PRESS RELEASE – 30 September 2010

A film documenting the symbolic burial of Patrick Ireland, the alter ego of the distinguished Irish artist Brian O’Doherty, will be launched at the Irish Film Institute at 7.00pm on Friday 8 October 2010. The Dying of Patrick Ireland is made by Loopline Film and is directed by Sé Merry Doyle. The film is produced by Vanessa Gildea and financed by the Irish Film Board and Loopline Film.

On 20 May 2008, after 36 years of making art as Patrick Ireland, Brian O’Doherty reclaimed his birth name with the burial of his alter ego in the grounds of IMMA. The burial was a gesture of reconciliation to celebrate the restoration of peace in Northern Ireland, just as his action in assuming the name Patrick Ireland was a protest at the British military presence in Northern Ireland and the failure of the authorities to ensure civil rights for all.
 
During the Irish Exhibition of Living Art at the Project Arts Centre in 1972, O’Doherty, in a performance before 30 invited witnesses and assisted by Robert Ballagh and Brian King, undertook to "sign his artworks Patrick Ireland until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights." This commitment, often seen as controversial, the artist described as "an expatriate’s gesture in response to Bloody Sunday in Derry." 
 
Born in Ballaghadereen, Co Roscommon, Brian O’Doherty variously exhibited in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and in the RHA and Oireachtas exhibitions from 1950 to 1956. He moved to the United States in 1957, where he became a pioneer in the development of conceptual art and also a renowned writer and critic. He has had several retrospectives, most recently in New York University’s Grey Gallery. His work has been seen in Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and Rosc. He is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The influence of his ground-breaking collection of essays Inside the White Cube continues to this day.

Commenting on the film, director Sé Merry Doyle said: “I first came across the names Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland in 1974 when I worked at the Project Arts Centre. Even two years after the event had taken place people were still talking about Brian O’Doherty’s historic name change. When the news broke that 34 years later he was going to change his name back to Brian O’Doherty I felt compelled to document this. The film is not so much a documentary as a document for the ages. It is a document that I hope will throw light on one of the most important political art statements to come out of Ireland.”

The launch coincides with the gift to the Irish Museum of Modern Art by Brian O’Doherty and his wife, the art historian Barbara Novak, of more than 70 artworks from their own collection. An exhibition of the donated work Post-War American Art: The Novak/O’Doherty Collection, is on show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until 27 February 2011.

Limited tickets to the launch are available to the public online at www.imma.ie.

Additional screenings of The Dying of Patrick Ireland will take place at IMMA at a later date. These screenings will be open to the public. For further information visit www.imma.ie.

The Dying of Patrick Ireland
Director: Sé Merry Doyle
Producer: Vanessa Gildea
Executive Producer: Martina Durac
Editor: Sé Merry Doyle
Director of Photography: Paddy Jordan
Original Music: Lance Hogan (Kíla)
Financiers: Bord Scannán na hÉireann/ The Irish Film Board and Loopline Film
Duration: 50 minutes

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

30 September 2010

PRESS RELEASE – 30 SEPTEMBER 2010

The Moderns: The Arts in Ireland from the 1900s to the 1970s at the Irish Museum of Modern Art

A major exhibition examining the development of modernity in 20th-century Ireland through the visual arts, and other art forms, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 20 October 2010.  The Moderns: The Arts in Ireland from the 1900s to the 1970s  is one of the most ambitious exhibitions ever undertaken by the Musuem, comprising some 250 works by more than 180 artists, writers, film-makers, architects, designers and composers. It presents the work of many of the 20th century’s leading creative minds and constitutes the most extensive showing to date from IMMA’s own Collection. The exhibition will be officially opened by the Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport, Mary Hanafin, TD, at 7.30pm on Tuesday 19 October.

The Moderns focuses on the innovative and the experimental and employs a broad, interdisciplinary approach. It brings together exceptional examples of painting and sculpture, photography and film, architecture, literature, music and design of Irish significance from the 20th century. The exhibition clearly positions photography as part of mainstream visual art, through photographs taken by J M Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Roger Casement, Fergus Bourke and many others.

Curated around the Museum’s Collection, and occupying almost all of IMMA’s main building, the exhibition includes many superb loans from public and private collections in Ireland and beyond. The Moderns focuses primarily on the arts in Ireland but also includes the work of some European artists, mainly French and British, who had special relevance to what was being done in this country.

Commenting on the Museum’s reason for staging the exhibition, Irish Museum of Modern Art Director Enrique Juncosa says: “A central aim of this project is to highlight the importance of the Collection to us at IMMA, and how this exhibition has to be more than the mere display of considered masterpieces as if they were trophies. It is important that the Collection [is] used as an educational tool and as a mechanism to encourage debate, historical analysis and scholarship. With The Moderns, we wish to present visual culture in relation to other art practices – none of them, after all, were developed in isolation – and to analyse contexts and aesthetic development and changes.”

