The first solo exhibition in Ireland by the exciting German/Brazilian artist Janaina Tschäpe opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 25 June 2008. Janaina Tschäpe: Chimera is structured around the genetics of the fabled beast, to create a very specific atmosphere. Comprising some 20 works, the exhibition focuses mainly on Tschäpe’s recent paintings that embody a sense of the extraordinary through colourful botanical notations. Displayed and intertwined amongst these paintings are her film and photographic works.

Chimera stands for a fusion of multiple identities in a single body or creature. In her interview from the exhibition catalogue with Rachael Thomas, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA, Tschäpe describes the relationship between the Chimera and her work: “What makes the Chimera a fearful monster isn’t any of [its] traits in particular, but the fact that they are all combined in a single being. It is this notion of the Chimera that applies to the way I structure the process of my work. Whether I’m making videos, photographs or paintings, the process is similarly multifaceted to the point that it departs from being a work strategy to become the reason for the work to exist. When I am immersed in this sort of media amalgamation I am allowed to lose control and be free”.

In this exhibition Tschäpe creates an environment of dream and fantasy, where the everyday world metamorphoses into a mythical place, populated by fabricated creatures and florescent vegetation. The four screen video installation, Blood, Sea (2004), is a mesmerising example of Tschäpe’s fantasy worlds. Its narrative plays with the evolutionary biology of sirens and mermaids, from fables such as the water sprites of Irish lore to the Brazilian Iemanjá – spirit of the seas, lakes and fertility – from the Candomblé religion. In this work Tschäpe plays creator to magnificent and fantastical creatures and environments.

The fertile worlds found in Blood, Sea and the photographic series Botanica (2004-05) are juxtaposed with the simplicity of an earlier series spanning over a number of years. 100 Little Deaths (1996-2002) explores danger and the horror for an artist of a failure of ideas. This exhibition is a unique opportunity to discover Tschäpe’s contemplative and melancholic, yet surreal, practice.

Janaina Tschäpe was born in Munich, Germany, in 1973, but spent a great deal of her childhood in São Paulo, Brazil, her mother’s hometown. In 1992 she moved to Hamburg and attended the Hochschule für bildende Künste where she received her degree in Fine Art. Tschäpe has exhibited extensively in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her most recent solo shows include Galerie Xippas, Athens, 2007; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, 2007; Contemporary Museum of Art, St Louis, 2006; Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo, 2006; Paço das Artes, São Paulo, 2006, and Tokyo Wonder Site (TWS), Tokyo, 2006. She currently lives and works in New York.

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

Artist’s Talk
On Tuesday 24 June at 4.00pm Janaina Tschäpe will discuss her work in the Lecture Room at IMMA. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 6129948 or email: [email protected]

A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with texts by Rachael Thomas, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, curator Angela Kingston and writer/curator Germano Celant. A discussion between the artist and curator is also included.

The exhibition continues until 28 September 2008.

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12 noon – 5.30pm
Late opening on Thursday evenings until 8.00pm from 5 June – 18 September
Mondays: Closed

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

18 June 2008

The first solo exhibition in Ireland by one of Germany’s most innovative contemporary artists, Ulla von Brandenburg, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 28 May 2008. Whose beginning is not, nor end cannot be presents new and recent works that explore recurring themes and new subject matter through a wide range of media including film, drawing, installation and performance. Brandenburg’s practice reflects her training in set design and the visual arts and is inspired by a wide range of historical elements, many reverting back to the late 19th-centruy, sourced from literature, the visual arts, expressionist theatre, Hollywood films, photography, chess and magic, as well as pre-Freudian psychoanalysis. Brandenburg has created a new specially designed wall installation for IMMA and has produced a magazine based on a Danish photo-book which will be available to visitors throughout the show.

The title of the exhibition, Whose beginning is not, nor end cannot be, is taken from the work Angel-talks by Magus John Dee (1527 – 1609), a noted mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, occultists and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. As the title suggests, many of Brandenburg’s installations present uncertainty. It is never clear whether the show is over, or whether the performance has just begun. The entrance to the exhibition space itself is adorned with a theatre curtain, installed on the façade which visitors must pass to enter. In the interview from the catalogue with Rachael Thomas, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA, Brandenburg describes the use of the curtain: “The pattern of the curtain is the same as the backside of the tarot cards which I developed. In this sense, what is behind the curtain is like the image of a tarot card. Of course, every tarot card has a different, very personal meaning and can be read in different ways, just like everybody can find a different interpretation behind the curtain in the exhibition”.

