author of numerous photography publications. The Newhalls’ connoisseurship, continued by the Bank of America’s subsequent curators, has resulted in an extraordinary collection of rare and varied works.

Bank of America’s Art Collection comprises a global assemblage of paintings, works on paper, video, photography, sculpture, textiles, and maps dating from the 18th-century to the present. Bank of America has chosen to share the Collection with the public via its dedicated loaning programme Art in our Communities ™. Peter Keegan said; “By providing these exhibitions and the support required to host them, Bank of America Merrill Lynch hopes to enrich communities both culturally and economically and help to generate vital revenue for museums. By the end of 2012, Bank of America Merrill Lynch will have loaned more than 50 exhibitions to museums worldwide.” 

In 2009 an exhibition at IMMA of the work of the distinguished American artist Lynda Benglis was made possible by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. This partnership included the loan and subsequent donation to IMMA of Caelum, 1986, a Benglis sculpture from the bank’s corporate collection.

Rachael Thomas, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA, said: “We are delighted to be presenting a photography exhibition of such great diversity and distinction, here at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Conversations celebrates the best of the history of photography and reflects all aspects of life from across the world, with brilliance and imagination”.

A full programme of talks and lectures is planned to coincide with the exhibition. Admission is free. See www.imma.ie/talksandlectures for more information.

Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection is free of charge to the public and is made possible by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Art in our Communities Programme™. The exhibition was originally curated by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, travelled to the Museo del Novecento in Milan, and has now been re-interpreted by the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition is curated by Mary Cremin, Project Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA, and is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue with texts by Enrique Juncosa, former Director of IMMA;  Rena De-Sisto, Global Art and Culture Executive, Bank of America Merrill Lynch; Matthew S Witkovsky, Curator and Chair, Department of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago; Anne Havinga, the Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Karen E Haas, the Lane Collection Curator of Photographs, MFA, Boston, and Mary Cremin. The publication provides a valuable insight into the history of the Collection and the development of photography over time. Price €25.00.

Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection continues until 20 May 2012. 

 
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sunday and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
Mondays and Good Friday 6 April: Closed

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

2 February 2012

About Bank of America Merrill Lynch and the Arts
As part of Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s corporate social responsibility, the company believes that greater cultural understanding fosters increased opportunity for all. Its Arts and Culture Programme – which supports 5,000 arts organisations around the world – has been developed with this ethos as its focal point.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch helps a broad spectrum of arts programmes thrive, encompassing sponsorships, community grants and loans to museums from the company’s own art collection. The Bank of America Merrill Lynch Art Conservation Project enables local cultures to preserve their heritage and serves to locally embed the company’s brand, particularly in areas where the company conducts business.

2011 sponsorships included the V&A’s The Cult of Beauty: the Aesthetic Movement 1860 – 1900, The British Museum’s Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, and Manet, The Man who invented Modern Art at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The company is also Global Sponsor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Presenting Sponsor of the Bridge Project which sees Kevin Spacey star in the title role of Sam Mendes’ acclaimed Richard III production in cities around the world. Upcoming sponsorships include Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London (February – May) and Americans in Florence at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (March – July).

Through the company’s Art in Our Communities® programme, the Bank of America Collection has been converted into a unique community resource from which museums and non-profit galleries may borrow complete or customised exhibitions at no cost. Since its launch in late 2008, more than 50 exhibitions have been loaned to museums around the world. These include The Art Books of Henri Matisse; The Wyeth Family: Three Generations of American Art; and Conversations, an exhibition of more than 100 photographs by some of the genre’s most recognised names.

About Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Arts support in Ireland:

• The Bank supports ‘New Stream’, a €400,000, three-year investment developed by the not-for profit organisation Business to Arts. Launched in 2009, the project supports the development of fundraising skills for professionals in the cultural sector. ‘New Stream’ provides artists and arts organisations with access to fundraising training, professional advice, coaching and support networks.

• As part of its 2010 Art Conservation Project, the Bank made a grant to the National Gallery of Ireland for the restoration of Daniel Maclise’s ‘The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife’ (1854). The picture depicts a pivotal event in Ireland’s past and is viewed by approximately 750,000 people annually.  It  was chosen for it significance to Ireland’s history.

• As part of  its global Art in Our Communities® programme, the Bank made its corporate art collection available to Dublin’s Chester Beatty Library, through loan of  the exhibition The Art Books of Henri Matisse’ which was displayed in 2011.

• The bank also sponsors the Irish Chamber Orchestra via direct support of the Shannon International Music Festival and the ground-breaking ‘Music Factory’ programme in Limerick.

To mark the closing weekend of the exhibition Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, IMMA is holding a weekend of literary events on Friday 27 and Sunday 29 January 2012. Distinguished figures from the literary and performing arts will present a range of responses for adults and families. The weekend begins at 6.00pm on Friday 27 January with a dramatic reading of an excerpt from Samuel Beckett’s novella First Love by Irish actor Conor Lovett, who is internationally acclaimed for his interpretation of Beckett’s works. This echoes Neuenschwander’s 2005 participatory work of the same name, in which visitors to the exhibition describe their first love to a police sketch artist, with the resulting drawing forming part of the exhibition.