VISUAL ART AND DESIGN

The Moderns is being presented more or less chronologically, starting with J M Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Roderic O’Conor and William Leech and closing with the earliest post-modern artists such as Michael Craig-Martin, Barry Flanagan, Sean Scully and James Coleman. Special displays range from the work of Eileen Gray and Mainie Jellett to that of Jack B Yeats and Francis Bacon.   In addition, Samuel Beckett’s Film made in 1965, is presented as one of the major visual arts works in the Irish canon. The exhibition also considers the vision and enterprise of collectors, gallerists and other individuals whose contribution qualifies them for inclusion in any survey of modernity in Ireland.

ARCHITECTURE

In the field of architecture, The Moderns references major achievements such as the Shannon Scheme in the late 1920s, the Irish Pavillion at the 1939 New York World Fair and the internationally-acclaimed bus terminus, Busáras, by Michael Scott, as well as a host of innovative architects such as Noel Moffett and Andy Devane, and later Scott Tallon Walker, Stephenson & Gibney and others. 

LITERATURE AND MUSIC

The show presents first editions by leading Irish writers, including W B Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett,  Anthony Cronin, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney  and many others.  In addition, it will feature a selection of critically-acclaimed music, in manuscript and audio form,  by Frederick May, Sean Ó Riada, Seoirse Bodley, Raymond Deane and Gerald Barry and will acknowledge the achievements of Woodtown and Claddagh Records.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM

Works specially selected by the Gallery of Photography include photographs made by Roger Casement in the Congo, self-portraits and other images by George Bernard Shaw and an array of remarkable photographs made by Independent Newspapers’ photographers during the 1930s and 40s.   The Irish Film Institute (IFI) will present  a parallel programme of screenings and related discussions for The Moderns around classic films such as Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein (1919), Man of Aran (1934) by Robert J Flaherty,  Film by Samuel Beckett (1965) and Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoire (1975) by Bob Quinn, inspired by the Irish lament The Lament for Art O’Leary.

Referring to the influence of Modernism on the arts in Ireland, Enrique Juncosa says, “It has very often been said that Modernism did not really happen in Ireland, but clearly a lot of the best art produced here demonstrates a knowledge of international ideas of the period, even if those were filtered or tinted with local myths, beliefs, traditions, history or politics.

The exhibition is jointly curated by Enrique Juncosa and Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections at IMMA.

Lecture

Peripheral Visions: Rethinking Irish Modernism, Tuesday 19 October at 6.00pm in the Chapel at IMMA

IMMA Director Enrique Juncosa introduces Professor Luke Gibbons who will present a keynote lecture exploring the transformation of visual culture in relation to Irish Modernism and the Revival.

Booking is essential and can be made online at www.imma.ie.

An extensive, 400-plus-page catalogue will include all the works in the show as well as several exhibition installation shots. It will be available in late January 2011. Contributors will include Bruce Arnold, Theo Dorgan, Aidan Dunne, Luke Gibbons, Enrique Juncosa, Robert O’Byrne, Christina Kennedy, David Lloyd and Ellen Rowley.

The Moderns is sponsored by BNP Paribas and its media partners are The Irish Times, RTÉ and ebow.

The Moderns continues until 13 February 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]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PRESS RELEASE – 3 September 2010

Line exploring space: Drawings from the IMMA Collection in Thurles as part of IMMA’s National Programme

Line exploring space: Drawings from the IMMA Collection opens at The Source Arts Centre, Thurles, Co Tipperary, at 8.00pm on Thursday 9 September 2010. The exhibition continues at the Tipperary Institute, Thurles Campus. The collaboration is the result of an established relation between The Tipperary Institute and The Source Arts Centre. However, it is the first time both venues have worked together with the National Programme at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

During the 1960s, as abstract art gained prominence, there was a widespread rebellion against the traditional methods of drawing. As a result drawing became largely a preparatory exercise with many works remaining unseen in the artist’s studio. Within the last decade, however, drawing has been reenergised by the widespread proliferation of imagery. Line exploring space aims to explore the diverse nature of drawing through the display of traditional methods of drawing and its relation to photography, film, print and installation. The exhibition includes artwork by artists such as Alice Maher, Hughie O’Donoghue, Stephen Brandes, David Godbold and Garrett Phelan. 

Alice Maher’s The Music of Things, explores drawing through an animated film. This is the first example of moving imagery in Maher’s work, and is an example of the artist’s continuous quest to develop her work through new languages and new materials. Beginning with a sheet of A4 Hahnemühle paper, Maher scanned each stage of the pencil drawing at 10-minute intervals preserving the images as documents in a computer. There is no ‘actual’ drawing, just the record of its many stages. When added together as an animated sequence the drawings form a peculiar imaginative narrative. It follows the twists and turns of the artist’s decision-making process, becoming witness to the evolution of a series of images that never remains constant but grows and morphs with thought and time.

Stephen Brandes also presents work with a fantastical narrative. Using the pictorial language of European fairytales, 20th-century poster design and medieval cartography, his large graphic works represent fantastical, dysfunctional landscapes that suggest places from history and fairytales, while the smaller paintings and drawings often imply imagined fragments of tales. Brandes, like Maher, employs a variety of styles and materials, from small paintings and collages, to vast highly detailed drawings on unexpected surfaces (like used floor vinyl or straight onto the gallery wall) such as Hotel Amnesia.

