A retrospective of the entire photographic work of the American-born artists McDermott & McGough, covering two decades of their highly-original output in that medium, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 6 February 2008. An Experience of Amusing Chemistry: Photographs 1990 – 1890 comprises some 120 works created using a wide range of historic photographic techniques, including the use of palladium, gum, salt and cyanotype prints. Many of the processes which they employ have long since disappeared with the rapid development of photography and their reinvention causes a ghostly displacement of time characteristic of all of McDermott & McGough’s work. The exhibition will be officially opened by the Honorable Desmond Guinness at a private view at 6.00pm on Tuesday 5 February.

David McDermott and Peter McGough met when they were both part of the famous East Village New York art scene of the 1980s, and have since become renowned for their seamless fusion of art and life. In a revolt against the confines of chronological time, they have built their practice through appropriating imagery and objects from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They have also assiduously reconstructed their lives as Victorian gentlemen – complete with knee britches, top hats and tail coats – immersing themselves in the environment and era in which they feel most at home, and, incidentally, dating their works accordingly.

Their photographs, paintings and installations are fueled by this self-imposed time travel, and reflect the larger performance art dimension of their everyday lives. In this way they have explored art and culture, both high and low, from religion and sexual mores to the new industrial age and popular entertainment. However, they also subvert the obvious by incorporating homoerotic and art historical references, allowing the subject to expand outside of its time-capsule-like boundaries and to exist in relation to current cultural and artistic ideals, as in A Soap Bubble, 1915 (1991) and The Last Supper, 1898 (1998).

McDermott & McGough are particularly drawn to the mysterious and theatrical nature of the rapidly developing science of photography in their chosen era and the exhibition presents a series of magical experiments sourced from Les Récréations Scinetifiques and hints at the possible use of photography to communicate across time to different psychic spaces, as in the eponymous Experience of Amusing Chemistry, 1884 (1996) and Curious Experience of Equilibrium with Three Sticks, 1884 (1990).

Shot with an authentic 8” x 10” view camera and developed using chemical processes from an earlier era, each photographic procedure is selected to suit its chosen subject matter.  Based upon the light sensitivity of ferric salts, cyanotyping, as in Mocking Orange Grove, 1901 (1989), was traditionally used for the reproduction of botanical specimens, while the gum print offered more variation in colour, seen to good effect in works such as Washer Woman’s Effects, 1915 (1990).
The exhibition also includes a recent film work made in 2000, entitled Found, 1928. Ostensibly composed of sections of found film, it is set in Dublin, with its main focus being the Formal Gardens at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, where IMMA and their exhibition are located.

This exhibition is being shown in the East Ground Galleries at IMMA, in a contrived domestic setting with opulent hand-painted wallpaper and an 18th-century geometric floor pattern copied from Powerscourt Townhouse, Dublin.

McDermott was born in Hollywood, California, in 1952, although he spent the majority of his childhood in New Jersey. McGough was born in 1958 in Syracuse, New York, where he lived until moving to New York City to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1977. Coincidentally, David attended Syracuse University studying Advertising Design in the 1970s but their paths never crossed until they were both living in New York City a few years later. They have exhibited widely internationally and were nominated for the Glen Dimplex Award at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1998.  Previous exhibitions include the Frankfurt Kunstverein 1986 and the Whitney Biennial, New York, in 1987, 1991 and 1995. In 1997 the duo mounted a mid-career retrospective exhibition at the Provincial Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Oostende, Belgium.

An Experience of Amusing Chemistry: Photographs 1990 to 1888 is curated by Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA.

The exhibition is sponsored by De Gournay, London.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by IMMA, with a foreword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, and texts by Matthew Higgs, Director, White Columns, New York, and Seán Kissane. The catalogue is supported by Marie Donnelly.

The exhibition continues at IMMA until 27 April 2008. It will tour to Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, from November 2008 to January 2009.

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

Admission is free.

