The first large-scale exhibition in Ireland by the renowned American artist Terry Winters opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 12 June 2009. Terry Winters Signal to Noise examines the painter’s evolving relationship with abstract imagery, the central driving force of his work, as it has developed over the past ten years. The 40 paintings and drawings explore the cerebral spaces of information technology and issues of cognition and narration as they relate to abstract painting. Winters’ forcefully made works invoke modular forms and structures in an instinctive, symbolic language that sets out to encapsulate entire worlds. The relationship between the artist’s single large-scale works and his use of drawing and painting in serial presentations is also explored.

Terry Winters’ 30-year-long engagement with abstraction has encompassed a wide range of works; including early monochrome paintings incorporating unconventional materials, works based on botanical and biological processes and complex linear structures combined with rich colour fields. The exhibition takes up this narrative through some of his major series, beginning in 1997-98 with Graphic Primitives, dense compositions resembling circuit boards, maps and radar screens. Derived from the processes used to generate them, they combine an emphasis on the importance of the idea in the creative process with pure visual pleasure. Science also informs Set Diagram, 2000-02, 13 works drawn from a series of 100 paintings, each measuring one metre by one yard, containing a huge variety of forms inspired by the laws of optics and incorporating barcodes, meshes, wheels and charts. These, in turn, led on to paintings such as Composition and Luminance, both 2002, with their suggestions of mandalas, Ferris wheels and spinning cogs.

In the work, Display Linkage, 2005, the linear structure has become less important and, as in several of Winters’ earlier works, floating forms begin to appear, enveloping the viewer in a world of light and form. Signal to Noise, the work which gives the exhibition its title, is the culmination of a series of paintings from 2006 and presents a cloud-like image made up of various superimposed forms, which take on a mobile, ghostly form. The work In Blue, 2008, displays a spectral form floating above a grid, juxtaposing order and chaos, the rational and the irrational. In a recent interview Winters describes his intention in these works: “What I am trying to do is engineer pictures to the point where those figural components are there but not quite there. A tension develops between them becoming legible and illegible, or drifting off from one thing to the next.”

Writing in the catalogue of the exhibition, Enrique Juncosa, Director of IMMA and curator of the exhibition, describes how Winters, while participating in the aesthetic debates of his time, is also “heir to a tradition that includes some of the greatest names in abstraction – Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly – all of whom had a profound impact on 20th-century painting….Winters is without doubt, one of the leading painters maintaining the currency of abstraction after Minimalism. This exhibition at IMMA follows the exhibitions of Sean Scully in 1996 and Juan Uslé in 2003, both of whom are also part of this debate.”

Terry Winters was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1949. He received his BFA from Pratt University, New York, in 1971. Major international solo exhibitions include Tate Gallery, London, 1986; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1991; IVAM, Valencia, 1998; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1999; Kunsthalle, Basel, 2000; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2001; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 2003, and the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, 2004. Winters is currently based in New York City and Columbia County, New York.

Lecture
On Thursday 11 June at 5.00pm writer and critic David Levi Strauss will discuss the relationship between image and abstraction in Terry Winters’ work, and the constitutive differences between technical images created by mechanical means and manual images. Admission is free, but booking is essential. Please book online on www.imma.ie. The lecture will take place in the Chapel at IMMA.

A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition and includes essays by Enrique Juncosa and American writers Francine Prose, Peter Lamborn Wilson and David Levi Strauss. The texts explore a range of subjects, from Hermeticism and Abstraction to the use of technical images in contemporary painting.

A limited edition print by Terry Winters, made especially for IMMA, is available.

The exhibition is sponsored by H&K International, Suppliers of Restaurant Equipment Systems Worldwide. Commenting on the group’s involvement, Chairman Brian Ranalow said:  “H&K International is pleased to sponsor this exhibition of works by leading American artist Terry Winters. The sponsorship is part of the H&K corporate social responsibility programme – with our international headquarters in Ireland and significant manufacturing and warehouse in the USA, we are pleased to be associated with an exhibition by an iconic American artist. In the past H&K has been involved with IMMA in sponsoring exhibitions of artists such as Tony O’Malley and Howard Hodgkin, and are pleased once again to be associated with artists of international renown.”

Signal to Noise is presented in association with The Irish Times and JCDecaux.

The exhibition continues until 27 September 2009.

Admission is free.

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays 12noon – 5.30pm
Culture Night: Friday 25 September open until 11.00pm
Mondays Closed

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

11 May 2009

A public art performance with the Step Aerobic Class at the UL Sports Arena, University of Limerick, by Irish artist Sean Taylor, will take place on Friday 8 May 2009, in association with the Arts Office of the University of Limerick and the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s National Programme. Two performances of THE STEPS will take place at 6.30pm and 7.15pm (each performance is 12 minutes in duration); the accompanying catalogue and DVD will be launched at 6.00pm. This step aerobics class is a long established health & fitness facility for students of the University and the general public in Limerick. This particular class has been running for over 10 years and has a large regular public attendance.

Sean Taylor, an artist on the Artists’ Panel at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, undertook a series of creative workshops from October 2008, based on introducing members of the UL Aerobics Class to contemporary film works from the IMMA Collection during their one hour workout. The videos were screened during the class to instigate and stimulate discussion about contemporary art practices with the group.  The result of this relationship is the THE STEPS a collaborative sound/performance artwork. The artwork is based on the vocal/whistling instructions of the aerobic instructor, coupled with aerobic and fitness based patterns /movements. The finished artwork is located within the existing workout routine, and will become a permanent feature of the group’s workout.

Film works by ten artists from the IMMA Collection were screened for the purpose of the project – Cecily Brennan, Lu Chunsheng, Dorothy Cross, Brian Duggan, Ann Hamilton, Caroline McCarthy, Isabel Nolan and Paddy Jolley, Rebecca Trost and Inger Lise Hansen.