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.

The exhibition is accompanied by artist led discussion and workshops.
A retrospective publication will be produced and will include responses by artists John Beattie and Christine Mackey.
Line exploring space: Drawings from the IMMA Collection continues until 21 October 2010.

Admission is free.

For further information and images please contact Patrice Molloy or Vanessa Cowley, IMMA at Tel: +353 1 612 9900, Email: [email protected]  or The Source Arts Centre at Tel: +353 504 90204, Email: [email protected]

3 September 2010

Downloadable Copy (Word Doc 2003, 31.5KB)

PRESS RELEASE – 10 AUGUST 2010

Graphic Studio Dublin at the Irish Museum of Modern Art

An exhibition featuring a wide cross-section of prints by some 30 leading Irish and international artists, created over the past 50 years, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 8 September 2010.  Graphic Studio: 50 Years in Dublin celebrates the 50^th anniversary of Ireland’s first printmaking studio with a particular focus on their distinctive Visiting Artists Programme.  The show also highlights the studio’s establishment by five members who, through innovation and progressive thinking, made Ireland a centre of world class printmaking.

 

The exhibition presents a diverse range of prints from those founding members – Patrick Hickey, Leslie MacWeeney, Liam Millar, Elizabeth Rivers and Anne Yeats – right through to the newer generation of artists integrating print into their wider practices, including Diana Copperwhite and Geraldine O’Neill.  The show also presents prints by such celebrated artists as Patrick Scott, Dorothy Cross and the late Barry Flanagan.  Writing in the accompanying catalogue, Irish Times art critic Aidan Dunne is struck by “how good an historical record [the exhibition] provides of Irish art – and not exclusively Irish art – from the mid-20^th century onwards.” 

 

Since 1980, these and other artists have been involved with the studio’s Visiting Artists Programme started by Mary Farl Powers, where international and Irish artists are invited to the studio to work with master printers developing a body of prints that expands the boundaries of their usual practices.  This creative collaboration manifests itself in special and often unexpected ways as can be seen in the exhibition.  The show reveals itself as an important historical archive, telling the story of the often crucial relationship between printer and artist.  From the start of the programme, a small number of master printmakers at the Graphic Studio, including Tom Phelan and current studio Director Robert Russell, have been guiding and mentoring artists through the printmaking process.  These shared skills combine to create editions that are unique to the Graphic Studio, as can be seen in the longstanding artistic partnership of William Crozier and Robert Russell whose latest edition is currently being made especially for IMMA’s Limited Edition sales.  

 

The exhibition also marks a forthcoming donation of works to the Irish Museum of Modern Art from the Graphic Studio Archive on the occasion of their golden anniversary.  This is in addition to the Mary Farl Powers Archive donation made by her family in 2009.

 

Jackie Ryan, Chief Executive Officer of the Graphic Studio Dublin says of the show, “Working with IMMA to realise this exhibition…has been a tremendous journey.  That its timing coincides with the donation to IMMA of the Mary Farl Powers Archive is deeply enriching.  The legacy that Farl Powers left the studio, in the establishment of this programme, helps assure its international placement in the next 50 years of our history…We are proud that in association with this exhibition, Graphic Studio Dublin is donating a significant number of works from our archive of prints, from both Visiting Artists and our Members to IMMA’s permanent collection, ensuring that fine art print, and Graphic Studio Dublin’s contribution to it, are firmly enshrined in Ireland’s visual landscape.”

Graphic Studio Dublin was established in 1960 to teach traditional printmaking skills and to provide studios and technical assistance to artists to make fine art prints. Its Graphic Studio Gallery was established in 1988 dedicated to promoting fine art printmaking in Ireland and abroad, educating the public about fine art printmaking and exhibiting and selling fine art prints on behalf of its member artists.

 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-colour, illustrated catalogue that will contain essays by the exhibition’s curator Eimear O’Raw, Curatorial Coordinator: Irish Museum of Modern Art, as well as Aidan Dunne and Jackie Ryan, along with an introduction by Enrique Juncosa, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

 

Graphic Studio Dublin is supported by The Arts Council.

 

Talks and Demonstrations

 

Introduction to Printmaking Techniques for Adults and Children

Saturday, 18 September 2010 starting at 11:00am

Featuring Introductory Talk by Graphic Studio Director Robert Russell and separate workshops for children and adults given by Mary Fitzgerald and Graphic Studio artists.  For further information see IMMA’s website www.imma.ie in the Education and Community: Talks, Lectures & Events section.

