A wide-ranging survey of the work of the distinguished artist Barrie Cooke, organised to mark his 80th birthday, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) on Wednesday 15 June 2011. Entitled simply Barrie Cooke, the exhibition comprises some 70 paintings and sculptures, from the Sheila-Na-Gig images and the Perspex bone boxes of the 1960s and 1970s to the nudes which have formed a constant mode of expression in his practice. Works are drawn from the Museum’s own significant holding of Cooke’s oeuvre, as well as from public and private collections.

A major figure in the development of painting in Ireland, Barrie Cooke was born in England, but since 1954 has been resident in Ireland, which he found offered him an ideal environment for his lifelong love of nature, and his twin passions of painting and fishing. This fascination with nature can be seen from his earliest works, a 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. As with other subjects, his concern is with water as a physical phenomenon – the source of life for all living things – rather than as a reflection of a mood or feeling. Two of his 1960s Sheila-Na-Gig sculptures, inspired by medieval fertility stone carvings found in parts of Ireland and Britain, are also included in the exhibition.

Animal studies were another subject at this time, from drawings of small bones, which the butcher saved for Cooke’s dog, to whole carcasses. However, their lack of physical realism lead the artist to turn to the creation of the bone boxes of the 1970s. These comprise Perspex boxes containing artificial bone sculptures, rendered in clay fired at 950° C and painted in layers of acrylic. A variety of real bones in the shape of pike jaws and a ram’s spine were inserted into individual boxes.

Painting and box come together in Slow Dance Forest Floor (1976), a work from IMMA’s Collection, comprising a box containing organic material projecting from a semi-abstract painting depicting a rainforest. This was created during a visit to Malaysia, where the artist lived among the Iban and Kelabit tribes, sharing the latter’s communal longhouses.  Cooke has travelled extensively, exploring the formation and transformation of the environment in remote and exotic landscapes through painting and fishing.  His entire body of work is marked by journeys mapping all that he has seen and experienced in Lapland,  Cuba, Cape Cod, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, and most recently, Madeira. The formation, transformation and degradation of the environment have been constant motifs – works relating to Ireland and, more recently, to New Zealand, which Cooke had found to be a clean and unspoilt terrain during earlier visits in the 1980s and 1990s.
 
Born in Cheshire, England in 1931, and brought up in Jamaica and Bermuda, Cooke moved to the US as a teenager and studied art history and biology at Harvard University. Having moved to Ireland in 1954, he had his first solo exhibition in Dublin the following year and the following year received a scholarship to study with Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg. He represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1963. He has exhibited widely throughout Europe, the US and Canada. Major retrospectives include shows in the Douglas Hyde Gallery (1986), the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (1992), and LAC, Perpignan, France (1995). His work is held by IMMA, the Ulster Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Haags Gemeentemuseum, and in many other collections worldwide. He won the Marten Toonder Award in 1988 and the Irish-American Cultural Institute’s O’Malley Award in 2002.

Talk
On Tuesday, 14 June at 5.00pm Irish Times Art Critic Aidan Dunne will give talk on Barrie Cooke’s practice in the Lecture Room at IMMA. Admission is free, but booking is essential on www.imma.ie/talksandlectures.

IMMA and The Lilliput Press are publishing a fully-illustrated colour catalogue to accompany the exhibition, which includes both newly-commissioned and republished texts. Authors include Seamus Heaney, Brian Dillon and Karen Sweeney, Assistant Curator of Exhibitions at IMMA. There is also an interview with Barrie Cooke by artist Dorothy Cross and a foreword by IMMA Director, Enrique Juncosa.

The exhibition is organised by IMMA and is curated by Karen Sweeney.  It will travel to the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, in November.

Barrie Cooke continues at IMMA until 18 September 2011. Admission is free.

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
Mondays: Closed

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

10 June 2011

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PRESS RELEASE – 17 May 2011
 
IMMA Celebrates 20th Anniversary with Twenty exhibition and a host of other events
  
Drawn from IMMA’s Collection, the works in Twenty include installations, photography, painting and sculpture. Commonalties and dialogues appear between the works, but the exhibition seeks to allow sufficient space that each may be viewed as representing an individual practice. For example, Katie Holten’s 137.5 / It started on the c train, 2002, a web-like wall installation made from crochet, started on the subway in New York and continued as the artist traveled around Eastern Europe. Another work, Memorial Gardens, 2008, by Niamh O’Malley was made while O’Malley was participating in IMMA’s Artists’ Residency Programme. It presents footage taken in the nearby WarMemorial Gardens in Islandbridge projected on to etched-primed aluminum, creating an unreal, chimera type effect of distance and loss. Works by Orla Barry, Stephen Brandes, Nina Canell, Fergus Feehily, Patrick M FitzGerald, John Gerrard, David Godbold, Paddy Jolley, Nevan Lahart, Niamh McCann, Willie McKeown, Perry Ogden, Liam O’Callaghan, Alan Phelan, Garrett Phelan, Eva Rothschild and Corban Walker are also shown, together with a borrowed piece by Irish artist Sean Lynch.
 
Many of the Irish artists live abroad – in New York, Berlin, Vienna or London – reflecting the increasingly international environment in which their work is now seen.  The significance of IMMA’s Artists’ Residency Programme, established in 1994, is also evident as many of the artists in Twenty have participated in the programme at some point, including Orla Barry, David Godbold, Liam O’Callaghan, Niamh O’Malley, Sean Lynch, Paddy Jolley, Katie Holten, Nevan Lahart, Alan Phelan and Garrett Phelan.
 