The performance was documented by filmmaker Robert Corrigan, sound engineer Dave Carugo and Sean Taylor, the documentation accompanies the publication. The publication includes an interview with Sean Taylor by visual arts writer Karen Normoyle-Haugh; an introduction by Patricia Moriarty, Arts Officer, University of Limerick; and an introduction by IMMA curators Lisa Moran, Johanne Mullan and Georgie Thompson.

The UL Arts Office is committed to the development of an awareness and appreciation of the arts amongst the University community. It actively supports projects that involve staff and students. This office is supported by the Student Affairs Division.

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 locations 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.

For further information please contact:

Patricia Moriarty, Arts Officer, University of Limerick, Email : [email protected]

Monica Cullinane, Press Office, IMMA, Tel : +353 1 612 9900, Email : [email protected] 

29 April 2009

An exhibition presenting an extensive display of books on which Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney collaborated with a wide cross section of leading artists opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday 14 April 2009. Artists/Heaney/Books: An Exhibition is being shown to coincide with the celebration of Seamus Heaney’s 70th birthday on 13 April, and is presented in association with the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism and RTÉ. Throughout his career Heaney has developed friendships and collaborated on imagery with a variety of artists, including Barrie Cooke, Felim Egan, Barry Flanagan, T.P. Flanagan, Martin Gale, Cecil King, Sol LeWitt, Hughie O’Donoghue and many others. 

The exhibition features a display of the poet’s book collaborations, as well as selected artworks from IMMA’s Collection by the artists in question, with select loans from the Ulster Museum and private collections. Especially for the occasion, Barrie Cooke has made a pair of editioned prints, Guttural Muse, 2009 and In the Boathouse, 2009 for the IMMA Editions series, with excerpts from published and unpublished poems written in the poet’s own hand.

Most of the artists are friends of the poet, or if not friends then as he himself explains "familiar presences". Some, such as Basil Blackshaw and T. P. Flanagan, represented respectively by Study for the first tractor in Randalstown, 2001, and Boglands (for Seamus Heaney), 1967, have been friends since his twenties in Belfast. Others, including Barrie Cooke, Sonja Landweer and Louis le Brocquy, came to know Heaney a little later, when he began to move in Dublin arts circles. Felim Egan’s painting Intertidal Note, 1995 echoes the artist’s book collaborations of the same period with Heaney, when they lived in close proximity near Sandymount Strand, Dublin, "under the influence of the big sky and the wide sand". Hughie O’Donoghue, whose paintings can be seen in an adjoining exhibition at IMMA, pursues his powerful vision in the images which he created in response to Heaney’s translation of The Testament of Cresseid, which is among the poet’s books included in this exhibition.

As Heaney describes in a short interview with the exhibition curator, Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections at IMMA: “I don’t think … an artist needs any specialised access to poems in order to make a significant response. It’s enough if the words set him or her to work. I’ve always liked the old schoolroom definition of work as moving a certain force through a certain distance, so you could argue that all that’s required is some stimulus to start that move, something that says to the artist, ‘The force be with you.’” The interview is being published to coincide with the exhibition.

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 near Castledawson, Co Derry. The eldest of nine children he won a scholarship to St Columb’s College in Derry and later attended Queen’s University Belfast where his first books of poems where written. He was a teacher in Belfast from the 1960s and has since held many positions including Professor of Poetry at Oxford and Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. A Saoi of Aosdána, he is one of the most admired and popular writers of our time. Best known for his poetry, his works also include plays, translations and essays. Among his many achievements is the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

The exhibition is curated by Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, assisted by Seamus McCormack, Assistant Curator: Collections, and Jessica Monnin, Intern: Collections. Thanks are due to Noureen Qureshi, Delmas Conservation Bindery, Marsh’s Library.

Artists/Heaney/Books: An Exhibition continues until 14 June 2009. Admission is free.

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

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

7 April 2009

The first exhibition in Ireland by Elizabeth Peyton, one of the most outstanding American artists of her generation, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 1 April 2009. Elizabeth Peyton: Reading and Writing presents some 20 works, comprising carefully selected portraits of youthful, romantic individuals and still lifes depicting table tops covered with books, bouquets of flowers and collectables, chosen to work in harmony with the domestic setting of the East Ground Galleries at IMMA. Presenting paintings and works on paper, the exhibition illustrates an intensely personal body of work, which confidently places beauty at the centre of contemporary art. The exhibition has a particular focus on poetry and literature, interiors and photographs, desire and love.

Peyton first came to prominence in the early 1990s as one of the few young artists exploring figurative painting. Although her paintings owe a clear debt to 19th-century masters, such as Edouard Manet and John Singer Sargent, Peyton’s work also demonstrates an intimate understanding of 20th-century artists, such as David Hockney, Alex Katz and Andy Warhol. Despite these influences, Peyton has developed a highly personal body of work, deeply rooted in her surroundings and her readings. Her dazzling palette of jewel-like colours and her refined graphic sensibility are combined in enormously seductive works, both in content and form. Over the years her work has evolved into an increasingly fascinating chronicle of contemporary American life and culture.

The portraits and still lifes in the exhibition encapsulate many of Peyton’s favourite sources of inspiration, which have included William Shakespeare, 19th-century Realist or Romantic authors, Nouvelle Vague filmmakers of the 1960s and present day singer-poets, such as Patti Smith and Bob Dylan. An early work, Oscar and Bosie, 1998, depicts Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. Here Peyton characteristically brings together the subculture of a past age with contemporary popular culture, as the faces of Wilde and Bosie are interchangeable with those of Stephen Fry and Jude Law, who portrayed Wilde and Douglas in the 1997 film Wilde. The drawing Patti and Bob (After Judy Linn with Dylan mask 1971), 2006, with its nostalgic 1970s feel, is based on a photograph by Judy Linn showing Patti Smith holding a photograph of Bob Dylan in front of her face. The Age of Innocence, 2007, again combines the historic and the contemporary in its representation of Countess Olenska and Newland Archer, the illicit lovers in Edith Wharton’s novel, who bear a striking resemblance to the stars of Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film version – Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis.