 

Graphic Studio: 50 Years in Dublin continues until 3 January 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 August 2010

Press Release – 3 August 2010 
George Segal Preparing to Cast Barbara Novak for "Street Crossing" 1992. Documentation photograph. Photograph by Donald Lokuta

Post-War American Art: The Novak/O’Doherty Collection

 

An exhibition of 76 artworks by many of America’s leading post-war artists gifted to the IMMA Collection by art historian Barbara Novak and artist Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 8 September 2010. Post-War American Art: The Novak/O’Doherty Collection, donated in association with the American Ireland Fund, comprises paintings and sculpture and an extensive range of works on paper, including watercolours, drawings, photographs and limited edition prints and multiples. Works by Joseph Cornell, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and a host of other celebrated artists are included in the exhibition.

 

The donation is particularly rich in works from New York of the 1960s and ‘70s; many the result of friendships with outstanding artists from that milieu. We can imagine the lives of Barbara Novak and Brian O’Doherty over 50 years – they married in 1960 – through these paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures and prints.  Many works were swops with other artists or tokens of friendship, inscribed with dedications or personal notes; others reflect their ongoing exchanges and correspondence through postcards and letters, such as the postcards sent by Sol LeWitt over the years incorporating sketches. Still other works were gifts, while some were purchased.  Through them we see that Barbara Novak and Brian O’Doherty were central figures in the art community of the 1960s and ‘70s and beyond.

 

Four important works, by Edward Hopper, Marcel Duchamp, George Segal and Jasper Johns, were gifted in 2009. The forthcoming exhibition celebrates the arrival of the balance of their collection to IMMA. Other artists represented in the collection include  Christo, Mel Bochner, William Scharf, Peter Hutchinson, Les Levine, Sonja Sekula,  John Coplans, Arnold Newman, and Elise Asher. Some works were included in the recent exhibition Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts – appropriate since the composer Morton Feldman was a close of friend of the donors.

 

Born in New York, Barbara Novak is an enormously influential art historian as well as artist and novelist.  She is the author of American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, Nature and Culture and Voyages of the Self, recently published as a trilogy on American art and culture by Oxford University Press. She joined the art history department of Barnard College and Columbia University in 1958 and retired as Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor Emerita in 1998. A chaired professorship at Barnard College was named in her honour.

 

Born in Ballaghadereen, Co Roscommon, Brian O’Doherty variously exhibited in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and in the RHA and Oireachtas exhibitions from 1950 to 1956. He moved to the United States in 1957, where he became a pioneer in the development of Conceptual Art and also a renowned writer and critic. He has had several retrospectives, most recently in New York University’s Grey Gallery. His work has been seen in Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and Rosc. He is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The influence of his ground-breaking collection of essays Inside the White Cube continues.

 

Commenting on the gift, Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections, said:

 

‘As IMMA approaches its 20th anniversary in 2011, it is its great good fortune to be the recipient of a most generous gift of artworks from the personal collection of Brian O’Doherty and Barbara Novak. Their gift to IMMA fulfills a longstanding wish of Brian O’Doherty, supported by Barbara Novak, to provide Irish artists and audiences with a collection of modern American art. While there are individual works by American artists in the Collection, the gift launches a whole new area of collecting and focus for IMMA, expanding its horizons to include an immensely rich seam of American art.

 

This donation cements an already important relationship: not only has IMMA in recent years acquired two superb examples of  the artist’s Conceptualist work, even more powerfully since 2008 it is the location of The Burial of Patrick Ireland.  Patrick Ireland was an identity which Brian O’Doherty assumed, in a performance enacted in 1972 called Name Change, whereby as  a gesture of patriotic protest at the Bloody Sunday killings of 13 civil rights marchers, he pledged to sign his artwork Patrick Ireland “until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights.” Thirty-six years later, in 2008, in a remarkable ceremony, an effigy of Patrick Ireland was interred in the formal gardens at IMMA, in a ceremony of reconciliation celebrating peace in Northern Ireland.’

 

IMMA’s Collection comprises more than 4,500 works in a wide range of media, having grown significantly, through purchases, donations, long-term loans and the commissioning of new works. It is shown in themed exhibitions at IMMA, and also throughout Ireland via the Museum’s unique National Programme. The presence of IMMA’s Collection abroad has increased substantially in recent years, with large-scale exhibitions in Beijing and Shanghai, China, Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago, United States, St John’s, Newfoundland, and San Sebastian, Spain, plus numerous loans of individual works to museums and galleries worldwide.

 

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustated catalogue, with a contextualising comment by Brian O’Doherty and individual insights on almost all of the works by both donors; an introductory essay by Christina Kennedy and a foreword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA.

 

This exhibition is supported by the Clarence Hotel.

 

 

American Post-War Art: The Novak/O’Doherty Collection continues at IMMA until

27 February 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 Patrice Molloy or Vanessa Cowley at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected]

3 August 2010

An exhibition by one of Cuba’s leading contemporary artists Carlos Garaicoa, whose work explores the social fabric of our cities through the examination of its architecture, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 10 June 2010. Carlos Garaicoa brings together new and recent works comprising sculpture, installation, drawing, video and photography, which explore the themes of architecture and urbanism, politics and history, and narrative and human culture. Since the early 1990s Garaicoa has developed his multi-faceted practice as a means to critique modernist utopian architecture and the collapse of 20th-century ideologies using the city as his point of departure. Adopting the city of Havana as his laboratory, his works are charged with provocative commentaries on issues such as architecture’s ability to alter the course of history, the failure of modernism as a catalyst for social change and the frustration and decay of 20th-century utopias.