The exhibition is structured into four different chapters. Moving through the exhibition space each chapter explores recurring themes and images which relates to one another. In the first chapter the newspaper magazine IV, 2008, acts like an archive of Brandenburg’s collected images and is surrounded by drawings relating to them and other images in the exhibition. Leading into the next chapter the film Geist (Ghost), 2007, explores themes of past and present, life and death and reality and illusion. In the second chapter a wall drawing, specially designed for IMMA, Forest, 2008, of a forest by night covers all four walls. Inside this dark space only the long trunks of the trees are visible, enclosed in the space visitors are brought into another world where the inside becomes outside and day becomes night. In the third chapter the installation Karo Sieben (Seven of Diamonds), 2007, comprises a chess-board with various props, made to give the illusion of perspective it acts like an empty theatre stage where anything can happen.

In the final chapter the new film work 8, 2007, refers to Brandenburg’s adaptation of the the tableaux vivants from earlier works but approaches them in a new way. The tableaux vivants or ‘living pictures’ are shot on a Super-8 film, in which a seemingly motionless arrangement of people hold their frozen staged positions for the entire duration of one reel of film. Popular in the 19th-century, the tableau vivant was a combination of fine art and theatre, with live models carefully posed and lit in a composition akin to that in a painting or photograph. In the work 8 the film’s narrative is constructed through a single shot that gently pans and flows through a French castle inhabited by all the tableau vivants from Brandenburg’s past works, threading together numerous theatrical scenes and layering historical characters such as chess players, ghosts and a sleeping man. The film leads us in an endless loop of images, objects and tableaux vivants, with no specific beginning or end.

Born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1974, Ulla von Brandenburg currently lives and works in Hamburg and Paris. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 2008; Project PS1, New York; Art: Concept, Paris, 2007; Produzentengalerie, Hamburg, 2007; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2006, and Kunsthalle, Zürich, 2006. Group exhibitions in 2008 include Biennale’s in Jerusalem, Bucharest and Sydney; in 2007 group exhibitions include Performa 07, New York; The World as a Stage, Tate Modern, London; Against Time, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; 3rd Prague Biennial, Prague, and Pale Carnage, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol.

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

The exhibition is supported by the Goethe-Institut Dublin.

An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition which includes an interview with the artist by Rachael Thomas, texts by curator and critic Beatrix Ruf and writer Declan Long, and a foreword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA.

Whose beginning is not, nor end cannot be continues until 12 October 2008.

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12 noon – 5.30pm
Late opening on Thursday evenings until 8.00pm from 5 June – 18 September
Mondays: Closed

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

21 May 2008

An exhibition of the African works of the Spanish artist Miquel Barceló, widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 25 June 2008. Miquel Barceló: The African Work focuses on works inspired by Barceló’s frequent stays in West Africa, where he has been a regular visitor since 1988 and where he has had a home, in the Dogon area of Mali, since the early 1990s. Comprising some 90 works, the exhibition ranges over the entire period of his association with West Africa, presenting works on paper – some being shown for the first time – large and small-scale paintings, sculptures, ceramics and sketchbooks. Also included is a large bronze sculpture of an elephant, Elefandret, 2007, situated in the Museum’s formal gardens.

Miquel Barceló is renowned for the extraordinary diversity and originality of his work, which has ranged from a series of spectacular terracotta murals for a chapel in the cathedral in Palma de Mallorca to a mesmerizing performance piece/living sculpture with the Hungarian/French choreographer Josef Nadj. He is currently creating a ceiling painting for the Human Rights Hall at the United Nations offices in Geneva, his most ambitious project to date. Barceló’s amazing creative output has been compared to such great Spanish masters as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Antoni Tapies and to outstanding contemporaries European artists such as Francesco Clemente and Anselm Kiefer. Alongside these major projects, for the past 20 years West Africa has played – and continues to play – a particularly important part in Barceló’s practice. Unlike many artists who have been fascinated with the region, Barceló is drawn not to the exoticism of the area but rather to the daily life of its inhabitants, which he presents in a series of portraits, domestic scenes, landscapes and still lifes.

More than half of the exhibition is made up of works on paper, a medium which is central to this aspect of Barceló’s oeuvre. Using sketchbooks and diaries, he captures, visually and occasionally in words, the difficult human experience which is an essential reality of the region as well as its beauty and grace. The material poverty of the area is for him rich in impressions and spirituality. Barceló experiments with local pigments and clays producing an intense depth of colour, which gives his work a wonderful vibrancy. In 4 Seated Women and Young Girl with a Violet Skirt, both dating from 2005, we see women going about their daily tasks in vividly-coloured indigenous costumes. Executed in a seemingly simple, and almost hurried, manner, the works have a remarkable spontaneity and an essential and unforced feeling of Africa. The primordial beauty of the landscape also finds an echo in the irregular surfaces of his paintings. Some even include a covering of dust blown up by the regular dust storms, or holes made by termites, demonstrating his fascination with the transient nature of much that surrounds him.