Born in 1965 in Danbury, Connecticut, USA, Elizabeth Peyton lives and works in New York. A major retrospective of her work, Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton, was shown at the New Museum in New York in 2008/09 and tours to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht. Solo exhibitions include Aldrich Museum of Art, Connecticut, 2008; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, 2008; neugerriemschneider, Berlin, 2006; Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2005, and the Royal Academy, London, 2002. Group exhibitions include The Painting of Modern Life, Hayward Gallery, London, 2007; Getting Emotional, ICA Boston, 2005; Contemporary Painting, curated by artist Alex Katz for Colby College Museum of Art, Maine, and the Whitney Biennial, New York, 2004, and Dear Painter, Paint for me, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2002.

The exhibition is curated by Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA.

A fully-illustrated artist’s book accompanies the exhibition, designed by Elizabeth Peyton herself and produced by Charta Books Ltd, with an afterword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, and an essay by Rachael Thomas, titled In Search of Lost Time. This publication also includes extracts from classic texts by authors such as Honoré de Balzac, the Goncourt Brothers and Gustave Flaubert, alongside an interview with filmmaker François Truffaut. Peyton’s selection ties in closely with the works presented in the exhibition and reveals some of her key inspirations.

Artist’s Talk
On Tuesday 31 March at 5.00pm Rachael Thomas invites Elizabeth Peyton to discuss the recurring themes portrayed in her practice, such as love, desire, loss, and how these are interlinked with the world of literature. The talk will take place in the Lecture Room. Admission is free, but booking is essential.

Limited Edition
Elizabeth Peyton has created a new print with Two Palms Press for sale by the Museum on the occasion of the exhibition: Flowers and Diaghilev, 2009, etching in black ink on magnani pescia paper, 30.4 x 22.8 cm. Cost €1,500 unframed.

The exhibition is presented with the support of The Merrion Hotel, Dublin and is assisted by RTÉ Supporting the Arts. 

Elizabeth Peyton: Reading and Writing continues until 21 June 2009. Admission is free.

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

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

26 March 2009

Portable Histories, an exhibition developed through the continued partnership between Art Alongside and IMMA’s National Programme, opens to the public at Wexford Arts Centre on Monday 23 March 2009 at 7.30pm. Art Alongside is an artist residency that aims to provide a dynamic experience of the visual arts to children and adults in Co Wexford. Pupils and parents from six primary schools worked with artists Helen Robbins and Mary Clare O’Brien on the project. After viewing a selection of works from the IMMA Collection the pupils were encouraged to draw on their experiences and respond creatively to them. In Portable Histories a selection of the children’s work is exhibited alongside works by Helen Robbins, Mary Claire O’Brien and works from the IMMA Collection, promoting a level of esteem between the professional artist and the amateur.

The exhibition features work from the IMMA Collection by Edward Allington, Oliver Comerford, Colin Harrison, Caroline McCarthy and Nick Miller, and focuses on the themes of history and memory and our readings of them. Key to the exhibition is British artist Colin Harrison’s Portable History of the World, 1974, a suitcase shaped wooden box which can be opened as if it where a cabinet. Within the box a grid-like arrangement of small artefacts reveals a private world filled with cryptic clues and references sourced from the artist’s own memory.

Other works in the exhibition include Caroline McCarthy’s, The Luncheon, 2002, which on first glance appears to be a traditional still-life, however, on closer inspection, reveals itself to be photographic documentation of a sculpture made of coloured toilet paper. Commenting on the historical and traditional notions of art, the work simultaneously makes witty observations about the nature of consumerism and representation. Nick Miller’s, South Africa Memory Series, no.1, 1991, is part of a series of works resulting from a visit to his parents’ former homeland in 1991. The series is concerned with his understanding and perception of encounters with human relationships of family, race, politics, economics and responsibility. In a statement on these works from 1994 Miller said “While travelling I felt my mind and eyes to be like a video recorder, with extra functions of smell, touch, thought and emotion….On returning to Ireland, I tried to retrieve images like organic ‘video-grabs’ from my memory bank……They naturally came to an end when I found myself starting to invent memories for art’s sake".

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 locations 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. Art Alongside is an initiative of the Wexford Arts Office.

The exhibition will be accompanied by workshops and tours funded by the Department of Education.

Portable Histories continues until 8 April 2009. Admission is Free.

Wexford Arts Centre
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday 10.00am to 6.00pm.
Tel: 053 9123764
Email: [email protected]

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

23 March 2009

The first exhibition devoted exclusively to the remarkable jewellery created by the American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976) opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 1 April 2009. Calder Jewellery explores the lifelong output of wearable art pieces made for family and friends by one of the most innovative and influential figures in 20th-century art, best known for his iconic sculptures and mobiles. IMMA is the only venue in Europe where Calder Jewellery is being shown. Also on display is the specially designed BMW Car with which Calder, who trained as an engineer, initiated the company’s Art Car series in 1975, later continued by such famous artists as Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and David Hockney.

Comprising some 100 pieces, including necklaces, bracelets, brooches, earrings and tiaras from the 1920s to the 1960s, the exhibition is the first in which this aspect of the artist’s practice is explored in depth and on its own. Also included are photographs of prominent people wearing individual pieces, among them Anjelica Huston, Georgia O’Keeffe and Peggy Guggenheim. These give a sense of the pieces when worn and of their popularity in artistic circles.