Garaicoa spends time exploring cities to discover their true meaning, he often illustrates his vision in large installations using various materials such as crystal, wax candles and rice-paper lamps. In No Way Out, 2002, a city at night is constructed through various scales of illuminated rice-paper lamps, while the materials in this work reference Japan, the uniformity of the city landscape alludes to a universal situation common to all cities worldwide. In The Crown Jewels, 2009, miniature replicas of real-life torture centres, prisons and intelligence networks are cast in silver and in Bend City (Red), 2007, a city is constructed entirely from cut cardboard.

Havana, the extraordinary city where he grew up, is a particular source of inspiration for Garaicoa’s work and it is from this city’s complicated development that his preoccupation with the detritus of the cityscape developed. After the Cuban revolution in 1959, many architectural projects and buildings were left unfinished or abandoned, in Havana and in other Cuban cities. This juxtaposition of architectural projects halted and abandoned, and the buildings of the colonial period, create a narrative of a complex political history that scars the landscape. Garaicoa refers to these as ‘ruins of the future, where ruins are proclaimed before they even get to exist’. Garaicoa addresses these collapsed buildings in his black-and-white photographs by pairing them with a second image that reconstructs the missing parts with coloured threads and pins. By illustrating the absence of these once-great structures, Garaicoa emphasises the reality of these failed utopias. His interest in urban ruins has expanded from the cities of Cuba to cities around the world from LA to Paris to Moscow.

Garaicoa directly references iconic texts and writers through the titles of his pieces as well as within the sculptural works themselves, particularly the concept of the city as a symbolic space as it appears in the work of the writers Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. In On how my brazilian library feeds itself with fragments of a concrete reality, 2008, publications on Brazilian architecture, landscape and culture are stacked in rows interspersed with cement blocks. The front of the sculpture reveals the books spines while the back shows a number of bullets inserted into the cement. In her essay for the catalogue Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy describes this work “As if it has been attacked, the sculpture sets in motion ideas of urban development and the weight and the wounds of progress”. The use of books is repeated in the works My personal Library Grows-up Together with My Political Principles, 2008, where architectural publications are assembled to form the framework of a city landscape and Monsieur Haussmann, la perfection n’existe pas, 2009, where a stack of copies of the book Paris-Haussmann are placed on a plinth with the exposed paper at the base of the books inscribed with the plan of Place de l’Etoile in Paris. Baron Haussmann was famous for his creation of modern Paris, with its boulevards and grand vistas designed for the bourgeoisie of Paris representing his ideal utopian city, but not necessarily the reality.

Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967, Carlos Garaicoa trained initially as a thermodynamics engineer before his mandatory military service. While in the army he worked as a draughtsman, learning the skills the he would use later in his practice as an artist. He attended the Havana Instituto Superior de Arte in Cuba from 1989 to 1994. Garaicoa has exhibited extensively around the world, recent exhibitions include the Venice Biennale, 2009; Havana Biennale, 2009; La Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro, 2008; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2007; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 2006, and Documenta II, Kassel, 2002. He lives and works in Havana and Madrid.

The exhibition is curated by Seán Kissane, Acting Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue documenting Garaicoa’s work since 2006. It includes essays by Seán Kissane; Okwui Enwezor, curator, writer and critic; and Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Director of the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.

Artist’s Talk: Carlos Garaicoa
Wednesday 9 June 2010, 5.00pm, Lecture Room, IMMA
Garaicoa discusses his interests in urban planning and a city’s architectural social fabric. This event is followed by the exhibition preview and wine reception. Booking is essential, please click here to book.

Access
Visitors are asked to note that, on the OPW’s advice, the Museum is unable to facilitate access by lift-dependent visitors, including wheelchair users, to the First Floor Galleries in the main building until further notice. The Museum greatly regrets this inconvenience. The Ground Floor Galleries, the New Galleries and IMMA’s café and bookshop remain accessible to all visitors.

Carlos Garaicoa continues until 5 September 2010. 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 Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected]

27 May 2010

An exhibition by Ferran Garcia Sevilla, a leading Spanish artist whose career has embraced many of the most influential art movements of the past 40 years, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 10 June 2010. Ferran Garcia Sevilla presents 42 paintings in the artist’s characteristically eclectic style, which draws on influences as diverse as his travels in the Middle East, philosophy, Eastern cultures, comic books and urban graffiti. The exhibition comprises works from 1981 to date and includes well-known earlier works, alongside a group of more recent, previously unseen pieces, all illustrating the extraordinary visual richness of Garcia Sevilla’s work.
 