Other events taking place on 27 May include a talk by Irish artist Dennis McNulty at 3.00pm on his interdisciplinary installation in the Formal Gardens created in response to the Royal Hospital site.  A series of short talks by the artists in Twenty will follow at 4.00pm, offering a personal perspective on their practice, while the participants in the IMMA’s Artists’ Residency Programme – John Hawke, John Beattie, Mark Hamilton, Andrea Pichl and the multi-faceted visual arts project CULTURSTRUCTION – will open their studios to visitors from 5.30 to 7.00pm.
 
Poet and novelist Jeremy Reed and musician Itchy Ear (Gerry McNee) take to the stage at 7.30pm with their unique collaboration The Ginger Light,  In what has been described as a performance dynamic unparalleled in British poetry, they blur the boundaries between the spoken work, music, sound and song. The celebrations end with The fight against vegetation part 2, a film by French artist Cyprien Gaillard and his compatriot the self-professed “symphonic composer” Koudlam, presenting a characteristically iconoclastic view of man’s interaction with nature.
 
Throughout the evening lifestyle store Brown Thomas will showcase 20 unique looks from internationally acclaimed fashion designer Mary Katrantzou. The installation, curated especially for IMMA, will bring together selected creations from her recent collections and an exclusive preview of her autumn 2011 collection. Originally from Athens, Katrantzou is known as the ‘Print Princess’ due to her amazing bold graphic prints and distinct approach to fashion, evident since the launch of her first collection in autumn 2009.
 
Twenty continues until 31 October 2011. Admission is free.
 
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
Mondays: Closed

For further information and images please contact Vanessa Cowley or Patrice Molloy at Tel: + 353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected].
 
17 May 2011

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PRESS RELEASE – 25 May 2011

Minister Deenihan welcomes donation of significant Anglo Irish Bank artworks to IMMA

The Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Jimmy Deenihan, TD, today (Wednesday 25 May 2011) welcomed the donation of 18 important artworks from Anglo Irish Bank to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). The gift includes works by such leading artists as Sean Scully, Stephen McKenna, Edward Delaney, Nick Miller and Elizabeth Magill.

Speaking during an advance visit to IMMA’s Twenty exhibition, Minister Deenihan said: “This very generous donation represents the ideal birthday present for the museum, which opened its doors exactly 20 years ago today. In that time the museum has done an extraordinary job of building up the scale and scope of its collection, which now comprises more than 2,350 works. In the past five years alone some 400 works have been added to the collection, with a further 600 pledged over the coming years”. The Minister went on to say that the donation would complement perfectly the works by younger-generation artists, recently purchased with funding from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, and being shown as part of Twenty, the centrepiece of IMMA’s anniversary celebrations.

Mike Aynsley, Group Chief Executive of Anglo Irish Bank, said: “A decision was taken by the Bank that it would be appropriate to begin the process of reducing the Bank’s art collection and making these pieces available for public viewing. I am delighted to present these pieces to IMMA, one of our most innovative national cultural institutions. I am confident that IMMA, as Ireland’s leading national institution for the collection and presentation of modern and contemporary art, will ensure that visitors to the museum will have the opportunity to appreciate these pieces.”

Commenting on the donation, IMMA Director Enrique Juncosa said: “The gift of 18 works by such distinguished and well loved artists will provide a tremendous stimulus for new and exciting exhibitions from our collection, from large-scale shows like The Moderns to more focused exhibitions such as Twenty. It will also greatly extend the choice of work available for the many exhibitions which we organise all around Ireland each year as part of our unique National Programme and for our frequent loans to sister institutions abroad.”

The donation comprises works by Sean Scully, Elizabeth Magill, Barrie Cooke, Mark Francis, Stephen McKenna, Nick Miller, Edward Delaney, Cheung Eun Mo, Charles Brady and Kim en Joong.

Twenty: Celebrating 20 Years of the Irish Museum of Modern Art presents 20 younger-generation Irish and international artists, whose work is increasing prominent in the global visual arts arena. Many of the works are being shown for the first time, having recently been acquired with  funding from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. These include Orla Barry, Stephen Brandes, Nina Canell, Fergus Feehily, John Gerrard, David Godbold, Paddy Jolley, Nevan Lahart, Niamh McCann and Willie McKeown. The new works echo the museum’s acquisition 20 years ago of works by leading younger artists of the day, many of whom went on to have a close and mutually beneficial relationships with IMMA in the intervening years. In addition to the opening of Twenty, the anniversary celebrations on Friday 27 May include poetry readings, artists’ talks, open studios, electro music/video performances and cutting-edge fashion.

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

25 May 2011

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PRESS RELEASE – 27 April 2011

Orla Barry’s The Scavenger’s Daughters opens Special Performance Season
at IMMA

The Scavenger’s Daughters, a performance work by leading Irish artist Orla Barry, will be staged at the Irish Museum of Modern Arts (IMMA) on Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 May 2011. The work is an ambiguous portrait of two sisters and, like much of Barry’s work, is rooted in the tensions between visual and literary representation. It comes to IMMA following performances at some of Europe’s leading visual art institutions, including Tate Modern, London, De Appel, Amsterdam, and STUK kunstencentrum, Leuven. The Scavenger’s Daughters is the first in a series of wide- ranging performances at IMMA during May to mark the 20th anniversary of the foundation of the Museum in 1991.