From his earliest days as an artist, Calder’s practice extended beyond the visual arts into many other creative forms, ranging from household objects and toys to buildings and racing cars. He produced more than 1,800 pieces of jewellery, beginning in 1906 when he found copper wire discarded in the street, which he used to adorn his sister’s dolls. His designs were influenced by the human body, the natural world and pure abstract forms, ranging from animals, flowers and vertebrae to zigzags, spirals and arcs. Each piece is hammered, shaped, and composed in a fashion that echoes the artist’s sculptures. The use of non-precious materials and found objects guided his intuitive technique, from his bohemian years of the 1920s and 1930s to the war years. His jewellery was coveted by followers of the Surrealist movement, and today is still much sought after by collectors and museums.

The light, three-dimensional qualities of Calder’s famous sculptures and mobiles are clearly evident in the kinetic and Surrealist shapes of his jewellery, which also reflects his fascination with adornments across a variety of historical periods and cultures. In the necklace The Jealous Husband, c 1940, and The Necklace, c 1942, and many other pieces, Calder repeatedly incorporated the spiral, a late Bronze Age motif, into his jewellery. Similarly, the influence of African tribal art, an interest he shared with many of his contemporaries, is evident in works such as Belt, c 1935, made with fibres from a raffia palm tree, brass wire and wool. Other pieces spell out the initials of the intended wearer, as in the medallion LJC, c 1938, made for his wife Louisa James Calder, and the brooch SD, c 1960, for his daughter Sandra Calder Davidson.

A film of Calder’s performance work Circus, 1926-31, filmed by Carlos Vilardebo in 1961, is shown as part of the exhibition. This presents an assemblage of wire, leather and found objects fashioned into circus performers by Calder and animated by the artist for dedicated performances in Paris and New York.

Calder’s specially designed BMW car, the first of the company’s Art Car series, will be on display in the grounds of IMMA adjacent to the exhibition. As a sculptor who normally devised his own shapes, Calder managed to free himself from the formal structure of the racing car and created a distinctive design using intensive colours and gracefully sweeping surfaces, again echoing his sculptures and mobiles.

Alexander Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, in 1898. He attended classes at the Art Students League, New York, from 1923 to 1926 and made his first wire sculpture in 1925. Calder developed this new method of sculpting by bending and twisting wire – essentially “drawing” three-dimensional figures in space. He is renowned for his striking mobiles, whose suspended, abstract elements move and balance in changing harmony. Calder also made large outdoor sculptures from bolted sheet steel for public buildings and spaces – such as Cactus provisoire, 1967, in Trinity College Dublin – and was a noted book illustrator and stage set designer. He died in 1976 in New York.

The exhibition is co-organised by the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, and the Calder Foundation, New York. It was previously presented at the Norton Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

A substantial book, published by the Calder Foundation, Calder Jewelry, features more than 450 bracelets, brooches, necklaces and rings, photographed in still life by photographer Maria Robledo. Essays by Mark Rosenthal, Adjunct Curator, Contemporary Art, Norton Museum of Art and Detroit Institute of Arts, and Jane Adlin, Associate Curator, Department of 19th-century Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, discuss the relationship of these objects to the artist’s other endeavours and in relation to the history of adornment. Other authors include Alexander S.C. Rower, and artist Holton Rower, grandsons of Alexander Calder.

Lecture – Calder Jewellery: A Modernist Synthesis
On Wednesday 29 April at 6:30pm Mark Rosenthal, Curator of the exhibition Calder Jewellery, will give a lecture on Alexander Calder’s art and jewellery, in the Chapel at IMMA. Admission is free but booking is essential. Please book online at www.imma.ie

The exhibition is assisted by RTÉ Supporting the Arts and is supported by BMW.

Admission charges: €5.00, concessions €3.00. Admission free for under-18s, those in full-time education and on organised Museum programmes and IMMA members. Admission free for all on Fridays.
Calder Jewellery continues until 21 June 2009.

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays 12noon – 5.30pm
Monday and Good Friday, 10 April Closed

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

20 March 2009

A new exhibition celebrating the recent gift of 25 works from the prestigious Bank of Ireland Collection to the Irish Museum of Modern Art has just opened to the public at IMMA. Exploring a New Donation: Artworks from the Bank of Ireland join the IMMA Collection marks the second major gift by the bank to IMMA in just ten years. In 1999 Bank of Ireland donated 21 works by leading Irish artists to the Museum. Both were Heritage Donations under Section 1003 of the Taxes Consolidation Act, 1997. The recent donation includes major works from the period 1940 to 1969, by artists such as Jack B. Yeats, Gerard Dillon, Paul Henry, Louis le Brocquy, Sean McSweeney, Patrick Scott, Camille Souter, Robert Ballagh and others.

The exhibition acknowledges this important gift, and also seeks to reflect its significance in the context of IMMA’s existing Collection, investigating affinities and new perspectives between these earlier works and more contemporary pieces.  An outstanding late Jack B. Yeats painting, Eileen Aroon, 1953, enhances IMMA’s existing collection of Yeats paintings from the 1940s onwards, a number of which are included in this exhibition, along with two fine early canvases. The donation also includes three watercolours by Austrian Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka, with whom Yeats was acquainted, and presents a rare opportunity to view the works of the two artists in proximity.

Yeats’ highly personal interpretation of the Irish landscape and its people, resonated with other artists of the period, including Paul Henry and, to some extent, the younger Gerard Dillon. The exhibition also explores more recent, diverse considerations of the Irish landscape. For example, Michael Craig-Martin’s only film work, Film, 1963, is set in Connemara, a favourite location for many artists of an earlier generation, while Willie Doherty’s Border Incident, 1994, with its implicit theme of surveillance, echoes Robert Ballagh’s Marchers, 1968, and Oisin Kelly’s The Marchers, 1969, both from the Bank of Ireland donation and both the reflecting the civil rights marches of the time.