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

14 January 2008 

An exhibition of work from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection has opened to the public at the Cavan County Museum in partnership with the IMMA National Programme.  Alternative Nature is based on the depiction of nature in art and includes works by artists such as Hamish Fulton, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Alice Maher, Barrie Cooke, Oliver Comerford and Avis Newman. 

Tipperary-born Alice Maher works within the realms of nature and culture, subversion and transformation, mythology and memory. 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 lack of conformity to a single medium and wide use of natural materials are typified in Berry Dress, 1994, whichpresents the delicate shape of a child’s dress, decorated with berries. On closer inspection, the dress loses its innocence, 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.

Nests There Are…, 1986-7, by Avis Newman presents a complex combination of natural objects (bird’s feathers and honeycomb), industrial material (steel) and painting and refers at once, to nature, craft, and to art. It also focuses on the intangibility of the imagination, as real objects fuse with the artist’s drawn image and symbols of freedom and nature are tightly contained in its glazed and boxed frame.

Also included in the exhibition is the film-work Waves, 1998, by Marie-Jo Lafontaine. One of the most prominent figures in contemporary European art, a number of Lafontaine’s monumental film installations deal with passion and violence. In Waves, shot on the west coast of Ireland, Lafontaine shows the theatre of the elements in fury, the power and passion of the natural world. The viewer is drawn into the work through Lafontaine’s use of sound that alternates between dramatic pieces of classical music which the artist distorts post-production, and mysterious otherworldly voices. The crescendos of the powerful and dramatic work echo the tumultuous movements of the breaking waves leaving the viewer with a sense of the incommensurable mystery and power of the ocean.

Alternative Nature is curated by Johanne Mullan, National Programmer, IMMA. The 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 programme facilitates the creation of exhibitions and other projects for display in a range of locations around the country.

Opening Hours: 

Tuesday – Saturday 10:00am – 5:00pm 

Alternative Nature continues at the Cavan County Museum until 13 January 2008.

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

3 December 2007

The first major retrospective of the work of James McKenna, one of the most celebrated Irish sculptors of the 20th-century, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 28 November 2007. Comprising some 80 works, it covers McKenna’s entire career, including both large and small-scale sculptures, as well as a small selection of his drawings. It also makes reference to his work as a playwright, with masks and photographs from the period in which he founded and directed the Rising Ground theatre group. The exhibition will be opened at 6.00pm on Tuesday 27 November 2007 by the poet Desmond Egan.

Born in Dublin in 1933, McKenna had an interesting career, combining the visual arts with literature – he was also a poet and a playwright – until his death in 2000 in Co Kildare. McKenna studied at the National College of Art in Dublin in the early 1950s where he specialised in sculpture, particularly in 19th-century classical figuration. Carving and clay modeling from life and the antique formed a large part of the training. Modernist sculpture was ignored – a surprising fact, considering the dominance in Britain of artists such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth; yet this was symptomatic of the conservatism and insularity of the art establishment in Ireland at that time.

On completing his diploma, McKenna was awarded a Macaulay Fellowship, which allowed him to travel to Florence for eight months. There he studied the works of the great Renaissance masters, particularly Michelangelo, whose work influenced him throughout his career. The affinity he had with Michelangelo’s David, a sculpture presenting the biblical hero at more than twice life size, and a symbol of Florentine freedom, is reminiscent of McKenna’s Oisín i ndiadh na Féinne/ Oisín Alone after the Fianna (1971) in scale, pose and the anatomical proportions. David and Oisín can also be seen as metaphorical self-portraits, combining political and poetic consciousness.    

Political events also informed McKenna’s works. Men Entering a City, was made in 1965, the eve of the 50th commemoration of the 1916 Rising in Ireland. McKenna said of this piece that … the leaders of The Rising had …to answer a riddle, the riddle of Nationalism, and they did so through a mixture of physical and moral force. The marrying of Classical and Celtic mythologies with Irish Revolutionary history is characteristic of McKenna’s work. He introduces figures such as Aegisthus and Agamemnon, or Ferdia and Oisín; often juxtaposed with revolutionary figures like Pádraig Pearse or Wolfe Tone. This can be seen in works Citizens’ Tree (1966), Oisín (1971) and Metamorphosis (1993).   