The Scavenger’s Daughters weaves together three monologues, which constantly fail to form a narrative dialogue. The title refers to the act of scavenging for words, ideas, food and emotions. The work employs a powerful combination of poetic writing and theatrical performance to reveal a fictional narrative concerned with intimate relationships and the inability to communicate, providing a unique visual and physical experience of language.

The eponymous sisters could be taken to represent simply sisterhood. However, they could also be lovers, or two opposite aspects of one mind: the intellectual as opposed to the corporeal, adult versus adolescent, a world of reason as against a world of play.

The Scavenger’s Daughters is performed by Kate McIntosh, Ineke Lievens and Miles O’Shea. 

Orla Barry’s work is rooted in language. The artist composes poetic prose – textual fragments that bring together philosophical meditations, casual thoughts, biographical facts as well as fictional elements and (nonsensical) associations. In her photographic series, publications, films and performances, Barry dwells on themes such as linguistic intoxication, proximity and distance, melancholy and frivolity, friendship and family relationships, the things that bring us together and those that keep us apart.

Born in Wexford, Orla Barry has lived in Belgium for 16 years, but still gets the inspiration for and creates most of her work in Ireland. She has exhibited extensively internationally, including solo shows in Brussels, Antwerp, Milan, London and Amsterdam. Her work has been included in prestigious group exhibitions, such as Manifesta 2, Luxembourg, and Prix de la Jeune Peinture Belge, Brussels. A major exhibition, Orla Barry: Portable Stones and Other Works, was shown at IMMA in 2006. She was short-listed for the IMMA Glen Dimplex Artist’s Award in 1999 and participated on IMMA’s Artists’ Residency Programme.

The performance begins at 8.00pm.

Admission is free but booking is essential. Please email [email protected] to reserve a place.

Other events in the performance season are:

Jodi Melnick & Burt Barr – Fanfare (2009)
Yasuko Yokoshi/Masumi Seyama VI – Bell (2011)
Friday 13 and Saturday 14 May, 7.30pm

Collaborating for the first time, Dublin Dance Festival (DDF) and IMMA present two award-winning contemporary dance artists on the opening weekend of DDF 2011. Jodi Melnick returns to Dublin to perform Fanfare, a mesmerizing world of rhythms, gestures and motion, created in collaboration with visual artist Burt Barr. Yasuko Yokoshi, a New York-based multi-disciplinary artist and dancer, presents the world premiere of Bell, a contemporary interpretation of a classical Japanese dance, as part of DDF’s focus on Asian choreographers.
Tickets: €20.00, concession €18.00. Booking: www.dublindancefestival.ie  
DDF Box Office + 353 1 672 8815

Dublin Dance Festival & Phantom 105.2 present
Bumper 2 Bumper @ IMMA
Saturday 14 May, 9.00pm–12 midnight

Dublin’s favourite headphone disco lands in IMMA’s stunning courtyard. Bring your FM radio, headphones and get ready to dance the night away to top Phantom tunes. Over 18s only.
FREE tickets available from DDF Box Office, The Culture Box, Temple Bar, from 3 May.

Gerald Barry – The Intelligence Park
Wednesday 18 May, 8.00pm

This concert performance of Gerald Barry’s rarely-heard opera is presented in collaboration with the Crash Ensemble. Premiered in 1990 at the Almeida Festival, the work is in three acts to a libretto by Vincent Deane. The story is set in 18th-century Dublin and has at its core the everlasting conflict between reason and feeling, obligation and inclination.
Tickets: €20.00, concession €15.00. Book online at www.imma.ie

Jeremy Reed and Itchy Ear – The Ginger Light
Friday 27 May, 7.30pm

The Ginger Light is a unique collaboration between poet and novelist Jeremy
Reed and musician Itchy Ear (Gerry McNee). Together they create a performance
dynamic unparalleled in British poetry, and an excitement usually only generated by pop. Jeremy Reed has been described by J G Ballard as ‘the most gifted poet working today’. His musical collaborations with Gerry McNee have included sold out performances at the ICA and the Horse Hospital, in London.
The performance is free but ticketed. For information visit www.imma.ie/27May

Koudlam & Cyprien Gaillard – Desniansky Raion
Friday 27 May, 9.30pm

Rival gangs battle on a housing estate, a tower block is illuminated by a light
show before it is razed to the ground, and a housing estate in a Russian suburb, Desniansky Raion, stands desolate and empty. These are all part of artist Cyprien Gaillard’s triptych of films, set to music by French composer and musician Koudlam, exploring visions of utopian architecture and the aftermath ofits social and physical destruction.
The performance is free but ticketed. For information visit www.imma.ie/27May

Dennis McNulty
23–27 May during IMMA’s opening hours

Dennis McNulty is a Dublin-based artist whose practice is concerned with memory, potential and flow. His work emerges from research, taking physical form in a variety of media. Objects are combined with space, sound and video to create situations suggesting possible narratives. McNulty will present an interdisciplinary work responding to the specific context at IMMA.
On 27 May at 3.00pm Dennis McNulty will give a talk on the installation in the
Formal Gardens.