The exhibition presents a number of large-scale works, which while not produced in Africa are linked to Barceló’s experience there. These include the desert landscape painting, Landscape for the Blind on Green Background II, 1989, one of what has become known as his “white paintings”; the Issa Beri, 1991, series of people in boats and Paradise Table, 1991, with its large tables of food reminiscent of African market stalls where totems are sold.

Barceló’s work in ceramics, which have since become such an important part of his practice, also had it beginnings in Africa. The exhibition includes some of these earlier pieces, all created with the artist’s customary sense of urgency. In Large Pot with Volcanic Rock, 1999, we see a small herd of goats disappearing through the walls of a ceramic pot, having left a trail of hoof marks on the outside, while Papaya, 1998, depicts two halves of a papaya served up on a plate. Bronzes include Gorilla’s Head, 2000, and a delightfully playful outdoor sculpture, Elefandret, 2007, of an elephant standing on its trunk.

IMMA Director, Enrique Juncosa, the curator of the exhibition and a long-time friend of the artist, describes Barceló as “one of the few contemporary artists who feels comfortable working in a rural idiom. In doing so, he confronts subjects of fundamental importance, subjects that have troubled and preoccupied us for an eternity.”

Born in Majorca in 1957, Miquel Barceló studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Palma and the Fine Arts Academy in Barcelona. In 1974 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galería d’Art Picarol, Cala d’Or, Majorca. During the 1980s he traveled in Europe, the United States and West Africa and in 1982 he achieved international acclaim for his participation in Documenta 7 in Kassel. Barceló works with a wide-range of media and projects, from paintings and drawings, to backdrops for opera, murals and engravings, and terracotta and ceramic sculptures. From 2001 to 2006 Barceló worked on a project for the cathedral in Palma, covering an entire chapel in terracotta and then decorating it with images relating to the sixth chapter of the gospel of St John. Recent solo exhibitions include Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, 2003; Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2004; Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zürich, 2005, and Sala Kubo, San Sebastián, 2005. Barceló currently lives between Paris, Majorca and Mali.

Enrique Juncosa has previously curated retrospective exhibitions on Barceló in the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1994, and in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), Madrid, 1998. This exhibition will travel to CAC Málaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in Spain from 11 November 2008 to 15 February 2009.

Artist’s Talk
On Tuesday 24 June at 5.00pm Miquel Barceló will discuss his work, in conversation with Irish Writer Colm Tóibín, in the Johnston Suite at IMMA. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected]. 
 
A fully-illustrated catalogue has been published with texts by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín and the Spanish poet and novelist José Carlos Llop, a chronology of Barceló’s time in Africa compiled by Amelie Aranguren, former assistant of the artist and an interview between myself and Barceló. We are delighted to collaborate with Turner Libros on the English and Spanish editions of this publication. The catalogue has been produced with the assistance of Marie Donnelly. 

The exhibition continues until 28 September 2008.

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12 noon – 5.30pm
Late opening on Thursday evenings until 8.00pm from 5 June – 18 September
Mondays: Closed

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

8 May 2008

An exhibition celebrating 20 years of the organisation Business to Arts, and the visual art collections of its members, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 30 April 2008. 10,000 to 50: Contemporary Art from the Members of Business to Arts reflects the collecting and support of the Irish private and public sector for contemporary visual art in Ireland over two decades. It includes exciting examples of Irish-based visual art practice, as well as documenting the commissioning of artworks and ongoing corporate support at community, national and international levels for the presentation and promotion of contemporary art. 

Over 10,000 artworks from the collections of Business to Arts’ member companies were considered from which a final selection of 50 was made. Most of the works are by Irish or Irish-based artists and largely comprise paintings, works on paper and sculpture, reflecting the prevailing tendency of corporate collectors towards more traditional forms of presentations. There is, nonetheless, a rich variety within these familiar media – in, for example, the juxtaposition of nature and urban culture in Blaise Drummond’s Island Painting No.1, 2005, and Oliver Comerford’s Line In, 1999; in Elizabeth Magill’s use of landscape as a device for emotional reflection in Forest Edge 2, 2000, and in Hope Painting – A Journey without Moving, 2005, William McKeown’s exploration of the atmospheric aspects of nature. Sculptures include Corban Walker’s architectonic glass structure Grid Stack 1/6, 2007, Mariele Neudecker’s fiberglass and plastic landscape Another Million Days and Night Go By, 2002, and Janet Mullarney’s totemic life-size figure, Untitled, 1988.