A further link to the exhibition is created with a family event at 3.00pm on Sunday 29 January, when actor Louis Lovett, best known for his outstanding performance in The Girl who Forgot to Sing Badly, takes his audience on an exciting journey through the Arabian Nights, another source of inspiration for Neuenschwander’s work.

At 1.00pm on Sunday 29 January, IMMA will launch Look, No Cows, its new trail for children by Siobhán Parkinson, novelist and Laureate for Children’s Literature. 

The schedule of events over the weekend is as follows:

Friday 27 January, 6.00pm, the Chapel
First Love with Conor Lovett
To open IMMA’s literary weekend, Conor Lovett will read an excerpt from Beckett’s novella First Love in response to Neuenschwander’s artwork of the same title. Lovett’s performance is a short dramatic narration which closes with a chaired discussion exploring the interpretation, translation and adaptation of Beckett’s work in the performing and visual arts. This event is chaired by Nicholas Johnson, the Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College, Dublin.

Sunday 29 January, 1.00pm, the Chapel
Look, No Cows by Siobhán Parkinson
To launch IMMA’s new trail for children, Siobhán Parkinson will read from her trail Look, No Cows which visits her favourite artworks from IMMA’s Collection in the museum grounds. Families and the general public are welcome, and the new trail is available free of charge.

Sunday 29 January, 2.00pm – 4.00pm, New Galleries
Explorer
IMMA’s Sunday family programme, for children aged 4 to 10, will take place in the Rivane Neuenschwander exhibition.

Sunday 29 January, 3.00pm, the Chapel
A Dramatic Reading from the Arabian Nights with Louis Lovett
The literary classic Arabian Nights, a sprawling compilation of anonymous folk stories from the East, is an important source of reference in Rivane Neuenschwander’s work. Louis Lovett will perform a dramatic reading from this collection of fairytales.

Admission is free. Booking is essential for all events (except Explorer). Book 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]

19 January 2012

The Chairperson and Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art today (13 January 2012) announced the appointment of Sarah Glennie, currently Director of the Irish Film Institute, as the new Director of IMMA, where she previously held the post of Curator from 1997 to 2001.

Sarah Glennie has been working professionally in the cultural realm for sixteen years and has extensive experience of directing and working in a number of public cultural institutions in Ireland and Britain. Prior to joining the Irish Film Institute (IFI) in 2008, where she oversaw a major redevelopment programme, she was Artistic Director of the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo. While there she initiated a nationally and internationally significant programme, including The Eternal Now: Warhol and the Factory and an exhibition and unique performance by Patti Smith. She has also curated many other notable visual art projects, both in Ireland and internationally.

Sarah Glennie was born in Britain and moved to Ireland in 1995 to work at IMMA, where she curated a number of projects, including solo exhibitions by Olafur Eliasson, and Shirin Neshat and the major public art project GHOST SHIP by Dorothy Cross. In 2001 she moved to The Henry Moore Foundation Contemporary Projects where her curated projects included Paul McCarthy at Tate Modern, and Stopover at the Venice Biennale 2003. In addition, in 2004 she co-curated Romantic Detachment at PS1/MoMA and in 2005 a major new film commission by Tacita Dean for Cork Capital of Culture. She was also the Commissioner of Ireland’s participation at the 51st Venice Biennale 2005. In 2008 she became Director of the IFI, where she oversaw significant development of the Institute’s activities, nationally and internationally.

Commenting on the appointment IMMA’s Chairperson, Eoin McGonigal, said: “Everyone at IMMA is delighted to have secured as the Museum’s new Director someone with such an impressive record of achievement in the arts, more especially the visual arts. I am confident that Sarah is exceptionally well placed to build on the Museum’s very considerable achievements over the past 20 years. It is interesting that Sarah began her distinguished career in the Irish arts sector at IMMA.  I believe we can all look forward to the impact her well-known creativity and energy will have on the organisation over the coming years”, he said.

Eoin McGonigal also paid tribute to the outgoing Director, Enrique Juncosa. “Over the past nine years Enrique has transformed virtually every aspect of the Museum’s activities. Through his standing in the international arts community, through his sheer ambition for the Museum and through his faith in what it could achieve, he has increased IMMA’s reputation immeasurably, both at home and abroad”, he said.

Sarah Glennie said: “IMMA makes a vibrant and valuable contribution to contemporary Irish society and I am truly honoured to be given the opportunity to lead this great institution into the next important phase of its development. I look forward to working with the Museum’s excellent team and the wider arts community to build on the extraordinary legacy of the Museum’s first twenty years, and to ensure that Ireland continues to have a modern art museum of distinction and international significance”.

Sarah Glennie will take up the post of Director in April 2012.

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

13 January 2012

The Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Jimmy Deenihan, TD, announced that, following its success as the main venue for Dublin Contemporary 2011, the exhibition space at Earlsfort Terrace will be made available to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in 2012 during the closure of the main building at Kilmainham.

