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

Abode, an exhibition developed through the continued successful partnership between Art Alongside and IMMA’s National Programme, opens to the public at Wexford Arts Centre on Monday 31 May 2010. Art Alongside is a visual arts project working with children in primary schools which aims to provide a dynamic and relevant experience of the visual arts to the children and adults of County Wexford. Abode includes a selection of work from the primary school children, alongside the work of project artists Mary Claire O’Brien and Helen Robbins, and works from the IMMA Collection. The inclusion of work from the Museum’s collection allows the public, and in particular students, access to the National Collection in a familiar and accessible location.

The exhibition features work from the IMMA Collection by Kathy Prendergast, Maria Simonds-Gooding, Paddy Jolley, Rebecca Horn and Rachel Whiteread, and focuses on the theme of an abode. The project artists worked with 4th, 5th and 6th classes, exploring the concept of imaginary personal spaces and places that provide a sense of privacy and protection. Ideas and images of dwelling places, safe havens, personal spaces and cocoons, were used to fire the creativity and imagination on the overall theme. Some class groups responded to this theme in a very personal way, creating the interior of their own imaginary rooms, hideaways, or dens – private places for themselves. Other class groups were interested in actually building the exterior of their own ‘ideal home’, these homes ranged from house boats, buses and caravans, to cosy cottages, tall towers and stately homes.

Artists from the IMMA Collection have also explored this theme in their work as seen in Paddy Jolley’s film-work, Hereafter, 2004. This work is the result of a commission from 2002 to make a film in Dublin’s north-side suburb of Ballymun – an area targeted for radical social and economic change due to Dublin City Council’s plan to regenerate the area by demolishing and rebuilding residential housing and services. As part of this plan, residents were requested to move from flats in tower blocks, which in many cases were their lifetime dwellings, to new contemporary houses. Jolley in collaboration with German artist, Rebecca Trost and Norwegian artist/animator, Lise Inger Hansen, focused on the freshly departed flats and the physical items left behind.

In Demolished printportfolio, 1996, Rachel Whiteread’s was particularly concerned by socio-economic changes in Thatcher’s Britain and their impact on the number of homeless people in London. The demolished documents focus on the destruction of tower blocks in three different housing estates in Hackney, East London, between 1993 and 1995. Whiteread is well know for her celebrated work House, 1993, a concrete cast of the space inside a terraced house scheduled for demolition in Bow, East London, which came to stand as a monument to a lost community, destroyed by increasing gentrification.

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.

Art Alongside is funded and supported by Wexford County Council, the Arts Council in association with IMMA, Wexford Arts Centre and participating national schools.

Abode continues until 15 June 2010. Admission is Free.

Wexford Arts Centre
Cornmarket, Wexford
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday 10.00am to 6.00pm.
Tel: 053 9123764
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.wexfordartscentre.ie/

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

10 May 2010

As part of the Bealtaine Festival, the annual country-wide arts festival which celebrates creativity in older age, the Irish Museum of Modern Art is hosting a number of Bealtaine associated events throughout the month of May. This includes the popular Tea and Tour programme in which visitors can enjoy complimentary tea and coffee while an IMMA Mediator discusses one of the featured exhibitions which is followed by a short free guided tour. Bealtaine events are run independently with over 300 organisers, with Age & Opportunity responsible for the overall coordination and promotion of the festival.

The exhibitions featured in the Tea and Tour programme are Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts, an exhibition focusing on the work of the influential American composer Morton Feldman and the many leading visual artists with whom he was closely associated, including Piet Mondrain, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and Francis Alÿs: Le Temps du Sommeil, an exhibition comprising a series of 111 small-scale paintings by the Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs, one of the most original artists working today.

The scheduled dates for the Tea and Tour programme are:

Thursday 13 May at 4pm: Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts
Saturday 22 May at 2.30pm: Francis Alÿs – Le Temps du Sommeil
Thursday 27 May at 2.30pm: Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts

All Tea and Tour events are free, however places are limited so booking is essential. For more information, please contact Maggie Connolly, Education and Community Programmes, Email: [email protected], Tel: 01-6129950

In addition to the Bealtaine Tea and Tour programme, IMMA invites visitors to a number of other events which include:

Film Screening: Wide Details – Francis Alÿs
12 – 14 May 2010: 3pm, The Lecture Room, IMMA (56min)
Screened in association with Alÿs’s current exhibition, this short documentary film features Belgian born contemporary artist Francis Alÿs who has lived in Mexico City for the past fifteen years. The film invites the viewer to discover Alÿs’s ongoing work as a painter, photographer, video artist and urban interventionist. No booking is required to attend screenings.

Artists’ Residency Programme Open Studios
Wednesday afternoons throughout May: 2pm – 4pm, Artist Studios, IMMA
Artists Pascal Bircher (UK) – Studio 6A, Atsushi Kaga (Japan) – Studio 14, and Jasmina Llobet and Luis Fernandez-Pons (Spain) – Studio 12, currently participating in the Museum’s Artists’ Residency Programme, will open their studios to visitors from 2pm to 4pm on Wednesdays during the month of May. Visitors will be able to see the variety of work being produced by the artists currently participating in the programme, meet the artists and discuss their work with them. The Artists’ Residency Programme studios are located in the former coach houses across from the main reception. Please see the programme leaflet available at the main reception or visit www.imma.ie for further details on the artists participating. This is an open event and does not require booking.

Explorer for Families
IMMA’s family programme Explorer welcomes children and adults to experience art works and art making together on Sunday afternoons, in the company of two of IMMA’s gallery staff, the Mediators. Explorer is:
– Free and drop-in
– On Sundays between 2pm to 4pm
– Explorer runs until 30 May 2010 and re-opens 3 October to 5 December 2010
– The maximum number of participants is 35 (adults and children), so arriving early is advised
– Projects are designed for children aged 4 to 10 years old
– Project themes are repeated over two consecutive Sundays

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

6 May 2010