The Back of Tory Island, 1960, Derek Hill’s largest Tory Island landscape is the first of this artist’s work to enter the IMMA Collection.  Hill is especially associated with Tory where he painted from the 1950s and encouraged what became known as the Tory Island School among the Island’s fishing community. The gift also includes five works by Camille Souter from the 1950s and ‘60s, which are a rich sample of her exploratory painting methods during those years and – together with selected works from the IMMA Collection – provide a concentrated focus on her work of the period.

Autumnal Landscape, 1964, from Patrick Scott’s atmospheric Bog Series of the 1960s and White Road to the Sea, 1965, an early example of Sean McSweeney’s hallucinatory combination of land and sea, are also included in the gift, as is Allegory, 1950, one of the finest of Louis le Brocquy’s early tapestries, brings to 30 the number of works by the artist in IMMA’s Collection in this medium, including the outstanding Táin series.

The Bank of Ireland began its Collection in the 1970s, and went on to create one of the first comprehensive corporate collections to be initiated in Ireland. The importance of the Collection lies in the quality of the individual works, but it also carries unique cultural significance as an important composite collection created during a period of regeneration of visual arts and culture in Ireland. The works have a strong Irish dimension, of the 15 artists represented in this donation 12 are from Ireland or have been long-term residents.

The exhibition is curated by Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections, IMMA, assisted by Marianne Kelly, Assistant Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA.

Exploring a New Donation continues until 27 September 2009. Admission is free.

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays 12noon – 5.30pm
Monday and Good Friday, 10 April Closed

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

18 March 2009

Major exhibitions by such leading artists as Hughie O’Donoghue and James Coleman; the first European exhibition devoted to the jewellery of the iconic American artist Alexander Calder; a series of intriguing displays from the Museum’s own Collection, and an exhibition featuring many of the finest works from MoMA’s photographic collection are all part of an exciting and wide-ranging programme for 2009 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, announced today (Wednesday 4 March) by the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Mr Martin Cullen, TD. Plans for the coming year also include solo exhibitions by three acclaimed American artists Elizabeth Peyton, Terry Winters, and Lynda Benglis, French artist Philippe Parreno and Irish artist Alan Phelan, and a number of new partnerships and initiatives under IMMA’s Education and Community Programme.

Speaking at the launch of the programme Minister Cullen said: "The Irish Museum of Modern Art is widely admired for the range and relevance of its exhibitions, for the innovative use of its growing Collection and for its popular education and community initiatives. What is particularly striking about the 2009 programme is the breath of modern art available. The 2009 calendar includes an innovative collaborative display to mark Seamus Heaney’s 70th birthday,  a magnificent collection of photographs from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and new events and research projects with both Irish and international partners. I am delighted to see this ongoing development in the Museum’s programme and the ever increasing public engagement with its work." Minister Cullen added: "IMMA attracts more than 400,000 visitors each year and 40% of its visitors are from overseas. This also demonstrates the important value of the Museum to our cultural tourism infrastructure." 

Commenting on the programme IMMA Director Enrique Juncosa said: "This year has a special American flavour. We are not only presenting surveys of American artists of different generations, but we are working for the first time with two leading American institutions. The Calder Jewellery exhibition travels to Dublin from the Metropolitan Museum and Picturing New York is in its totality a loan from MoMA, who have organised this exhibition at our request. Both projects underline, somehow, the position that IMMA now enjoys internationally. We are also organising exhibitions of the work of three major Irish figures: Seamus Heaney, James Coleman and Hughie O’Donoghue, which I am sure will arouse lots of interest, with both local and international audiences."

Exhibitions
The new temporary exhibitions programme is already underway with an exhibition of 27 monumental works by the acclaimed British artist Hughie O’Donoghue. This presents recent paintings revealing new directions in the artist’s work, alongside seven works from O’Donoghue’s celebrated Passion series, and marks the permanent loan by the American Ireland Fund to the Museum of all 22 works in the series, together with 17 further works, the gift of an anonymous American collector.
 
This will be followed on 7 March by an important exhibition by the internationally-renowned Irish artist James Coleman, being shown in collaboration with Project Arts Centre and the Royal Hibernian Academy. Featuring works from the 1970s to the 2000s, it includes a number of works not previously seen in Ireland, including three of the artist’s most celebrated works.
 
The first exhibition in Europe devoted exclusively to the jewellery created by the American artist Alexander Calder, one of the most innovative figures in 20th-century art, opens on 1 April. Calder Jewellery explores the artist’s lifelong interest in wearable art, much sought after in New York’s artistic and social circles. Calder’s original BMW Art Car will also be on show. Dealing with something of the same milieu, but from a modern-day perspective, American painter Elizabeth Peyton presents her distinctive, intimate portraits of friends, historical characters and celebrities, also from 1 April.
 
Two other American artists also feature prominently later in the year. The distinguished painter Terry Winters’ evolving relationship with abstraction can be seen from 12 June in an exhibition of works exploring the cerebral spaces of information technology in a collection of powerful paintings and drawings created over the past ten years. The first solo exhibition in Ireland by the leading American sculptor Lynda Benglis opens on 4 November. Spanning 40 years of her pioneering and richly diverse body of work, it also documents her, often celebrated, involvement in performance and media-based projects. Irish artist Alan Phelan will present two bodies of work from 22 July, both rooted in the narrative possibilities of art that inform all aspects of his multi-faceted practice; one addresses issues from nationalism to popular culture; the other focusses on the world of the boy racer. French artist Philippe Parreno, co-curator of IMMA’s widely-praised Lunar Reggae exhibition in 2007, makes a welcome return on 4 November with a major exhibition questioning ideas of time, reality and representation, as well as exhibition-making and performance.
 