The earlier works in the exhibition date from the 1980s, when Garcia Sevilla was one of the principal proponents of the so-called return to painting. This followed a period as an outstanding figure in the vibrant Catalan Conceptual Art scene centred on Barcelona, where he had settled from Palma de Majorca in 1969. Paintings such as Ruc series, created after a trip to Nepal in 1986, brought Garcia Sevilla great international acclaim, as part of an explosion of Spanish art on the international scene, which also included artists such as Juan Mũnoz, Cristina Iglesias, José Maria Sicilia and Miquel Barceló. During the 1980s he showed regularly throughout Europe and beyond, with solo show in Spain, France, the UK and Japan. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1986, in Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987 and in ROSC 1988, which took place in number of locations around Dublin, including the Royal Hospital Kilmainham now the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
 
Works from this period such as the celebrated Deus series from 1981 demonstrate the artist’s interest in exotic cultures and mythologies, while their execution, with rapid brush strokes and splashes and drips, suggest the immediacy of primitive rituals. The Ruc paintings show a further development of these mythic or symbolic forms in a more graphic style and include what the artist himself has described as some of his most powerful images. Always controversial, he also began to introduce, sometimes self-mocking, phrases into his paintings, such as “If you discover the secret I’m sure you’ll get depressed” in Muca 17.

Towards the end of the 1980s Garcia Sevilla works take on a more three-dimensional form incorporating everyday objects, including books, shoes and light bulbs. His use of floor tiles in the Mosaico series refers directly to the work of the famous Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who used broken ceramics in, for example, his design for Parc Güell. The early 1990s sees the introduction of still further new imagery in the form of coloured discs, hands, feet and arrow motifs in the Sama series from 1990, while the many works that make up the Xa series from 1995 contain primarily black and red forms reminiscent of scaffolding or of the iron grilles used in 19th-century balconies in Barcelona.

Towards the end of the 1990s, in series such as Tepe, Garcia Sevilla’s work becomes more introverted, featuring drips, intertwining and superimposed lines, dots and nets. While these motifs suggest balloons, gun shots, fireworks and comets as well as force-fields, graphs and atmospheric phenomena, they may also simply be results of the properties of paint as a material. In some cases, he exaggerates the dripping effect further by rotating his canvases. These works were the last to be seen for some time and marked a move from the narrative to the lyrical in which specific references are abandoned.

In 1998 Garcia Sevilla stopped exhibiting in solo exhibitions, alienated by what he saw as an overly-commercialised art scene. He continued, however to create work with the same vigour as before and works began to emerge again in a solo show in Barcelona in 2007. In the Moll series from 2008, for example, the dot has become the predominant element, seemingly referring to notions such as the dissolution of reality or the disintegration of matter. Sometimes they are spread over the expanse of the painting; on other occasions, they form constellations and molecular chains.  

Born in Palma de Majorca in 1949, Ferran Garcia Sevilla lives and works in Barcelona. Major international exhibitions include Foundation Cartier, Paris, 1997; IVAM, Valencia, 1998; Malmo Konsthall, 1998; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia Sofía, Madrid, 2001; and more recently exhibitions at Galería Joan Prats, Barcelona, 2007, and Galería Fúcares, Madrid, 2008.

The exhibition is curated by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA.

The exhibition is co-produced by the Irish Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with Patio Herreriano, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Espanol, Valladolid, Spain, where it will be shown from 2 October 2010 to 9 January 2011.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with texts by Enrique Juncosa; Dan Cameron, Visual Arts Director of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Centre; Cristina Fontaneda Berthet, Director, Patio Herreriano; Greg Hilty, Curatorial Director, Lisson Gallery, London; Seán Kissane, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA; Kevin Power, writer and curator, and John Yau, poet and critic. 

The exhibition is supported by Institut Ramon which promotes Catalan language and culture internationally.

Access
Visitors are asked to note that, on the advice of the OPW, the Museum is unable to facilitate access by lift-dependent visitors, including wheelchair users, to the First Floor Galleries in the main building until further notice. The Museum greatly regrets this inconvenience. The Ground Floor Galleries, the New Galleries and IMMA’s café and bookshop remain accessible to all visitors.

Ferran Garcia Sevilla continues at IMMA until 5 September 2010. 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 Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected]

27 May 2010

An innovate exhibition, designed to stimulate engagement with the visual arts by people with disabilities, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 17 June 2010. Altered Images comprises works from the collections of South Tipperary County Council, Mayo County Council and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, all of which have been selected and curated with a view to creating an exhibition which is accessible, interactive and inclusive for all, but especially for those with disabilities. The exhibition was originally scheduled to open at IMMA on 19 May. However, due to some recently-discovered access difficulties, the exhibition has had to be relocated from the first to the ground floor galleries causing the start date to be rescheduled.

Altered Images includes work by Thomas Brezing, David Creedon, Alice Maher, Caroline McCarthy and Abigail O’Brien, with specially commissioned works by Amanda Coogan and Daphne Wright. The exhibition already met with an enthusiastic reception when shown at the South Tipperary County Museum, Clonmel, and at the Ballina Arts Centre, Co Mayo, in 2009. The IMMA exhibition will be officially opened by Fintan O’Toole, Assistant Editor, The Irish Times, at 6.00pm on Wednesday 16 June. 