McKenna also made works in response to contemporary political events such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the later Hunger Strikes, for example his wooden sculpture, By the Rivers of Babylon: Lament for the Hunger Strikers (1992). McKenna’s humanity is palpable as he represents their political struggle in an empathic way, the strength ebbing from their bodies.   

McKenna, a founding member of both the Independent Artists’ Group and the founder of the Rising Ground theatre group, was elected to Aosdána in 1983. He exhibited widely and his work was included in many international sculpture shows in the 1980s and ‘90s, a retrospective of his work took place at the Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Co Kildare, in 2002, and its principal gallery is named after him – the McKenna Gallery. He is well known for several of his public and private commissions including his large limestone monument Resurgence at the University of Limerick; Female Figure and Tree (1979), at the Central Bank in Sandyford, Co Dublin, and the Gerard Manley Hopkins monument in Monasterevin, Co Kildare. He was also a noted playwright of The Scatterin’, At Bantry, and other works, along with a volume of poems.

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

Performance
On Tuesday 27 November at 7.00pm a dramatisation of The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins adapted for the stage by James McKenna and produced by the Gerard Manley Hopkins Society will take place in the Chapel, IMMA.

Curator’s Talk
On Tuesday 27 November at 5.00pm Seán Kissane, curator of the exhibition will present a gallery talk in the New Galleries. Admission is free but booking is essential on Tel: +353 1 612 9948; Email: [email protected].  

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with texts by Seán Kissane and Susan Daniel McElroy, former Director of Tate St. Ives and a foreword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA.

James McKenna continues until 2 March 2008. Admission is free.

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays, Bank Holidays, 28 – 30 December and 1 January 2008: 12 noon – 5.30pm
Mondays, 24 – 27 and 31 December: Closed

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

16 November 2007

An exhibition of 42 works on loan from the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art to Sala Kubo-Kutxa in San Sebastián, Spain, has met with a warm response from leading Spanish newspapers. Enthusiastic reviews include the prestigious national daily El País, which praised the Museum’s Collection “since its opening in Dublin in 1991, IMMA has become a landmark Museum thanks to the 4,500 works in its Collection”. Another leading paper El Mundo stated that this was the right time to see IMMA’s Collection “This seems the right moment to show what is being made in the visual arts in Ireland, especially after the big cultural and economic boom of the last decade”. The newspaper Diario Vasco was also impressed: “This show wraps superbly the programme of Sala Kubo this year”.

The exhibition, Obra nabarmenenak /Obras Fundamentals (English version), comprises both Irish and international artists in a wide variety of media with a strong focus on large-scale works. The selection predominantly reflects recent work by upcoming artists from, or with a base in, Ireland, shown alongside works by well known international artists. Irish artists include Sean Scully, Dorothy Cross, Gillian Wearing, Gerard Byrne and Peter Doig, while international artists include Marina Abramovic, Michael Craig-Martin, Cristina Iglesias and Vik Muniz. Most of the works date from the 1990s with a few notable Irish works dating from the 1960s. The exhibition was selected by freelance curator María José Aranzasti with the assistance of Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA, and continues in the Kubo-Kutxa Exhibition Hall until 20 January 2008.

Further loans from the Collection include 24 works on show as part of an exhibition, [C]artography: map-making as artform, exploring map making as an art form in the Crawford Gallery, Cork, until 10 November. Work is also continuing in preparation for a loan of 27 works to the Irish Embassy in The Hague and of 90 William Hogarth prints to Valencia in Spain.

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

7 November 2007

An exhibition of work, made in response to an artwork from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection, by students from the Convent of Mercy, Roscommon, opens to the public at the Roscommon Arts Centre on Saturday 10 November 2007. Ty Brand Ed, organised as part of IMMA’s National programme, features the work of transition year students in response to the video work Sloganeering, 1-4, 2001, by Irish artist Isabel Nolan.