 There is also a number of significant photographic works including Gerard Byrne’s view of the Gate Theatre’s stage with Louis le Brocquy’s famous set for Waiting for Godot; Amanda Coogan’s still from her performance piece Reading Beethoven, 2004, and Willie Doherty’s Grey Day 4, 2007, among others. Although fewer in number, the exhibition presents some notable mixed media and audio visual pieces, such as John Gerrard’s new media work, Smoke Tree V, 2006, displayed on a specially-made computer screen, and the mixed-media installation, Untitled, 2003, by Peter Maybury and Mark McLoughlin.

Although, in keeping with the 20th anniversary, the exhibition focuses on artworks produced in the last 20 years, the artists cover a wide age range. It is intriguing to see early works by younger artists, and to reflect on how their practice subsequently developed and how early patronage may well have played a part in this development.  

The selection also includes works by Declan Clarke, Maud Cotter, Gary Coyle, Dorothy Cross,  Mark Francis, Patrick Graham, Tjibbe Hooghiemstra, Ronnie Hughes, John Kingerlee, Ciaran Lennon, Mary Lohan, Stephen Loughman, Isobel Nolan, Kathy Prendergast, Nigel Rolfe, Patrick Scott and many others. A specially commissioned new artwork, a photographic ‘portrait’ of the workplace by Irish artist Ronan McCrea, is also being shown.

As well as providing audiences with the opportunity of experiencing artworks that are often behind the scenes in corporate settings, the exhibition aims to inspire enduring relationships between the business community, IMMA, and Irish and international contemporary artists, by introducing a wider business public to the excitement and rewards of supporting contemporary art. By collecting art, and especially by commissioning artists to make new work within the workplace and beyond, companies encourage innovation and creative entrepreneurship. This exhibition seeks to acknowledge those who have already supported the arts and to encourage companies to draw on the ideas and creativity of contemporary art and to support artists in society.

10,000 to 50 is jointly curated by Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA; Karen Sweeney, Assistant Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA, and Jenny Haughton, independent curator.

The exhibition is co-sponsored by Anglo Irish Bank and KPMG, Image Now are design partners and  The Irish Times are media partners.

A series of talks, events and projects, both curator and artist-led, examing the potential for artworks in new situations and corporate support of more ephemeral art projects, will take place during the exhibition.

A publication, with texts by Christina Kennedy and art critic Gemma Tipton, reflects on the nature of corporate support of the visual arts and the ways by which companies acquire and commission artworks, and includes a documentation of Ronan McCrea’s new artwork.

10,000 to 50 continues until 4 August 2008.

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

Summer late opening 5 June – 18 September Thursday evenings until 8.00pm
Mondays: Closed

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

15 April 2008 

After 36 years of making art as Patrick Ireland, the distinguished Irish-born artist Brian O’Doherty will reclaim his birth name with the symbolic burial of his alter ego in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art on the afternoon of Tuesday 20 May 2008. The burial is a gesture of reconciliation to celebrate the restoration of peace in Northern Ireland, just as his action in assuming the name Patrick Ireland was a protest at the British military presence in Northern Ireland and the failure of the authorities to ensure civil rights for all. "We are burying hate", says the artist, "it’s not often you get the chance to do that". 

During the Irish Exhibition of Living Art at the Project Arts Centre in 1972, O’Doherty, in a performance before 30 invited witnesses and assisted by Robert Ballagh and Brian King, undertook to "sign his artworks ‘Patrick Ireland’ until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights."  This commitment, often seen as controversial, the artist describes as "an expatriate’s gesture in response to Bloody Sunday in Derry".  For almost fifty years, the eighty-year-old artist has lived and worked in New York. 

At the 1972 performance, the artist, masked and clothed in white, was painted head to toe in the charged colours of green and orange by the two assistants, resulting in a glimpse of the tricolour before it was extinguished in the cross-over confusion of colours. The work documenting this performance can be seen along with the encoffined effigy of Patrick Ireland from Sunday 18 May, in IMMA’s Gordon Lambert Gallery, named after the collector and long-time friend of the artist. The death mask of the effigy, which is dressed in white, was made by O’Doherty’s friend, the American artist Charles Simonds. 

On Tuesday 20 May, the effigy will be interred in the grounds of the Museum. The secular ceremony will be conducted by the distinguished art historian and museum director, Michael Rush, a former Jesuit priest. At the graveside, five poems that resonate most closely with the meaning of the event will be read in English, French, Spanish, and German by friends of the artist and in Irish by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith. The ceremony will conclude with a vocal performance by the Irish artist, Alannah O’Kelly, after which those present will return to the Museum for a joyful wake.

Artists, museum directors, writers, and gallerists from Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, England, Northern Ireland and the US are expected to travel to Dublin for the occasion. Attendants will also include a special contingent from the Fondazione Zetema, which owns and administers the Casa Dipinta in Todi, Italy, where 30 years of Patrick Ireland’s wall paintings and installations can be seen. The house also contains an extensive research library on contemporary American and Irish art.