               

For further information please contact Vanessa Cowley or Patrice Molloy at Tel: + 353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected].
27 April 2011

PRESS RELEASE

Gerald Barry’s opera The Intelligence Park at IMMA

Gerald Barry’s opera, The Intelligence Park, widely regarded as one of the most innovative and compelling operas of recent times, will be presented in a concert performance at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 18 May 2011. Described by The Irish Times in 1990 as “the most original piece of music to come out of Ireland this century”, the opera is set in Dublin in 1753 and embraces love, power, prison and an eclipse of the sun. Presented in collaboration with Crash Ensemble, the production forms part of an exciting season of performances being staged at IMMA in May to mark the 20th anniversary of the Museum’s foundation in 1991.

The Intelligence Park, to a libretto by Vincent Deane, tells of a composer, Robert Paradies, who has lost the power to write but rediscovers it through his obsession with an Italian singer, the castrato Serafino. However, a triangular love affair involving Paradies, Serafino and Jerusha – the daughter of a wealthy merchant whom Paradies has been advised to marry but who is also the object of Serafino’s affections – complicates matters, bringing with it anger, betrayal and a conflict between private love and public duty.

When first produced in London for the Institute of Contemporary Arts/Almeida Festival in 1990, it met with an extraordinary critical response. For The London Evening Standard it was “a clenched fist of an opera.” The Independent said that “the joy of the opera… is that it is driven by music of an energy and pace unheard of in most contemporary work.  Barry…one of the true originals.”  The Times said: "Never mind what the piece is about: it just quite shockingly is. It exists”. A BBC recording of the opera is available on the NMC label.

Gerald Barry has written four other operas: The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit for Channel 4 Television, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant for RTE/ENO/Basel Opera, La Plus Forte (The Stronger) for Radio France, and most recently, The Importance of Being Earnest for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Barbican, London. The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit has been performed in London, Aldeburgh, Berlin, Paris, Los Angeles, New York and Amsterdam.  La Plus Forte has reached Paris, Amsterdam, Toronto, Miami, London and Dublin and has been described as the beginning of 21st century opera. The Los Angeles Times said that The Importance of Being Earnest was “sensational”, and “maybe the most inventive Oscar Wilde opera since Richard Strauss’s Salome more than a century ago.”

Crash Ensemble was founded in 1997 by composer and Artistic Director Donnacha Dennehy and has since attracted enthusiastic audiences for its adventurous repertoire. The ensemble has commissioned or premiered works by composers including Gavin Bryars, Arnold Dreyblatt, Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Terry Riley, and has also worked with Louis Andriessen and Steve Reich, among others. As well as performing regularly throughout Ireland, Crash Ensemble tours internationally. Crash features on recordings by labels such as NMC, Cantaloupe and most recently Nonesuch, with the release of Grá agus Bás by Donnacha Dennehy later this month.

The opera is conducted by Richard Baker and the singers are Sarah Gabriel, soprano, Loré Lixenberg, alto, Roderick Williams, baritone, Andrew Watts, countertenor, John McMunn, tenor and Stephen Richardson, bass.

The performance begins at 8.00pm.

Tickets €20.00, concessions €15.00. Booking on www.imma.ie.
For further information please contact Vanessa Cowley or Patrice Molloy at Tel: + 353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected].

19 April 2011

 

Minister Deenihan opens Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibition at IMMA

The Minister for Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht Affairs, Mr Jimmy Deenihan, TD, this evening (Tuesday 5 April 2011) officially opened the eagerly-awaited exhibition of works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, drawn from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Modern Mexican Art, features many of the artists’ most iconic paintings and offers a rich insight into the work and lives of two of the most celebrated figures in modern art.  Lithographs, drawings, collages and a page from Kahlo’s diary are also included, alongside photographs of the artists by some of the most renowned photographers of the day.

Speaking at the opening of the exhibition Minister Deenihan saidm, “it is wonderful to see the celebrated Kahlo self-portraits, probably among the most iconic paintings in 20th-century art, in an Irish museum.  The lives of Kahlo and Rivera could never be called conventional and it is intriguing to see how much of their work grew out of their fascinating and colourful lives. Kahlo and Rivera are the latest in an impressive list of leading international artists whose work IMMA has brought to the Irish gallery-going public. The fact that IMMA can persuade such bodies as The Vergel Foundation to make such priceless works available to it, is a testament to the position which IMMA has attained in the international arts arena.”

The exhibition, entitled Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera: Masterpieces of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, presents six of Kahlo’s famous self-portraits, her favourite mode of expression. Several, such as Self Portrait with Bed or Me and My Doll, 1937, and Self-Portrait as Tehuana or Diego on My Mind, 1943, reflect the artist’s personal difficulties, ranging from a horrific tram accident and her subsequent ill health and miscarriages to the sometime troubled nature of her relationship with Rivera. He himself described Kahlo as “an artist who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings.”

While Rivera also created many striking works of a more personal nature, his colourful paintings of everyday Mexican scenes and Mexican-Indian children, such as the famous Calla Lily Vendors, 1943, and Girl with Gloves, 1943, stem from his prominent position in Mexico’s public life. These works have their origin in his role in the 1920s as a leader of the Mexican post-revolutionary cultural movement, of which his famous murals on similar themes are arguably the most glorious legacy.