The first stage of this process involved the students engaging in a series of ‘think-tank’ sessions in relation to the direction and the theme of the exhibition. The sessions included visits to IMMA to discuss the Museum’s Collection and possible work for the exhibition. The group unanimously selected Isabel Nolan’s thought provoking work, Sloganeering 1-4, as the central element of the exhibition. This work humorously explores notions of identity using a white T-shirt on which Nolan repeatedly scribbles slogans. These slogans are underlined, added to and ultimately cast away as the artist takes off her shirt to start writing on a fresh one worn underneath. In this work Nolan creates a character who is trying, somewhat desperately, to communicate a sense of their identity, a person who is obviously frustrated, confused and inconsistent, but is nevertheless attempting to be sincere. This work explores the complexities of identity and how it can be reduced to clichés, it also looks at how in today’s culture communication is often reduced to sound bites

Working together the students created a series of responses to Nolan’s video work using the same medium of the T-shirt. They, like Nolan, explored the notion of identity and the role of communication in our society. Commenting on this process the student’s said “this project has opened our eyes to the world of slogans and advertising in general. As a group we have had the opportunity to explore and expand our creative sides”. Their responses are exhibited alongside Nolan’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.

Ty Brand Ed runs until 14 December 2007 at the Roscommon Arts Centre, Circular Road, Roscommon, Co Roscommon

Roscommon Arts Centre
Gallery opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 10.00am – 5.30pm
The gallery is also open on performance evenings from 7.15pm – 8.30pm
Telephone: 090-662 5824
Email: [email protected]
For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected]
6 November 2007

The first solo exhibition in Ireland by the leading young German artist Thomas Scheibitz opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 14 November 2007. about 90 Elements/TOD IM DSCHUNGEL comprises some 30 new paintings, sculptures and works on paper, all direct from the artist’s studio. It also includes a new architectural build made especially for IMMA. The exhibition will be officially opened by the leading Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe at 6.00pm on Tuesday 13 November.

The title of the exhibition provides a key to the essential ideas underlying Scheibitz’s work. about 90 Elements is taken from the periodic table of chemical components, of which 90 exist in the natural world, and refers to man’s desire for order and knowledge. TOD IM DSCHUNGEL translates literally as Dead in the Jungle and refers to two different jungles, the urban and the wild. The double title expresses something of the tension between man’s desire to expose nature’s secrets and nature’s reluctance to reveal all. Scheibitz seeks to convey the underlying principles of our seemingly well-ordered world, disentangling them into abstracted scenes to reveal something of the unpredictability that lies beneath. 

Scheibitz’s painting, which he began to produce in 1994, are composed of highly geometrical cube-like formations which are carefully arranged in tightly connected compositions. Although seemingly abstract these works contain often recognizable and reoccurring signs and symbols. Broken and fragmented these images are deconstructed into minimal geometric shapes, organic masses and flat colourful components firmly fixed in a shallow pictorial space. Returning to sculpture as a mature artist, Scheibitz juxtaposes painterly sculptural forms against expansive backdrops, using form and colour to create a dialogue between his paintings and sculptures. This combination of abstract geometrical landscapes and architectural components result in Scheibitz fresh and often startling vision of reality.

Scheibitz’s works are filled with contemporary and historical references derived from images collected from the media and elsewhere – Japanese comic books, Playboy magazine, Hollywood films, 15th-century lithographs. These images have been carefully collected and edited to form a vast image bank of source material and, along with his other reoccurring motifs, present a cross section of our visual world. Scheibitz uses these references to question the world and the ways in which man views it.

In the large landscape-format canvas, 90 Elements, 2007, we see Scheibitz command of architectural space. A seemingly disorderly pile of box-like coloured shapes, flatly rendered in a shallow pictorial space, are featured against a painted grey ground. The awareness of spatial dimensions is evident in this creation of dancing cubes and rectangles which convey a sense of movement and fluidity that evoke the work of Braque and Picasso.