The idea that a visual art exhibition should be accessible to all is not a new one, most museums and galleries have an access programme that enables people with disabilities to experience art works. However, the idea of selecting an entire exhibition with an emphasis on accessibility in a multi-dimensional way is relatively new in Ireland. The exhibition aims to enhance people’s engagement with the works through the tactility of relief models, by listening to the audio and artist’s descriptions and by viewing the sign language interpretation by Amanda Coogan.

Altered Images works on many levels. The selected works all make reference to classical or art historical sources either in the method of depiction or their subject matter. While each of the partner organisations has very different Collections in terms of capacity and the period of time they have been collecting, it was agreed at the outset that each would be represented equally. Each art work is accompanied by a multi-sensory display in order to provide meaningful access. In addition, an audio CD and Braille documentation of the large-print exhibition catalogue are available on request. Sign language tours are available by arrangement and an accessible website for the project can be found at www.alteredimages.ie

Padraig Naughton, Director, Arts and Disability Ireland commented in the accompanying catalogue: “What makes Altered Images an advance on what has gone before in an Irish context is the curation of a whole exhibition that has a multi-sensory approach to access thus having an inclusive appeal that will reach the widest audience possible. While in my reflections I have concentrated predominantly on my access requirements as a visually impaired person, Altered Images intends to provide access solutions that are cross-impairment while simultaneously creating an exhibition of equal interest and accessibility to a non-disabled audience. Consequently encouraging disabled people and their families and friends to come and explore the exhibition together. Furthermore it will for example allow people who are blind or deaf to explore the conceptual nature of visual and sound art along side non-disabled people.” 

On Friday 18 June IMMA is hosting a seminar to reflect on the experience of the partnering institutions and to explore the challenges, practical issues and resources involved in delivering an exhibition of this scale. Speakers, who are invited to share information on their individual experiences, include Marcus Dickey Horley, Curator of Access Projects, Visitor Services Manager, Tate Modern; Anne Hornsby, audio describer, Mind’s Eye; Anne McCarthy, Arts Officer, Mayo; Orla Moloney, Arts Council; Johanne Mullan, National Programmer, IMMA; Padraig Naughton, Director, Arts and Disability Ireland; Damien O’Connor, Disability Arts Coordinator, Mayo Arts Office; Sally O’Leary, Arts Officer, South Tipperary County Council; Loz Simpson, model maker, Topografik, and Georgie Thompson, Assistant Curator: Collections, IMMA. For further details on this event please click here

The access difficulties which necessitated the relocation of the exhibition have arisen in advance of structural works being carried out by the Office of Public Works (OPW). On the OPW’s advice, the Museum is unable to facilitate access by lift-dependent visitors, including wheelchair users, to the First Floor Galleries in the main building until further notice. The Museum greatly regrets this inconvenience. In addition to the Ground Floor Galleries, the New Galleries and IMMA’s café and bookshop remain accessible to all visitors.

Altered Images continues at IMMA until 15 August 2010. 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 and Good Friday 2 April:  Closed

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

24 May 2010

An exhibition presenting artworks recently acquired for IMMA’s Collection, marking the first occasion that these works have been shown at the Museum as part of that Collection, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 19 May 2010. Collecting the New comprises some 42 works which have, for the most part, been acquired since 2005, through purchase, donation and loans. Twenty-six Irish and international artists are represented, including Amanda Coogan, Patrick Hall, Stefan Kürten, Catherine Lee, Janet Mullarney, Makiko Nakamura, Hughie O’Donoghue, and Susan Tiger. The exhibition reflects the Museum’s acquisition policy that the Collection should be firmly rooted in the present, concentrating on acquiring the work of living artists, but also accepting donations and loans of more historical art objects with a particular emphasis on work from the 1940s onwards.

Recent donations on display range from works on paper by Irish artist Patrick Hall to a painting by English artist Alexis Harding. Patrick Hall’s ink, pastel and watercolour works on paper, such as Sprinkle Ochre into my Eyes, 2004, reflect his lifelong interest in human experience, suggesting a quest for meaning and happiness, fuelled by the twin sources of energy behind his work – mysticism and sexuality. Alexis Harding’s uses modernist devices such as grids, lines and arrows to make paintings which seem to be bound in their own materiality, driven by his exploitation of the incompatibility between artists’ oil paint and household gloss paint. This can be seen in the painting Drifters Escape (Blue oil / Dark blue gloss), 2006, in which the artist’s interest in time as a significant factor in the behavior of a painting is also evident.

Purchases to the Museum’s Collection include an installation by Portuguese artist Alexandra do Carmo and a sculptural work by American sculptor Catherine Lee. Alexandra Do Carmo’s practice investigates the dynamics of authorship and the influence of the audience on the artist and social awareness within art making as a means of generating discussions about the artistic practice. In her installation, A Willow (Or Without Godot), 2006, the public is invited to reflect on positive statements made by the characters of Estragon and Vladimir in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot emphasizing a complicity, dependency and deep affection between the two characters. Do Carmo made and exhibited this work while participating on IMMA’s Artist Residency Programme in 2006. Other Voices, 1993, was purchased after a mini-retrospective of Catherine Lee’s work at IMMA in 2005, and is formed from a series of small polychromatic wall-mounted pieces cast from aluminium, copper, bronze and iron. Lee’s works are a hybrid of painting, sculpture and installation, in which she juxtaposes the simplicity of a repeated form with a richness of materials, such as wax, bronze, glass and fibreglass.