In addition to the diaries and photographs, the exhibition is further extended by the inclusion of photographs by Frida Kahlo’s German-born father, Guillermo Kahlo, of churches around Mexico City and Tepotzlan, and by the showing of a conceptual film by Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura, in which he takes on Kahlo’s persona.

Commenting on the importance of the exhibition to the Museum, IMMA’s Director, Enrique Juncosa, said: “It is enormously satisfying to have in the Museum the Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits from the Gelman Collection, which are among the most famous images of 20th-century art. I am sure our visitors will not miss this opportunity to enjoy them.”

For the Embassy of Mexico, Alicia Kerber, Chargé d’Affaires, a.i. welcomed the presentation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s works for the first time in Ireland. “For Mexican art, the Gelman Collection represents a splendid and powerful voice that has been heard worldwide,” she said.

The Gelman Collection is a significant collection of more than 300 works of Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art which is housed in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and was established by Jacques and Natasha Gelman in 1943 to support Mexican artists.  Along with works by Kahlo and Rivera, it also holds major works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo, among others.

The exhibition, which continues until 26 June 2011, is curated by Seán Kissane, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA.

The exhibition is sponsored by BNY Mellon and supported by the Mexican Embassy, The Irish Times, and the Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht Affairs.

Admission: €5.00, concession: €3.00. Admission is free to all on Fridays.
Admission is free at all times for under-18s, those in full-time education, those on organised Museum programmes and IMMA Members.

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
Mondays and Friday 22 April: Closed

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

5 April 2011

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The eagerly-awaited exhibition of the work of the celebrated Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) on Wednesday 6 April 2011. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: Masterpieces of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection features many of the artists’ most iconic paintings and offers a rich insight into the work and lives of the two central figures of Mexican Modernism. Lithographs, drawings, collages and a page from Kahlo’s diary are also included, alongside photographs of the artists by some of the most renowned photographers of the day. Prints by Kahlo’s father, Guillermo Kahlo, and a film by the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura are also being shown. The exhibition will be officially opened by the Minister for Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht Affairs, Jimmy Deenihan, TD, at 6.30pm on Tuesday 5 April.

Few artists have captured the public’s imagination with the force of the painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and her husband, the painter and muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957). The myths that surrounded them in their lifetime arose not only from their renowned bodies of work, but also from their vigorous participation in the life of their time, their friendships and conflicts with leading figures, their indomitable natures and their striking  physical presence. In her lifetime Kahlo was best known as Rivera’s colourful wife, with her art being classed as secondary to his, a position that was to alter in later years.

The exhibition presents six of Kahlo’s famous self-portraits, her favourite mode of expression, comprising more than a third of her oeuvre. Many reflect the artist’s personal difficulties, including a horrific tram accident, her subsequent ill health and miscarriages, her loneliness and the sometimes troubled nature of her relationship with Rivera. He himself described Kahlo’s work as “the only example in the history of art of an artist who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings.”

In Self-Portrait as Tehuana or Diego on My Mind, 1943, Kahlo dons a lace head-dress, as worn by Tehuana women on ceremonial occasions. Encircling her head like an aureole, it lends her the attributes of a spiritual icon. In addition to Kahlo’s spellbinding gaze, we are also drawn to the miniature portrait of Diego that appears in the centre of Kahlo’s forehead. In another of her best known works, Self-Portrait with Monkeys, 1943, she is attended by a court of spider monkeys against the backdrop of a tropical forest, while her penetrating stare demonstrates her use of both Old Master and Primitivist techniques. Another important influence, that of indigenous Mexican people and their art, can be seen in Self-Portrait with Necklace, 1933, and Self-Portrait MCMXLI, I941.

Diego Rivera’s training followed traditional European models, reinforced by a move to Europe in 1907, where he became part of the Cubist and other Modernist movements. However, he had already broken with Cubism prior to his return to Mexico in 1921, where a programme to encourage mural painting on public buildings to support the ideal of equality for the native population had been introduced by the Ministry of Education. Rivera emerged as a prominent member of this Mexican mural movement, an influential fusion of artistic, literary and intellectual forces in the post-revolutionary period. He was well established as a muralist when Jacques Gelman commissioned him to paint a portrait of his wife in 1943. In Portrait of Mrs. Natasha Gelman the subject is shown in a sensual pose wearing a sculpted dress against a background of calla lilies, a recurrent motif in Rivera’s works, signifying both the exquisiteness of the sitter’s nature and female sexuality.

Well before the 1940s, Rivera had already embarked on a new genre of painting and drawings, focusing on indigenous motifs from his murals and on portraits of mostly Mexican-Indian mothers and children. The exhibition includes several examples of this style, such as Modesta, 1937, and Girl with Gloves, 1943, both typical of their portrayal of appealing Mexican children. One of his most celebrated works, Calla Lily Vendor, of two girls in Mexican dress in front of a huge basket of lilies, was painted in 1943, a year in which he made expeditions with his students into the city and provinces to paint such everyday scenes. Sunflowers and The Healer, also 1943, are painted in this colourful style that made his work so popular in the Mexican and US art markets.