“I am delighted at the warm public response to DC11”, the Minister said. “In addition to producing a lively debate on the nature and scope of contemporary art, it highlighted the degree to which the work of Irish artists can more than hold its own in an international context, while at the same time creating many valuable links with artists and curators worldwide.”

The Minister went on to say that the project had also led to the rediscovery of the hidden treasure that is the former UCD buildings in Earlsfort Terrace. “I am determined that these buildings should remain available for use by the arts community and I am sure that they will provide an ideal alternative space for IMMA during the closure of its main building at the Royal Hospital. Judging by the outstanding exhibitions which IMMA has brought us over the past few years, I’m confident that we can look forward to an exciting programme in Earlsfort Terrace in 2012 and that this city centre location will draw many new visitors to the museum to experience its always innovative and stimulating work.” 

The closure of the main building at IMMA, from 1 November 2011 to 31 December 2012, is due to essential and extensive refurbishment works. However, during this time exhibitions will continue in the New Galleries, beginning on 16 November with a major mid-career survey of the work of the leading Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander, entitled A Day Like Any Other. In addition, the Artists’ Residency Programme will continue on site during the closure, the café and bookshop will remain open to visitors and three sculpture trails will be available in the grounds.  IMMA’s successful National Programme will continue as normal in venues around Ireland, North and South.

Media queries:
Press and Information Office
Tel: 087-2908193 / (01) 631 3807 / 3838 / 3848(direct)
E-Mail: [email protected]
Web site: www.ahg.gov.ie

A major mid-career survey of the work of leading Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander opens to the public in the New Galleries at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) on Wednesday 16 November 2011. Covering the period since 2000, Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other highlights the artist’s unique contribution to Brazilian Conceptualism and reveals a wide-ranging interdisciplinary practice, which includes painting, photography, film, sculpture, collaborative actions and participatory events.

A variety of elements inform Neuenschwander’s work – the nature of time, the fragility of life, cycles of existence and the delicacy of human exchange. Motifs such as circles and ovals are of primary importance, together with drops of water, bubbles, hole-punched confetti, constellations and cascading zeros. These act sometimes as soundtracks or symbols of fragility, trail markers or life sources, symbols of the natural world or the feminine principle. Much of her oeuvre is about measuring passing time, in calendars that both mark the past and anticipate the future. Her maps, whether tracking visitors’ paths through the exhibition or presenting the blurred boundaries exposed to the elements during the rainy season, are about creating new geographies for new explorations.
 
Throughout her career, Neuenschwander has created participatory art and the exhibition includes three installations involving participation by visitors. The first, I Wish Your Wish, 2003, is based on a tradition at a church in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, where the faithful tie silk ribbons inscribed with their wishes to their wrists and to the gates of the church. According to custom, their wishes are granted when the ribbons wear away and fall off. At IMMA hundreds of ribbons printed with visitors’ wishes from the artist’s past projects will hang from the gallery walls. Visitors are invited to remove a ribbon, tie it to their wrist, and replace it with a new wish written on a slip of paper, in turn generating new ribbons and wishes.
 
The role of literary sources in Neuenschwander’s work  can be seen in another participatory work, First Love, 2005, which takes its title from Samuel Beckett’s novella of the same name. In Neuenschwander’s version a police sketch artist sits with visitors and listens as they describe the faces of their first loves; the sketch artist then produces portraits of these “first loves” to adorn the walls of the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. For the third installation, Walking in Circles, 2000, small halos of adhesive are applied to the gallery floor to pick up dirt from visitors’ shoes, creating a map of the exhibition’s traffic patterns.

The exhibition also contains several series of new paintings and the film The Tenant, 2010, following the journey of a soap bubble as it wanders through a deserted house in a permanent state of suspension. It also includes sculptures made by customers during conversations at bars and restaurants in Brazil.

Rivane Neuenschwander was born in 1967 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where she currently lives and works. She has exhibited internationally over the past 20 years, including solo exhibitions at the South London Gallery; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Walker Center, Minneapolis; Portikus, Frankfurt, and Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte. She had also shown in a number of group exhibitions in Europe and the US, and in a number of biennials, including the Liverpool Biennial in 1999, the Havana Biennial in 2006, the Venice Biennale in 2005 and the São Paulo Biennial in 2006.

The exhibition is curated by Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum, New York, and is organised by the New Museum in collaboration with IMMA.

In Conversation
At 5.00pm on Tuesday 15 November Rivane Neuenschwander will discuss the exhibition with Richard Flood and its installation at IMMA, the final venue on its tour. This will take place in the Chapel at IMMA. Admission is free but booking is essential on www.imma.ie/talksandlectures.  

A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

The exhibition originated at the New Museum, and has also travelled to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St Louis, Missouri; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona, and Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida.

The exhibition is supported by Inhotim and Rhatigan Commerical Development Ltd.

The exhibition continues in the New Galleries until 29 January 2012. Admission is free.
 
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays 12noon – 5.30pm
Closed Mondays and 24-27 December

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

8 November 2011