Born in Ballaghadereen, Co Roscommon Brian O’Doherty left Dublin for New York in 1957, where he became a pioneering figure in Conceptual Art and also a renowned writer, critic, filmmaker and educator. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and in the Rosc exhibition in Dublin. His most recent exhibition in Ireland was his 50-year retrospective at the Dublin City Gallery the

Hugh Lane

in 2006. The exhibition was recently seen at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University.

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

9 April 2008

 

Exhibitions from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s own Collection open to the public in three venues nationwide this April, as part of IMMA’s National Programme, in locations ranging from Thurles, Co Tipperary, and Letterkenny, Co Donegal, to Wexford Town.

What lies beneath the surface opened to the public at Tipperary Institute of Technology, Thurles, Co Tipperary, on Tuesday 1 April. This exhibition focuses on paintings from the IMMA Collection from the figurative to the abstract. It also explores the physical nature of the painting process and the importance, placed by some artists, on the building of layers to create definition and texture within their work. Works by distinguished artists such as Robert Ballagh, Mark Francis, Louis le Brocquy and Patrick Scott are included in the exhibition. 

The Picture is Still opens to the public at the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Co Donegal, on Wednesday 9 April. Comprising five film-works from the IMMA Collection, the exhibition features work by Irish and international artists Willie Doherty, Ann Hamilton, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Gerardo Suter and Philippe Parreno.

Seven Leagues More opens to the public at Wexford Arts Centre on Monday 21 April. Part of a highly successful partnership between Wexford County Council, the Arts Council, Wexford Art Centre and IMMA, the exhibition celebrates the seventh year of Art Alongside – a visual arts project for primary schools supported and funded by Wexford County Council and the Arts Council. Seven Leagues More presents work from IMMA’s Collection, by artists including John Kindness, Alice Maher and Michael Mulcahy, alongside a selection of works created by schoolchildren as part of their involvement in Art Alongside. 

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.

What lies beneath the surface continues at Tipperary Institute of Technology, Thurles, Co Tipperary until 10 April 2008.

The Picture is Still continues at the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Co Donegal until 21 June 2008. 

Seven Leagues More continues at Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford, Co Wexford until 4 May 2008.

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

3 April 2008

The Irish Museum of Modern Art is delighted to announce the opening of the new exhibition Cut-Outs and Cut-Ups: Hans Christian Andersen and William Seward Burroughs, in the New Galleries on Wednesday 9 April 2008. Focusing on the cut-outs and cut-ups of Hans Christian Andersen and William Seward Burroughs, this exhibition is the first to compare these legendary writers and fascinating, but little-known, visual artists. Hailing from different origins and different periods, Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) and William Seward Burroughs (1914-1997) nevertheless shared many significant connections. Both were highly productive and revolutionary writers, intrepid travelers and larger-than-life personalities who developed important collaborative relationships. They were visionaries, who had a deep and long engagement with the visual arts.

Though Andersen and Burroughs are known largely for their literary masterpieces, their visual work, has to date received little exposure. Key to the 124 works in this exhibition is the artists’ mutual engagement with cutting-out pictures and stencils which involve silhouettes and shadows. Their use of brilliant colours and metallic surfaces relate closely to their writings. The Andersen material consists of a wide range of drawings, cut-outs and picture books containing his original collages. The Burroughs artworks include paintings on paper and wood, collaborative projects with lifelong friend, the artist Brion Gysin – these include pages for The Third Mind, 1978, as well as their legendary Dreamachine.

Both Andersen and Burroughs produced unique books which combined both images and words. In the 1960s Burroughs and Brion Gysin began creating scrapbooks, mixing fragmented images, texts and drawings. They also began to use the ‘cut-up’ technique which involved cutting and reassembling printed and drawn materials with knives or scissors – a technique also untilised by Burroughs in his Nova Trilogy, three experimental novels made from 1961 to 1964. Closely related to the cut-up novels were a series of scrapbooks including Black Scrapbook, 1963-64, Red Scrapbook, c. 1966-73, and Green Scrapbook, 1971-73. The Third Mind, a collection of image-filled pages created by Burroughs and Gysin in 1965, was published in 1978. This scrapbook brought together, through the cut-up technique, a compilation of Burroughs and Gysin’s previous works, as well as fragments from various day-to-day sources.

Andersen’s picture books, which he often made with a patron or friend, consist of combinations of drawings, texts and mass produced images, as well as his own distinctive cut-outs. There are 16 known picture books made in the 1850s and ‘60s, with a final book made in 1874, all of which where created as birthday gifts for children intended for instructional and inspirational use. Along with the picture books Andersen also made cut-outs at social gatherings to entertain his guests while telling improvised stories creating decorative objects such as a Christmas tree or a children’s toy. On a more personal level he also used the cut-outs to convey complex psychic states often produced in a quick and direct manner with sections torn by hand to produce other-worldly beings such as witches, gnomes and trolls.