The 18 paintings in the exhibition are supplemented by other works including a page from Kahlo’s diary, lithographs, drawings and collages. Also included are striking photographs of Kahlo and Rivera by Lucienne Bloch, Héctor García, Martin Munkacsi, Nickolas Muray and Bernard Silberstein. As prominent personalities in Mexico’s cultural world, Kahlo and Rivera were used to the presence of press photographers in their home, acting as witnesses to their lives, and the photographs included in the exhibition contributed to the aura surrounding the couple.

The exhibition is further extended by the inclusion of photographs by Frida Kahlo’s German-born father Guillermo Kahlo. Having served as an apprentice in his father-in-law’s photography studio, Kahlo was commissioned in 1904 to make a visual inventory of important national buildings. The resulting prints, including churches around Mexico City and Tepotzlan and views from the Palace in Chapultepec Park, illustrate the architectural photography at which he excelled and his mastery of composition, light and shadow. Also being shown is Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura’s conceptual film Dialogue with Myself (Encounter), 2001, which pays homage to Frida Kahlo and is part of a series of works entitled An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo, in which Morimura talks the role of Kahlo the better to reveal her world. 

The Gelman Collection is a significant collection of more than 300 works of modern and contemporary Mexican art, established by Jacques and Natasha Gelman in the 1940s and housed in its own museum in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Russian-born Jacques Gelman (1909-86) travelled to Mexico in 1938 to found his own film production company. While there, he met Natasha Zahalka Krawak (1911-1998), who had fled her native Czechoslovakia following the Nazi invasion. They married in 1941 and became major art patrons in Mexico City at a time when it was exceptional to do so. The collection comprises two distinct elements. In addition to key paintings by Kahlo and Rivera, the Mexican collection includes works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo. Following Jacques’ death, Natasha Gelman continued to add to the collection with the guidance of her friend Robert Littman. When she died, the collection was entrusted to the Vergel Foundation and in the following years 12 new works by Kahlo, comprising all the works on paper in the exhibition, were added.

The Gelmans also a had a collection of modern European paintings by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, which they bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: Masterpieces of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection has already been shown to great popular and critical acclaim at the Pera Museum, Istanbul. It will also travel to the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, England, where it can be seen from 9 July to 11 October 2011.
An exhibition guide accompanies the show.

The exhibition is curated by Seán Kissane, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA. It continues until 26 June 2011.

The exhibition is sponsored by BNY Mellon and supported by The Irish Times, the Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht Affairs, the Mexican Embassy in Dublin and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes.

Admission: €5.00, concession: €3.00. Admission is free to all on Fridays.
Admission is free at all times for under-18s, those in full-time education, those on organised Museum programmes and IMMA Members.

Lecture:
Tuesday 5 April 2011, 5.00pm, The Chapel, IMMA
Sun and moon, dove and elephant.
Their Love story, as painted by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo                                        

To mark the occasion of the exhibition of works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera from the Gelman Collection; this keynote lecture is presented by leading art historian Dr. Helga Prignitz-Poda,  who specialises on the work of Frida Kahlo and Latin American studies. Dr. Helga Prignitz-Poda is author of the acclaimed Frida Kahlo: Life and Work (2003) and is curator of the Frida Kahlo- Retrospective in Berlin and Vienna (2010). Booking is essential and can be made online at www.imma.ie.
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
                               except Wednesday:  10.30am – 5.30pm  
                               Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
                               Closed: Mondays and Good Friday 22 April

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

22 March 2011

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An exhibition of Old Master prints by many of the most famous artists ever to work with print-making opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) on Wednesday 23 March 2011.  Works by Albrecht Dürer, Francisco de Goya, William Hogarth and Rembrandt van Rijn are all featured in Old Master Prints: The Madden Arnholz Collection, which is drawn from the Madden Arnholz Collection.  It was donated to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (RHK) in 1989 by Claire Madden, prior to the opening of the Museum in 1991.  The exhibition is curated by Janet and John Banville.

The works included in the exhibition are by German, Flemish, Dutch and British artists, spanning the period between the beginning of the 16th century and the early 20th century.  German printmakers of the Dürer period are well represented, but the most comprehensive part of the show is the remarkable group of prints by, and after, William Hogarth.  While not complete, this is a valuable group, with several proofs of Hogarth’s single prints and sequences of ‘modern moral subjects’ in various states. 

William Hogarth (1697-1764) was one of England’s most innovative and versatile artists.  His influence was so great that the phrase “The Age of Hogarth” is now frequently used to describe the first half of the 18th century.  Hogarth was renowned in particular for his use of satire to comment on the morals of his day.  Many of the subjects he addressed, such as crime, political corruption, sexuality, patriotism and charity, gave his work a distinctively modern feel.  His print series had a sequential character which could be said to anticipate the 20th century graphic and comic strip art and even film.

Also highlighted in the exhibition is the work of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Born in Nuremberg, Germany, he was regarded as one of the greatest artists of the Northern Renaissance.  He was also a painter, mathematician and theorist.  The renowned humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam paid his contemporary Dürer the highest compliment, saying that he achieved with his black and white prints what most artists could only express in colour.  This is evident in the exhibition in Dürer’s engraving The Great Horse (1505), where the detail of shadow with line and cross-hatching are remarkable. 

Another figure whose prints are just as well known as his paintings is Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European history.  His etching The Great Jewish Bride (1635), featured in the show, glistens with light. 