The temporary exhibition programme ends on a high note with some 150 photographs from the outstanding collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, opening on 25 November. Presenting images by some of the greatest photographers of the past 120 years, from Alfred Stieglitz to Cindy Sherman, Picturing New York explores the fascinating diversity of that city from its soaring architecture to its legendary mix of inhabitants.

Owing to budgetary constraints this year, the Museum is introducing an admission charge for two overseas exhibitions – Calder Jewellery and Picturing New York. The full charge will be €5.00, with concessions at €3.00. Under-18s will be free, as will those in full-time education, those on IMMA programmes and IMMA Members. Admission will be free for all visitors on Fridays.

Explaining the need to introduce the charges, Enrique Juncosa said that he very much hoped that visitors would understand the position that the Museum finds itself in, facing – like many other public bodies – an unexpected reduction in its funding following the sudden economic downturn. “I am confident that, under the circumstances, IMMA’s many faithful visitors will be prepared to contribute in this way, rather than see a reduction in the exciting range of international art, which the Museum is committed to making available to Irish gallery goers.”
 
Collection
During 2008 alone 69 works have been added to IMMA’s Collection through purchases, long-term loans and donations, and this very significant growth will be much in evidence in 2009. In addition to the works acquired via the American Ireland Fund in the Hughie O’Donoghue exhibition, other gifts and donations will also have pride of place in a variety of exhibitions and displays.  

The first new Collection display of 2009, Exploring a new Donation  opens on 10 March and marks the gift of 25 major works by leading Irish artists from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s from the prestigious Bank of Ireland Collection. The exhibition explores the manner in which the donation broadens and enhances  the reading of the Museum’s existing works, as well as expanding the context within which more recent artistic developments can be viewed.

From 14 April Artists/Heaney/Books: An Exhibition, will form part of Seamus Heaney’s 70th-birthday celebrations, focusing on the poet’s collaboration with a variety of visual artists, including Barrie Cooke, Felim Egan and Martin Gale, alongside an extensive display of the poet’s books, and artworks from IMMA’s Collection by many of the artists concerned.

Opening on 14 May an extensive exhibition, Between Metaphor and Object: Art of the 90s from the IMMA Collection, will present a range of sculptures and installation pieces from the 1990s, emphasising the diversity of practice that is represented in the IMMA Collection from this period, by artists such as Tony Cragg, Barry Flanagan and Antony Gormley. The exhibition will incorporate a number of pieces from the renowned Welkunst Collection, on loan to IMMA since 1995, which will return to the Welkunst Foundation in 2010.

This will be followed in July by New Acquisitions, presenting  a changing display of works acquired since 2005. This acquisition period provides a rich source of recent painting from Ireland and the exhibition will include examples of works by both younger-generation and more senior artists. Works in a variety of other media such as animation, film and site-specific sculpture are also included, plus a large-scale granite sculpture by the Brazilian artist Iran do Espirito Santo in the Formal Gardens.

Opening in November, What happens next is a secret is an experimental exhibition, which addresses the question of what happens when artworks are shown in different contexts. Taking the installation work Line Writing by the Laotian artist Vong Phaophanit – which is embedded in the floor of the gallery – as its starting point, it features a selection of other works from the Collection also employing secrecy or invisibility.

Works being installed in the grounds of IMMA in 2009 include an outdoor sculptural sound work by Michael Klein, Slattery’s Lamp, 2004, in the guise of a street light; the Iran do Espirito Santo piece, Correcoes D, 2008, and an Edward Delaney sculpture kindly donated by Agnes Toohey.

In addition, IMMA’s presence outside the Museum continues with the five-year loan of 22 works from the IMMA Collection to the Irish Ambasssador’s Residence, The Hague, which was inaugurated in November 2007. As part of the National Programme, Exquisite Corpse, will be exhibited in the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, from 15 October to 28 November, to coincide with the Belfast Festival.

Education and Community
The Education and Community programme continues to create access for all sectors of the public, and to work on specific projects to animate IMMA’s exhibitions and provide in-depth exploration of IMMA’s Collection throughout the year.

Again in 2009, new events and research projects are being developed with both Irish and international partners. A research project, with St Patrick’s College (NUI) and Poetry Ireland, will explore children’s critical thinking in relation to the visual arts and the written word. Other projects are being developed with a cross section of organisations, including the Council of National Cultural Institutions, The Ark, Dublin Institute of Technology and the Department of Education and Science.

Other new initiatives include the first two of a series of art packs, designed for primary school children, featuring 12 images of artworks from the IMMA Collection, accompanied by written information about the artist and ideas and themes stemming from the artwork. Also, a new series of workshops for families are being organised during the Easter, summer and Halloween school breaks.

Work on the Studio 8 youth programme and the three-year project exploring online learning, both initiated in 2008, will continue in 2009, with each involving very active partnerships with a wide range of museums and educational institutions across Europe. The former will host a visit of the five partner museums in Ireland in April and the latter will go live in the autumn.

The Talks and Lectures Programme continues in 2009 with a diverse range of artist’s and curator’s talks, lectures and seminars, starting with a series of seminars in association with the James Coleman exhibition. The programme will also include a new lecture series, What is…?, introducing aspects of contemporary art in association with IMMA’s Collection, and the annual Winter Lecture delivered by Hughie O’Donoghue.

The launch of the publications based on the international symposia, Curating Now, Access All Areas and Museum21, will take place on Culture Night, 25 September.

National and Artists’ Residency Programmes
The Museum’s unique National Programme will again take IMMA’s assets and expertise to 11 locations around the country in 2009. Projects, based around works from the Collection, take a variety of forms arising from the Museum’s engagement with the venue in question and input from the local community. These will include partnerships with Mayo County Council Arts Office and South Tipperary Arts Service on a multi-sensory exhibition, the first of its kind in Ireland. Further projects are planned for Counties Antrim, Cavan, Clare, Donegal, Dublin, Limerick, Monaghan and Wexford. With the continued support of the Department of Education and Science, the Museum will again work with all 11 centres in developing an appropriate primary school programme.