Other works in the exhibition include the Dreamachine, c. 1961,a flicker device that produces visual stimuli, the result of one of Burroughs’ and Gysin’s collaborations. Viewed with the eyes closed to provoke dream-like images and patterns the Dreamachine reflected their fascination with optical effects that could provoke changes in consciousness.

Around 1873, in the last few years of his life, Andersen began to work on a four-panel folding screen, which was placed at the foot of his bed, a space for projecting his thoughts and dreams. Andersen began to collage hundreds of cut-out printed images across the eight sections of the screen, covering the entire surface to produce eight interconnected works. Each section represents a separate chapter devoted to the art, people and events that where important to him. Andersen’s Screen is represented by a wall paper reproduction in the exhibition.

Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, in 1805, the son of a washerwoman and a shoemaker. At the age of 14 he moved to Copenhagen to pursue an acting career. Between 1822 and 1827 he attended the Slagelse and Helsingør Grammer Schools. Throughout his life he wrote a number of plays and travel books inspired by his ongoing travels in Europe, and is best known for his popular fairytales such as The Little Mermaid, The Red Shoes and The Ugly Duckling. The majority of his visual works, including the picture books, date from the 1850s to his death in Copenhagen in 1875.

William Seward Burroughs was born in 1914 in St Louis to a wealthy family. He studied at Harvard and travelled to Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Morocco between 1945 and 1950. Appropriating the cut-up technique developed by Gysin in the 1950s, Burroughs produced some of his most influential writings, extending the language first developed in his groundbreaking novel Naked Lunch, 1959. While living in Paris, London, New York and Lawrence, Kansas – where he died in 1997 – Burroughs never stopped experimenting with writing, film, sound and visual art.

The exhibition is curated by Hendel Teicher, independent curator and art historian.

Curator’s Talk
On Tuesday 8 April at 5.00pm curator Hendel Teicher will give a tour of the exhibition and discuss how she came to pair these two artists. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected].

A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Contributors include notable Andersen and Burroughs scholars Jens Andersen, Francine Prose, Raymond Foye and José Ferez Kuri. The catalogue also includes texts by Hans Christian Andersen and William Seward Burroughs, an essay by Hendel Teicher and a foreword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA.

Cut-Outs and Cut-Ups: Hans Christian Andersen and William Seward Burroughs continues until 29 June 2008

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

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

1 April 2008 

The first exhibition in Ireland by Jack Pierson, one of America’s most inventive and evocative artists, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 12 March 2008. Comprising some 45 works, Jack Pierson presents photographs, drawings and installations, as well as the artist’s renowned word sculptures. All are informed by Pierson’s concern with the emotional undercurrents of everyday life, from the intimacy of romantic attachment to the distant idolising of stars of stage and screen. The exhibition will be officially opened by Richard D Marshall, curator of the exhibition and former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, at 6.00pm on Tuesday 11 March.

Jack Pierson surveys over 20 years of the artist’s work and includes all the main subjects, forms and materials that make up his practice. The exhibition abounds with references to lost love, faded glamour and sentimental musings, inspired by the anxiety, alienation and yearnings that Pierson sees as an inevitable part of human existence. These find expression in a wide variety of media, from colour photographs and photographic collages through graphite and watercolour drawings to found letters, furniture and miscellaneous objects. The exhibition’s curator Richard D Marshall describes how, alongside these emotional elements, Pierson simultaneously focuses on the more formal aspects of art and “frequently and deliberately undermines the strong emotional and narrative content of his subjects by using unexpected configurations and by obliterating legibility in an ongoing quest to reconcile representation and abstraction”.

The exhibition begins with Pierson’s early photographs inspired by regular visits to Los Angeles and Miami Beach, to which he was drawn by their faded glamour and run-down Art Deco architecture. For the roses and A woman less lovely, both dating from 1990, show a strong sense of urban alienation, heightened by the seemingly haphazard manner in which they are displayed – unframed and pinned directly to the wall. Another early piece dealing with this sense of displacement is Untitled (Diane Arbus), 1992, a conceptual reconfiguration of MoMA’s catalogue for a 1972 Diane Arbus exhibition, with the pages presented, not in the correct sequence, but in the order in which they came off the printing press. Similar deconstructed works relate to Edward Hopper, Elvis Presley, and a number of Hollywood teen stars.  