The Old Master prints were left to Claire Madden in 1982, after the death of her daughter Étain Madden-Arnholz at the age of forty-three.  Étain had been married to Dr. Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Arnholz, to whom the Collection belonged, and who died in 1968.  He was born in Berlin in 1897, into a wealthy merchant family and studied medicine.  Graduating in 1924, he worked as a doctor in his native city until 1939 when, being Jewish, he was forced to flee Germany for Britain – his brother was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz.  Moving to London, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War and later set up a private practice in Fulham where he was to work for the rest of his life. 

In London in the early 1960s, Arnholz met his future wife, Étain, who was some 30 years younger.  She had been brought up in England but was born in Ireland to politically active parents, so she never lost her strong sense of herself as an Irish patriot.  Étain was a student of Philosophy, and Fritz, who had studied under Artur Schnabel, was a pianist of professional standard.  Writing on the exhibition, John Banville says that Arnholz even bought a Bechstein grand piano with his reparation money from the post-war German government.  The piano had to be hoisted through the first-floor window of his surgery to the amazement of his neighbours.

Banville goes on to say that Fritz was a lifelong collector of books, “how I envied his first editions of Rilke and Thomas Mann! – But his first love was for prints, especially those of Hogarth and Dürer.  However he was no slave to reputation and some of the finest things among his collection are the works by unknown hands, and it is from these that we have mainly made our choices for the present exhibition.”  The avid collector, Arnholz built up a significant collection both in Britain and through regular visits to the continent. 

“This trove of European art, and craft— Dr Arnholz was as much a connoisseur of engraving skills as he was of artistic inspiration—is a testament to a remarkable man and his equally remarkable wife,” says Banville.

The Madden Arnholz Collection was generously donated by Claire Madden to the Royal Hospital in 1989 in memory of her daughter and son-in-law.  It includes some 1,200 Old Master prints – the collection of engravings by Hogarth alone numbers over 500 works and is among the most comprehensive print collections in existence by the artist.  The Collection also includes works donated in October 1998 following Claire Madden’s death.  These include a large collection of books containing prints by the English printmaker Thomas Bewick and his family, as well as unusual versions of the prints on silk and one of Bewick’s printing blocks, of which will also be included in the exhibition.

The original Madden Arnholz Collection was first shown at the RHK in 1987 before it was donated and shown again at IMMA featuring the Hogarth prints in 2007.  This exhibition consists of approximately 35 books from the Thomas Bewick collection and 80 Old Master prints. 

The exhibition continues until 12 June 2011.

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 Friday 22 April

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

21 March 2011

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An exhibition of works donated to the Irish Museum of Modern Art by Dublin-born artist Les Levine, opens to the public at IMMA on Wednesday 23 March 2011. Mindful Media: Works from the 1970s comprises two portfolios of etchings and photographic works mixing text and image to reinforce the artist’s belief that social and political problems are valid concerns for art.  

Both works are entitled The Troubles: An Artist’s Document of Ulster, 1972. The first is a group of 80 cibachrome photographs forming part of a series of works for which the artist coined the terms “media sculpture” and “media art”. The second suite of the same title comprises 18 photo-etchings made in 1979 from photographs taken in 1972. 

Speaking of the photographic suite of 80 works, executed in 1972, Levine says; “The piece is extremely colourful.  It deals with every aspect of the situation. It goes into Catholic homes, Protestant homes, churches, funerals, explosions…My approach was to take it from the human point of view, not the political.  So in all cases, I tried to show the people involved and to evoke some state of mind that they were representing in the photo. I avoided taking sides or showing bias. I think the photos speak for themselves and tell their own extraordinary story.”

During his prolific career Levine has produced major series of works about the manifold effects and functions of the media and information systems. Since 1976 he has produced many major media campaigns throughout North America, Europe and Australia. For these works, in many cases he has used billboards in which he subverts the language of mass advertising to interrogate social and political anxieties. In most cases these billboard campaigns operate throughout an entire city virtually turning that entire city into a media sculpture. His billboard campaign, entitled Blame God, shown as part of IMMA’s From Beyond the Pale season of exhibitions in 1994, attracted huge public attention.

Les Levine was born in Dublin in 1935. At the age of eight he met the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats and remained friends with him until his death. He studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, before moving to Toronto in 1958, where he continued his studies at the New School of Art. Levine’s artistic practice incorporates various means including painting, sculpture, installation, performance work, mail art and artists’ books.

Moving to New York in the 1960s, Levine became a leading conceptual art figure, intersecting art and life in a variety of projects such as Levine’s Restaurant, 1969 and the conceptual museum he invented in 1970 The Museum of Mott Art, Inc. He also published a monthly magazine in 1969 Culture Hero. In the 1960s, Levine was one of the first artists to work with video and television. His first video tapes were produced in 1964. His work was to become a precursor to the new generation of experimental artists who were exploring the possibilities of the moving image including Dan Graham, Gary Hill and Bruce Nauman. 

In 2004 Les Levine edited/curated Printed Project 04 in an issue entitled The Self Express. This presented a multi-faceted portrait of the artist conducted by 15 different interviewers. The title comes from the idea that all art is a form of self-expression. The Self Express interviews could be seen as mental portraits of the interviewers. 

