A new arts and literary publication featuring contributions by Francesco Clemente, Seamus Heaney, Nalini Malani, David Mitchell, Sean Scully, Colm Tóibín and a host of other leading art world figures, will be launched by the Irish Museum of Modern Art at 6.00pm on Thursday 11 June 2009. Boulevard Magenta is the brain child of IMMA’s Director, Enrique Juncosa, himself a noted poet, who has brought together a collection of works ranging across the visual arts, prose, poetry, music, film and architecture for the first issue of the biannual magazine. The launch coincides with the opening of a new exhibition at the Museum by the celebrated American artist Terry Winters, who has contributed nine drawings incorporating texts by the American writer Ben Marcus to the publication.

The literary pieces include a short story by Colm Tóibín, based on an undeveloped plot from one of Henry James’s notebooks; a poem by Seamus Heaney, written in response to a painting by Colin Middleton; an excerpt from a forthcoming novel by David Mitchell and three poems by the Spanish poet José Carlos Llop. Also included is an unpublished interview with the Polish poet Czes³aw Mi³osz, carried out by the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the French artist Philippe Parreno just prior to Mi³osz’s death in 2004.

Several of the artists featured in the publication have exhibited at IMMA, such as Miquel Barceló, who is represented by a series of paintings inspired by creatures of the sea; Francesco Clemente, whose portraits include three of his fellow contributors, and Nalini Malani, whose watercolours combine Indian and Western mythologies. This first issue also includes ten paintings by Sean Scully, an exhibition of whose work will be presented by IMMA in collaboration with the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in 2011.

Boulevard Magenta also presents the design for a private house in Dublin by the London-based architecture firm Amanda Levete Architects, whose commissions also include the Spencer Dock Bridge; excerpts from the script for the long-awaited new film by Tran Anh Hung, and an unpublished early score by Kevin Volans.

Enrique Juncosa was particularly keen that the new publication would reflect the Museum’s multi-disciplinary approach to programming, echoing early avant-garde magazines: “In recent years, IMMA has organised numerous projects involving not only artists but also writers, architects, musicians, filmmakers and dancers. We believe that in this acknowledgement of the interconnection between art forms, we are offering our audiences the context and background to understand, learn from and enjoy more fully what we have to give.”

The title, Boulevard Magenta, is inspired by the street of that name in Paris, which Enrique Juncosa discovered on a visit there. He subsequently learned from one of the contributors, the poet Derek Mahon, that the street takes its name from the Battle of Magenta, fought in northern Italy in 1859 during the French-Piedmontese war against the Austrians, where French troops defeated the Austrian army, forcing them out of the country. The French were lead by General Patrice de Mac-Mahon, a member of the French nobility whose family originated in Co Limerick, who was given the title Duc de Magenta for his role in the battle.

Boulevard Magenta is edited by Enrique Juncosa and Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions at IMMA. The project is funded through the sale of  the limited edition print, Gray’s Robe, 2008, specially created for the Museum by Sean Scully, and also by a generous donation from Marie Donnelly.

The publication will be launched in New York at 12 noon on Bloomsday, Tuesday 16 June, by Niall Burgess, Consul General of Ireland, and Enrique Juncosa, at the Residence of the Consul General, 240 East 39th Street, # 52C.

Copies are available via the Museum’s website at Publications and at the Museum bookshop, price €25.00.

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

3 June 2009

Seanscéalta / Myths and Legends, an exhibition developed through the continued partnership between Iniscealtra Festival of the Arts and IMMA’s National Programme, opens to the public at Raheen Hospital Day Care Centre and Scariff Library, Co Clare on Monday 25 May 2009. Seanscéalta / Myths and Legends explores the world of childhood stories and memories, nursery rhymes and fairy tales.

In Scariff Library, artworks from IMMA’s Collection by Irish artist Alice Maher are exhibited alongside works made by local primary school children and visitors to the Raheen Hospital Day Care Centre in workshops inspired by both Alice Maher’s and  Paula Rego’s practices. Born in Tipperary, Alice Maher works within the realms of nature and culture, subversion and transformation, mythology and memory. Maher explains that working with materials like bees, berries and hair, she builds up a strong relationship with their histories and cultural associations in the creation of surreal works, that appear, like enchanted objects from a medieval folk tale. 

Maher’s Berry Dress, 1994 presents the delicate shape of the child’s dress, decorated with berries. On closer inspection, the dress loses its innocence and protective role, taking on a more sinister appeal. The pins, which hold the berries in place, are arranged internally – should the dress be worn, these pins would pierce the skin. Maher frequently uses materials in such a way that they challenge our interpretation of them. 