Youth culture, sexuality and Hollywood icons also inform Self-Portrait (James Dean), 1993. A homage to the tragic star of the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, the work comments on the cult of celebrity and on the film’s depiction of the sexual attraction between James Dean and his male co-star Sal Mineo. Presented as a formal grid-like composition reminiscent of the work of Minimalists Agnes Martin or Sol LeWitt, it illustrates Pierson’s fondness for acknowledging these artistic tenets, while at the same time subverting them with personal content. Ten years later Pierson returned to what he termed the self-portrait, producing a series of photographs of male subjects titled Self-Portrait, but which comprise images not of the artist but of friends, strangers and models.

One of the most distinctive aspects of Pierson’s work is his use of found objects, cast-off letters and penciled notes on paper to express feelings of loss, longing and rejection. In one of his first word pieces, he uses two manufactured signs of the type used to display menus, but with the wording altered to read ‘Breakfast/Hope, Dinner/Fear’, echoing his experience of frequent stays in soulless hotels. In a similar vein, Helpless Hopeless, 1991, displays two synonyms for states of despair using fifteen plastic and metal letters arranged in an X format. The two words intersect and share the letter P, which forces the viewer to read both words simultaneously and to read in an unconventional, diagonal direction. Another series of works, including Diamond Life, 1990, take the form of tableau sculptures that document further aspects of his life, depicting rooms he has occupied, complete with furniture, clothing, paperback novels, cigarette butts and record albums.

Jack Pierson was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1960 and studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He has been the subject of exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia and the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona, 2007; Sabine Knust, Munich, 2007; Regen Projects, Los Angeles, 2007, and Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Berlin, 2006. A mid-career retrospective of his work was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 2002 and his Self-Portrait series was shown at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Pierson’s works are featured in the permanent collections of major museums of contemporary art including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He lives and works in New York and Southern California. 

Jack Pierson continues until 18 May 2008.

Artist’s Talk
On Tuesday 11 March at 5.00pm Jack Pierson will discuss his work, in conversation with IMMA Director Enrique Juncosa, in the Lecture Room at IMMA. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected].

A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with texts by Richard D Marshall, Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA, and writer Wayne Koestenbaum.

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12 noon – 5.30pm
Mondays and Friday 21 March: Closed

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

25 February 2008 

The first showing in Ireland of Dark Mirror, 2005, a double video projection by the leading Mexican artist Carlos Amorales, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 27 February 2008. Dark Mirror, acquired by the Museum in 2005, is the result of a collaboration between Amorales, German graphic designer André Pahl and Mexican composer José María Serralde. In Dark Mirror Amorales draws us into a world of menacing fantasy, in a nightmarish animation depicting man and beast in apocalyptic scenes. The imagery of the ominous landscape is rooted in contemporary popular symbols and Mexican icons. Black and white graphics of animals, humans and machinery dissolve from one entity into another, merging and separating, creating a sense of ambiguity and thereby deliberately thwarting any chance of identifying with one central character or engaging with a linear narrative.
           
André Pahl and José María Serralde were asked by Amorales to respond to his Liquid Archive, a collection of digital drawings began in 1999 which now comprises more than a thousand drawings. Pahl selected specific drawings from the archive which he sequenced into a silent animation. Serralde, a silent movie pianist, also worked on a selection of images and, without seeing Pahl’s animation, composed music to accompany it. The animation and music were then united by Amorales to form Dark Mirror. The two are combined as a double projection on a two-sided screen – one side a video of Serralde performing his composition on a grand piano, and the other, Pahl’s soundless animation.

Liquid Archive’s silhouetted drawings of wolves, monkeys, birds, humans, planes, guns, and particularly the ubiquitous imagery of skulls lend themselves to Amorales’s world of dark fantasy. The drawings are made from a technique similar to rotoscoping – widely used in the animation industry -which uses live-action film to develop animated films. Amorales makes the drawings from photographs he has taken of objects or appropriated images and graphics. The result is highly malleable digital vector drawings of objects and components which are then archived and categorised. Even if an entry is left unused, it is never deleted from the archive. This stock of component elements can be reconfigured and recycled repeatedly in different media and used to form the basis of paintings, performances, sculptures, videos and animations.

Amorales first gained international recognition with the performance piece Amorales vs Amorales, 2000 – 2003, in which a fictional wrestling match was staged. A mask representing the fictional character ‘Amorales’ was used as a type of working tool – not dissimilar to the components of Liquid Archive – by different individuals to perform in matches. The mask was continuously emptied and refilled with different ‘contents’ and used to explore the idea of shifting identities within the restricted framework of a mask.

In 2003 Amorales formed Nuevos Ricos with musician Julián Lede, which combines notions of visual arts, performance, and music in the form of a music label and explores the fantasy related to rock music, especially the bootleg culture and idealisation of rock culture that evolved from the onetime ban of rock music and records in Mexico. Nuevos Ricos manages bands and performers from Mexico, Argentina and Europe. In 2005 Amorales initiated the animation collective, Broken Animals, a group of draughtsmen, animators, media researchers and a musician which explores the possibilities of Liquid Archive to make animated films and artworks. The group programmes monthly seminars with guest speakers which have included artists, philosophers, filmmakers, musicians and a traditional animator.