The Artists’ Residency Programme will host 21 artists who represent a diverse group of individuals coming together to live and work at IMMA. Irish artists Fergus Byrne, Allan Hughes, Eithne Jordan and Linda Quinlan, will participate in the programme, alongside, artists from Australia, Canada, Sweden, France, The Netherlands, Greece, Belgium, England and Scotland. The aim of the ARP is to generate a creative space for artists at a crucial point in their career and for the participating artists to leave IMMA with new experiences and networks that will enable them to further their practice. Each artist will also show their studio work
in the Process Room for a two-week period during their time at IMMA.

Music
On Saturday 4 July and Sunday 5 July the Museum will present two concerts to mark the 60th birthday of the distinguished South African-born composer Kevin Volans, who has been resident in Ireland since 1986. Featuring the Ensemble Madrid, a contemporary music group from Spain, the programme will focus on Volans’ own compositions and those of the younger composers he has influenced. The central piece will be Chakra, Volans’ spectacular percussion piece, which will be played at both the Saturday and Sunday concerts. Volans will also contribute a new piece for string quartet and percussion. The music in both cases will include a string ensemble, electronics, and percussion.

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

4 March 2009

Exhibition: James Coleman
Dates: 7th March – 26th April 2009
Location: Exhibition of works presented at three venues: Irish Museum of Modern Art, Project Arts Centre, and Royal Hibernian Academy
Opening Hours: 
IMMA: Tuesday – Saturday 10.00am – 5.30pm, except Wednesday 10.30am – 5.30pm, Sunday & Bank Holiday 12noon – 5.30pm, Mondays and Good Friday 10 April Closed
Project Arts Centre: Monday – Saturday 11.00am – 7.30pm. Sundays Closed.
RHA: Monday – Saturday 11.00am – 7.00pm, Sundays 2.00pm – 5.00pm.
Admission: Free

The Irish Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with the Projects Arts Centre, and the Royal Hibernian Academy, is pleased to announce an important exhibition by the internationally renowned Irish artist James Coleman. Featuring works from the 1970s up to the early 2000s, the exhibition includes many works previously not seen in Ireland, including three of Coleman’s most celebrated artworks, Charon (MIT Project), 1989, Seeing for Oneself, 1987-88 and Untitled, 1998-2002.

Recognised internationally as one of the most important and pioneering contemporary artists, the work of James Coleman over the last forty years has transformed the role of image and sound in visual art, and redefined our relationship with the artworks we see today in museums and galleries around the world. His influence can be seen in a generation of younger international artists, including Steve McQueen, Douglas Gordon, Tino Sehgal, Stan Douglas, and Jeff Wall.

Known for presenting his artworks in the form of audio-visual installations, the viewers of Coleman’s works are free to move around the space and engage in the interpretation and unfolding of the meaning and experience of the artwork, whether the work is a single-slide projection, or a larger scale video or film installation. For example, in Box (ahhareturnabout), 1977, a work widely acknowledged as one of the important artworks of the last thirty years, and on show at the Project Arts Centre, Coleman transforms archival film footage of a famous 1927 boxing match into a complex experience and reflection on the body, identity, and our perception of sound and imagery. As Dot Tuer writes, “the viewer, enveloped in a darkened space, listening to a heightened sound, is no longer a spectator, nor the referee, but a witness to the claustrophobia experienced inside the boxing ring”. 

Coleman’s use of technology and new media since the 1970s has been profoundly influential. In the work Charon (MIT Project), 1989, on show at the Royal Hibernian Academy, photography acts as both the medium of presentation (slides), but also as the subject and theme of the 14 short episodes. One of Coleman’s most humorous and engaging works, we see how the everyday practice of taking photographs is transformed into compelling short stories about the ‘behind the scenes’ of photography, and the value and complexity of what we cannot visually see behind a single photograph. A captivating work both visually and narratively, Charon (MIT Project) provides an amusing and stimulating reflection on our image-conscious and celebrity culture.

Coleman’s use of popular culture is also recognised for the way in which his works intertwine ancient mythologies and historical conventions with the most popularised and apparently trivial of artforms. While ‘Charon’ was the ancient Greek god who ferried the dead to the afterlife, in Seeing for Oneself, 1987-88, also on show at the Royal Hibernian Academy, the literary traditions of historical and romantic novels are intertwined with the visual look of teenage ‘photo-stories’ and black and white Gothic films. Set in an eerie-looking château in the mountains, the plot has the drama and tension of a great crime thriller or Agatha Christie novel. As viewers, we become drawn into trying to discover and unravel the secrets and mysteries of this narrated visual story.

In So Different… and Yet, a work completed in 1980, installed by Coleman as a specifically designed outdoor installation at IMMA on a 10-metre wide LED screen (the largest ever mounted in Ireland), the role of language and sound in Coleman’s work is explicitly brought to our attention. Borrowing the literary conventions of romantic novels, mixed with suggestions of vaudeville, Brecht, and piano-bar music, the dynamic quality of the narrative is set in contrast to the apparently static quality of the actor’s poses. Recounting an alleged crime, with the protagonist acting as both subject and objective observer, as viewer we become immersed in trying to decipher if any particular action has taken place, and the significance of the visual clues we are being given. Unlike most films we see in the cinema, we are not provided with supplementary actors or sets, but invited to imagine and piece together the elements of a plot which fundamentally has no clear beginning, middle, or end. The brilliance of Coleman’s work is that it keeps us continually enthralled and fully engaged.