Prints from IMMA’s Collection by Paula Rego, the celebrated Portuguese painter and print-maker, are exhibited in Raheen Hospital Day Care Centre. Rego’s works are highly figurative and explore, often through illustration of well-known works of literature, frightening or disturbing situations, many of which have a semi-overt sexual aspect. A number of her prints relate specifically to children’s literature, to fairy tales, nursery rhymes and longer fictional works which have a wide popular appeal. Using powerfully contrasting light effects, sharp, angular forms and child-like shifts in scale she communicates a sense that cherished children’s stories often contain messages that are profoundly unnerving from a child’s perspective or, alternately, are accepted by the child while it is the adult reader who is not comfortable with them.

Rego’s Little Miss Muffet, 1989 was made in response to a request from her grandchild, who did not seem distressed as Rego recalls by the enlarged spider and adult face. The etching has Freudian connections, as Freud believed that the mother was often perceived by a child as a spider, capturing it in her limbs and encroaching on its life. Daughters and their relationship with their mothers is a recurring theme in Rego’s work.

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.

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

Opening Hours:
Scariff Public Library, Mountshannon Road, Scariff, Co Clare
Monday – Friday: 12.00am – 5.00pm
Tel: (061) 922893

Raheen Hospital Day Care Centre:
Monday – Friday: 11.00 am – 5.00pm

Seanscéalta / Myths and Legends continues until Friday 29 May 2009.

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

12 May 2009

An exhibition from the IMMA Collection, featuring sculptures and installation works from the 1990s, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 14 May 2009. Between Metaphor and Object provides new perspectives on the diversity of practices represented in the IMMA Collection from this period, explores its particularities, and considers them in the context of international trends of the decade. Central to the exhibition are a number of key works from the Weltkunst Collection, which is on loan to IMMA since 1994. This significant collection of British sculpture and drawings of the 1980s and ‘90s will return to the Weltkunst Foundation in 2010. The exhibition acknowledges the vision and generousity of this loan. 

The Weltkunst Collection epitomises what is popularly referred to as ‘New British Sculpture’, a term used to describe the quite disparate work of young sculptors who emerged in the late 1970s and ‘80s and who showed renewed interest in using traditional materials after the dominance of Minimalist and Conceptual practices. The principal artists associated with this movement and featured in the exhibition are Barry Flanagan, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor and Alison Wilding. Other key Weltkunst artists included in the exhibition are Avis Newman, Lucia Nogueira, Julian Opie, Jacqueline Poncelet, Rachel Whiteread and Richard Wentworth. Work by Irish artists using a variety of materials include a totemic cast resin sculpture by Eilís O’Connell, a work by Siobhán Haphaska of lacquered fiberglass, basalt and moss playfully pitching the organic with the mass produced and a bronze installation by Michael Warren in homage to Eileen Gray. The exhibition also includes other works of the 1990s  from the IMMA Collection by artists such as Kiki Smith, Ann Hamilton and Maud Cotter whose presence references a central focus of the period on issues of identity, gender and the politics of the body and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, whose works imply stories which must be imagined by their audience.

Commenting on the exhibition Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA, said “Rather than addessing an overarching theme, each of the works in this exhibition operates as a sort of microcosm of each artist’s practice. However, the exhibition title Between Metaphor and Object takes its cue from the figurative and metaphoric imagery and titles of many of the Welkunst works and invites us to consider  how we look at and engage with a work of art. It calls attention to the range of readings that can accrue around a work of art and the idea of the continuous flux that such engagement elicits  between symbolism and objecthood in the mind of the viewer.”

The exhibition reflects the growing prevalence of installation works at the critical forefront of art developments in the 1990s. The international dominance in the ‘90s of interactive art practices that draw on human relations and their social context, termed ‘Relational Art’, is not reflected in the Weltkunst Collection, although noted exponent Douglas Gordon does feature with the work Above all else, 1991. In the context of this exhibition Literally Based on H.Z., 2006, by Liam Gillick, goes on view on the Landing for the first time since its acquisition. Much of the work for this project is based on academic research produced in South America concerning industrial working practices in Scandinavia in the 1970s. The work operates in parallel with Construcción de Uno Gillick’s ongoing open-ended writing project about the notion of continued production in a post-industrial landscape, where the former workers return to their now abandoned experimental factory to revisit the progressive models of production that led to their subsequent redundancy. Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig was also involved in the making of the installation.

Between Metaphor and Object is co-curated by Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA, and Marguerite O’Molloy, Assistant Curator: Collections, IMMA.

Between Metaphor and Object continues until 4 April 2010.
Litterally Based on H.Z., 2006, by Liam Gillick, 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] 

12 May 2009

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