The permanent Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art comprises approximately 2,500 works by 20th-century and contemporary Irish and international artists. It has been developed through purchase and donations, as well as long term loans and the commissioning of new works. The Museum’s acquisition policy, like its exhibition and education and community programmes, reflects the changing cultural landscape of the late 20th-century and the new millennium. The Museum not only buys the work of living artists but also accepts donations of works from the 1940’s onwards – a decade of significant social and cultural change, both in Ireland and worldwide.

This exhibition is co-curated by Johanne Mullan, National Programmer, and Georgie Thompson, Assistant Curator, Collections Department.

Collecting the New continues until 8 August 2010.

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 Monica Cullinane at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected]

18 May 2010

Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s leading contemporary music group, will perform two of Morton Feldman’s most memorable works, Rothko Chapel and Words and Music for Samuel Beckett, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Sunday 30 May 2010. The ensemble will be joined by the widely-praised National Chamber Choir and two of this country’s leading actors – Barry McGovern and Owen Roe – for the final concert in the Morton Feldman Concert Series organised to coincide with IMMA major exhibition, Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts. The exhibition, which continues at IMMA until 27 June, focuses on the formative connections between Feldman’s life and work and that of the many legendary visual artists with whom he was associated, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston

One of the most powerful and moving expressions of this association can be found in the choral masterwork Rothko’s Chapel, composed as a tribute to Feldman’s close friend Mark Rothko, for the dedication of the chapel in Houston, Texas, which houses 14 paintings by Rothko. The chapel and paintings were commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil as a place for contemplation and meditation.

Feldman described the rarely-performed Words and Music by Samuel Beckett as a collaboration between “the words man and the notes man”. As with many of Beckett’s works, there has been much debate as to its meaning. The work centres round themes of love, the face, age and music. Two characters, Words and Music, work together and against each other producing songs, musical interludes and lyric poetry. They are joined by Croak, who exists somewhere in between sound and sense.

Crash Ensemble was founded in 1997 by composer Donnacha Dennehy, conductor and pianist Andrew Synott and clarinetist Michael Seaver.  Since its first sold-out concert in Dublin in the autumn of 1997, the group has attracted enthusiastic audiences for its particular blend of music, video and electronics. The group is interdisciplinary in outlook, and considers its sound engineers, technicians and video makers as much a part of the enterprise as the musicians.

Crash has commissioned or premiered works by many leading composers including Gerald Barry, Gavin Bryars, Raymond Deane, Donnacha Dennehy, Stephen Gardner, Michael Gordon, Andrew Hamilton, David Lang, Terry Riley, Jurgen Simpson, Gerhard Stabler, Jennifer Walshe, Ian Wilson and Kevin Volans. It has worked directly with all these and other composers such as Louis Andreissen, Gloria Coates, Roger Doyle, Michael Maierhof and Steve Reich. Since 2002, Crash has hosted three contemporary music festivals, attracting international composers and performers to Dublin to collaborate with Irish colleagues. Just back from their US Tour and collaboration with the Dublin Dance Festival, Crash Ensemble’s upcoming events include a recording for Nonesuch Records and the world premiere of a new work by Donnacha Dennehy, commissioned by Grammy award-winning soprano Dawn Upshaw, to be performed in October 2010.

The exhibition Vertical Thoughts, is built around Feldman’s twin passions for music and the visual arts. These came together in his involvement with the New York School of artists, poets and musicians, which was active in the 1950s and ‘60s and was linked, especially, with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and so-called Action Art.  In 1967 Feldman curated an exhibition entitled Six Painters in Houston, Texas, which presented the work of Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

The IMMA exhibition takes Six Painters as its starting point and builds on this by showing other examples of the six artists’ paintings, which display similar qualities, and works by other artists who were equally influential in Feldman’s work, including Francesco Clemente, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and many others. It features artworks from Feldman’s former collection, as well as from several of the world’s leading galleries, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery, Washington, and Tate, London. It also presents music scores, record covers, photographs and documents. A number of Oriental rugs, formally owned by Feldman, which function in a similarly inspirational way to the Abstract Expressionist paintings, are also being shown.

Also on Sunday 30 May, at 3.00pm, IMMA will present a keynote lecture by the composer Dr Bunita Marcus on the relationship between Morton Feldman’s music and the visual arts. Admission to the lecture is free, but booking is essential at /en/subnav_50.htm

The concert takes place at 8.00pm on Sunday 30 May. Tickets €20.00 are available from www.tickets.ie

For further information please contact Monica Cullinane at telephone +353 1 612 9900 or email [email protected].

18 May 2010