Among his major exhibitions are Slipcover, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada, 1966; Contact, Institute of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, 1969; Language ÷ Emotion + Syntax = Message, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 1974; I Am Not Blind: An Information Environment About Unsighted People, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, 1977; Public Mind: Les Levine Media Sculpture and Mass Ad Campaigns, Everson Museum, NY, 1990, and Art Can See, Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart, 1997. 

Solo exhibitions of Levine’s work include the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo; and the Vancouver Art Gallery. His work is part of many international collections including Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Köln, Germany.

Levine continues to live and work in New York.

The exhibition is curated by Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections, IMMA.

Artists Talk

Les Levine Mindful Media: Works from the 1970s continues until 12 June 2011.   

Admission is free.

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
Mondays: Closed

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

9 March 2011

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A survey exhibition of the work of the Irish-American artist Philip Taaffe, one of the most significant painters working in America today, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) on Wednesday 23 March 2011. Philip Taaffe: Anima Mundi presents more than 30 abstract paintings from the past ten years, including many of the most striking examples of the vivid, complex imagery that characterises Taaffe’s highly individual practice. The exhibition also underlines the degree to which Taaffe, together with a handful of other artists, is responsible for the continuing international interest in abstraction which re-emerged in the 1990s. Other artists who have contributed to this revival include American Terry Winters and Spaniard Juan Uslé, who have also shown at IMMA.

Taaffe’s work is a veritable cornucopia of symbolism drawn from many different cultural and historical sources, including Islamic architecture, Eastern European textile design, calligraphy and information technology. His work has evolved significantly over the years since his first solo exhibition, mainly of collage works in 1982. However, his distinctive style using multiple references to create layered images of great complexity and beauty has been evident from quite early in his career. For example, although the exhibition focuses exclusively on paintings from the last ten years, echoes of earlier works, such as those from the mid-1980s that pay homage to abstract artists Bridget Riley and Barnett Newman, can be seen in Rose Nocturne (2002) and Port of Saints (2007).

Taaffe’s influences stem from his extensive travels and from his encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of image making. The titles of his works frequently refer to places, through words such as port, cape and passage. Porte Amur (2001) takes its name from the white shapes which dominate the composition, inspired by stencilled patterns on bark created by the people of the Amur River in Mongolia, one of the most northerly locations where Buddhism became established. Cape Siren (2008), the fourth in a series with imaginary capes in the title, features decorative motifs used by the native population of western Canada, where capes are a dominant geographical feature. Forms from this shamanic culture are alternated with Chinese heads and heads of mermaids and sirens of Greco-Roman origin. This work was donated to the National Collection at IMMA in 2008 by Irish collectors Lochlann and Brenda Quinn, as a Heritage Gift under Section 1003 of the Taxes Consolidation Act, 1997.

Devonian Leaves (2004) represents a further large body of work incorporating botanical references, a subject which first became important in Taaffe’s work in the 1990s. Here we see a floating, constellation-like arrangement of images of fossilised leaves from extinct plants of another geological epoch. The enamel marbled background gives the work a magma-like quality, bringing to mind the Big Bang and the origins of the universe. Other works refer to different forms of decoration. Cosmati (2007) takes its title from the Roman family who, in the 12th and 13th centuries, invented decorative, geometric designs for church floor mosaics using minute pieces of stone and coloured glass.

Although diverse in their inspiration, Taaffe’s paintings make up an unusually coherent, rewarding whole. In an essay in the exhibition catalogue, IMMA’s Director Enrique Juncosa, the curator of the exhibition, explains how Taaffe’s methods “have allowed him to develop a body of work that is visually extremely rich and highly individual. He is capable of harmoniously intermingling diverse ideas and cultural phenomena in a very open, inclusive, and seductive way, that leaves room for irony and political commentary while remaining open to interpretation by the viewer.”

Taaffe does not see style as an end in itself but rather as a means of transporting us to another perhaps more ordered and inviting place.  Shortly before the first works in the current exhibition were painted he explained: “I would say that to look at a painting means that one is taken up with another reality, a pictorial fictive reality, and as such that picture represents an imaginary location. So that if one is fed up with the mundane and pedestrian experiences of life, and instead stands in front of a painting, that is a place, an imaginary construction to inhabit with one’s sensory being. To be lost inside of a painting is the crucial experience here, as an alternative to other places in the world.”

Born in 1955 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Philip Taaffe studied at the Cooper Union in New York City.  His first solo exhibition was in 1982, and his work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Carnegie International, two Sydney Biennials and three Whitney Biennials. In 2000 the IVAM museum in Valencia staged a retrospective survey of his work. Taaffe’s work has also been acquired by some of the world’s leading musuems, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York, and the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.

The exhibition is curated by Enrique Juncosa, Director of IMMA, and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue featuring texts by Enrique Juncosa and novelist and writer Colm Tóibín and an interview with Philip Taaffe by David Brody, art critic and Professor at the School of Art in the University of Washington in Seattle.

Limited Edition:
Twenty signed and numbered limited edition prints by Philip Taaffe are available for sale from the opening night of the exhibition, visit www.immaeditions.ie.

Lecture:
Tuesday 22 March 2011, 5.00pm, Lecture Room, IMMA
To mark the occasion of the survey exhibition, Philip Taaffe presents an artist’s talk that is followed by a wine reception and exhibition preview.

Philip Taaffe: Anima Mundi continues at IMMA until 12 June 2001.

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 Friday 22 April

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

7 March 2011

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