Carlos Amorales was born in Mexico in 1970, and studied in Spain and Holland before returning to Mexico City where he now lives and works. Recent exhibitions include the Moore Space, Miami, 2007; Yvon Lambert, New York, 2007; Daros-Latinamerica Foundation, Zürich, 2007; MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2006, and Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, 2006. His work is featured in many public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; La Colección Jumex, Mexico City, and the Margulies Collection, Miami.

Artist Talk – Lecture Room
On Tuesday 26 February at 5.00pm, Carlos Amorales will present a lecture on his practice and discuss his installation Dark Mirror. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected].

Carlos Amorales: Dark Mirror continues until 11 May 2008

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sunday and Bank Holidays: 12 noon – 5.30pm
Monday and Friday 21 March: Closed

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

14 February 2008

An exhibition spanning the later career of the highly-regarded Irish artist Cecil King opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 27 February 2008. Cecil King: A Legacy of Painting presents some 40 works, concentrating mainly on the hard-edge paintings for which the artist was particularly well known. The exhibition includes many of the finest works from his celebrated Baggot Street, Berlin, and Nexus series. The exhibition will be officially opened by the writer and broadcaster Emer O’Kelly at 6.00pm on Tuesday 26 February.

Cecil King: A Legacy of Painting sets out to examine King’s contribution to the emergence of Modernism in Ireland. It also addresses his position as a painter working within an international discourse, at a time when contemporary practice in his chosen media was coming under attack from both conservative forces and from the champions of more experimental art forms, giving rise to widespread predictions of “the death of painting”.

Born in Rathdrum, Co Wicklow, in 1921, Cecil King was a successful businessman, who began to paint in his mid-30s, holding his first solo exhibition in 1959. Initially, he worked in a semi-realist style producing a number of lyrical paintings and pastels such as the Circus and Trapeze paintings from the mid-1960s, which were significant in the development of his later work. These early paintings show a reductivist tendency that points unmistakably towards his later work. King was an avid collector and the influence of Hans Hartung and Lucio Fontana, whose works he collected among others, can also be seen in these 1960s works. Like Hartung, King worked in series, repeating a motif until he was satisfied with the balance and tension he had achieved: indeed, he often returned to a motif after some years in the guise of a new title.

Cecil King was also a founding organiser of the legendary Rosc exhibitions, first held in 1967, and through this met many of the most influential artists of the time, who would have a profound influence on his work, among them artists as diverse as Barnett Newman and Joseph Beuys. In 1967-68 an important shift took place in King’s work, with the first of the Baggot Street paintings, in which figurative elements are replaced by plain fields of colour, forms are rendered geometrically and light is represented through the use of a single line. In 1968 King described this watershed: “The Baggot Street series was the break that opened up another world for me. I felt I had found my identity so to speak”.

From the early 1970s onwards King found new and varied forms to explore through different geometric abstractions. Vent, 1972, is imbued with a vigorous energy, as a V shape bisects the canvas which itself has found a new powerful verticality. Following a visit to Berlin in 1970, King began his Berlin series – large-scale colour field works in which a narrow peripheral band creates a tension between figure and ground, in which some commentators have seen references to the Berlin Wall and a city divided. The same wall-like constructions continued in the later Haarlem paintings, begun after a visit to New York. Much of the power of King’s works comes from their meticulous execution. In an interview with Ciaran Carty in The Sunday Independent in 1982, he said: “There is no margin for error. The image has got to be there from the beginning. Colours can change as you go along, lines can be added. But you’ve got to have the basis right. With my type of painting, if you spoil it at any stage you miss out on the whole thing.”

Cecil King was the subject of a major retrospective at the Hugh Lane Gallery, now Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, in 1981. He exhibited widely across Europe and his work is held in the collections of many leading museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Tate, London, and numerous private and public collections. He died in 1986.

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

Lecture: Speaking of Cecil King
On Sunday 9 March at 3.00pm in the Lecture Room, writer and critic Medb Ruane will present the lecture Speaking of Cecil King. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected].

The exhibition is accompanied by a significant monograph published by IMMA, which includes texts by Seán Kissane, writer and critic Medb Ruane and artist Richard de Marco and a chronology by Oliver Dowling. A selection of poems by major Irish writers, such as Seamus Heaney and Michéal Ó Siadhail, with whom King collaborated are also included.

Cecil King: A Legacy of Painting continues until 18 May 2008. Admission is free.

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12 noon – 5.30pm
Mondays and Friday 21 March: Closed

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

11 February 2008