In Ireland, James Coleman remains a figure little known to a wider audience. Yet, internationally, his work is recognised as having had a pioneering influence on contemporary art over the last forty years. This exhibition and collaboration between IMMA, the Project Arts Centre, and the Royal Hibernian Academy, hopes to redress this situation, by offering to Irish audiences a unique opportunity to view works from an artist who has profoundly changed and influenced the way we understand and engage with art today.

The works in the exhibition are installed at three venues:

IMMA: So Different… and Yet, 1980
Project Arts Centre: Box (ahhareturnabout), 1977; Untitled, 1998-2002
Royal Hibernian Academy: Charon (MIT Project), 1989; Seeing for Oneself, 1987-88; Connemara Landscape, 1980

James Coleman was born in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon in 1941. Since the 1970s, Coleman has exhibited extensively in international museums and galleries, including more recently the Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1994-95), Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne (1995), Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (1996), Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (1999), Lenbachhaus-Kunstbau Städtische Galerie, Munich (2002), Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2002), and Museu do Chiado, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon (2004-05). In 2003, Coleman developed a unique project at the Louvre in Paris for the exhibition Léonard de Vinci: dessins et manuscrits. In 2007, Coleman participated in Documenta 12 in Kassel, premiering his new work Retake with Evidence, 2007. In 2008, Coleman completed the successful showing at IMMA of his trilogy of pioneering works from the 1990s, with the slide installation Background, 1991-94, following the installation of  I  N  I  T  I  A  L  S,  1993-94, in 2006 and Lapsus Exposure, 1992-94, in 2007. These installations celebrated IMMA’s acquisition of these major works through funding from the Heritage Committee of the National Cultural Institutions in 2004.

The current exhibition is accompanied by a substantial new publication published in association with Thames & Hudson, with new texts by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII; Jean Fisher, Professor of Fine Art and Transcultural Studies, Middlesex University; Luke Gibbons, Keough Family Chair in Irish Studies, Professor of English, and Concurrent Professor in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, and Dorothea von Hantelmann, art historian at the Collaborative Research Centre "Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits" at the Free University Berlin.

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

19 March 2009

A major exhibition of 27 works by the leading British artist Hughie O’Donoghue opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday 3 March 2009. Hughie O’Donoghue: Recent Paintings and Selected Works from the American Ireland Fund Donation marks a significant donation to IMMA of 39 works by the artist; the gift of an anonymous American collector, facilitated by the American Ireland Fund. Juxtaposed with seven paintings from the donation, are works from the artist’s own collection and loans from public and private collections revealing more recent developments in his practice.

At the heart of the donation is a series of paintings on the subject of the Passion, commissioned by the American collector and completed over a period of ten years. As with all of O’Donoghue’s work, this involved a period of careful reflection, with the artist travelling to see several collections of religious works, from the great Tintoretto’s paintings in Venice to Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross in Washington. The result was 25 large-scale paintings, combining the figurative and the abstract to powerful emotional effect. The exhibition includes such notable works from the series as An Anatomy of Melancholy II, 1991-92, in which we see a ghostly figure descending, echoing, perhaps, Christ’s Descent from the Cross; also Blue Crucifixion, 1993-2003. The latter marked the end of this particular body of work and is considered by the artist to be the most important in the entire series, having been reworked over many years. Several paintings from the series were shown to great popular and critical acclaim in an exhibition of O’Donohgue’s work at the RHA Gallery in 1999. The IMMA donation includes a further 14 works, in addition to the Passion paintings.

Several other works, inspired by O’Donoghue’s father’s experiences in the Second World War, also have a connection with IMMA. It was during the artist’s stay at the Museum on the Artists Residency Programme in 1995, shortly after his father Daniel’s death, that he began going through some 300 letters, many of which his father had sent home from the Front. These subsequently became the inspiration for another major corpus of work in which his father can be seen to represents “everyman” – anonymous, despite living in exceptional times. Flanders and the Narrow Seas, 2005-06, incorporates a photograph taken in 1904, the year of the Entente Cordiale between England and France. In it we see a photographer relaxing at St-Valery en Crux, the exact location where the Highland Division, with which his father had served, was surrounded and captured in 1940. This, and other works, illustrates the abiding importance of memory in O’Donoghue’s practice. “One of the recurring themes of my work is memory and how it is constructed. I am interested in both individual memory and the larger cultural memory of societies. Memory is rarely accurate, but in my experience it is invariably true, in that it represents how we feel about things rather than what we know. In this way it is like the art of painting.”

The exhibition includes more recent paintings, including the Girl from Stellata, 2004, and Raft, 2005. Often of an epic scale, these paintings demonstrate O’Donoghue’s combination of painting and photographic techniques to produce a multi-layered image in which the photographic elements can dominate the image or be obliterated by over-painting. This technique forms a metaphor for the subject itself, as the artist highlights the extent to which history and memory are central to all of these works and their theme of man’s inability to learn from his own history.

Born in Manchester in 1953 and now based in Co Kilkenny, Hughie O’Donoghue has been exhibiting internationally, in solo and group exhibitions, since 1982, gaining a reputation as one of the leading painters of his generation. His paintings are included in important public collections, including the National Gallery, London; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and the Arts Council of England. Recent exhibitions include Lost Histories: Imagined Realities, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, 2008; Parables, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 2008; The Geometry of Paths, James Hyman Gallery, London, 2008, and Last Poems, Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, 2007.

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

A full-colour publication, including an interview with the artist by Seán Kissane, a poem inspired by Blue Crucifixion by Gerard Smyth, Managing Editor of The Irish Times, and a foreword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, accompanies the exhibition. The exhibition catalogue is supported by James Hyman Gallery. .

The exhibition is sponsored by PJT Specialist Art Insurance and presented in association with The Irish Times.

The exhibition continues until 17 May 2009.

Admission is free.

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays 12noon – 5.30pm
Monday, Good Friday 10 April Closed

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

28 January 2009