Born in Radeberg in 1968, Thomas Scheibitz currently lives and works in Berlin. In 1991 he attended HfBK Dresden and in 1996 was a student of Professor Ralf Kerbach. He quickly gained international recognition exhibiting extensively in solo and group shows across Europe and America. Recent solo exhibitions include Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2006; Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo, 2004, and ART PACE, San Antonio, 2002. He represented Germany in the 2005 Venice Biennale and participated in the 2004 Bienal de São Paulo.

The exhibition is organised by IMMA and Camden Arts Centre, London, where it will be shown from 21 February to 20 April 2008. The exhibition at IMMA is curated by Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA.

In Conversation – Lecture Room
On Sunday 11 November at 3.00pm Thomas Scheibitz will discuss his work in conversation with writer and critic Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected].

A fully-illustrated Artist’s Book produced by Thomas Scheibitz accompanies the exhibition with essays by Rachael Thomas and Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, and a conversation with the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Sereptine Gallery, London.

Thomas Scheibitz: about 90 Elements/TOD IM DSCHUNGEL continues until 27 January 2008

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sunday, Bank Holidays, 28 – 30 December and 1 January 2008: 12 noon – 5.30pm
Monday, 24 – 27 and 31 December: Closed

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

30 October 2007

An exhibition by the leading Polish artist Miroslaw Balka, internationally renowned for his powerful works dealing with memory and history, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 14 November 2007. Miroslaw Balka: Tristes Tropiques comprises 26 sculptures and installation works surveying the past 20 years. The exhibition includes eight large-scale installations and two new works being shown for the first time. It will be officially opened by the leading Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe at 6.00pm on Tuesday 13 November.

Described by IMMA Director Enrique Juncosa as “one of the most original contributions to sculpture in recent times”, Balka’s work draws on personal and collective memories. It relates especially to his Catholic upbringing and the fractured history of his native country, particularly the devastating impact of the Nazi occupation of Poland from 1939 to 1945, which led to the extermination of six million Polish citizens. These forces find expression in restrained, elegiac works, in their careful, minimalist placement and in the gaps and spaces between them. The exhibition takes its title from the book by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, published in 1955, which deals with his trip to the rainforests of Brazil in the 1930s and charts the native people’s experience of exile and displacement.

Despite their references to everyday human activities, Balka’s works are never purely representational. Materials, such as wood, iron, stone and linoleum, are sourced locally to his studio, once his childhood home, at Otwock near Warsaw, thereby imbuing them with strong personal associations. He also scales, and frequently titles, his structures to his own dimensions. 2 x (55 x 23 x 27), 190 x 190 x 0,3 (1995), for example, is made up of two boxes resembling old-fashioned suitcases, created from linoleum from Balka’s studio, set alongside a field of ashes, whose dimensions are dictated by the artist’s height and the width of his outstretched arms. The constituent parts unite Balka’s personal history with that of his fellow countrymen who ended their days in Nazi concentration camps and whose carefully labelled suitcases remain to this day one of the most poignant reminders of their fate.

Other frequently used materials, including soap, salt and hair, resonate with references to the body and its functions, and again with the collective memory of the Nazi regime. Hanging Soap Woman (2000), a rudimentary “necklace” of string and bars of soap, suggests bodily hygiene and even decoration, but also the commonly held belief that the Nazis manufactured soap from the remains of their victims. A new installation, Zoo/T (2007), being created especially for the courtyard at IMMA, reproduces a scaled-down version of a zoo built in 1943 in the ground of the Treblinka concentration camp. With a dovecote in the roof and a space for foxes and other wide animals below, it was commissioned by the camp commandant for the amusement of his children and his fellow SS officers.

In the accompanying catalogue, Enrique Juncosa describes Balka’s work as “intimate and self-reflective, exploring personal memory within the context of historical memory, while using deliberately limited means … [Balka] has managed to produce a series of works which take on the enormous historical trauma caused but the appearance of Nazi Germany, the bloodthirsty machinery of which exterminated one third of the population of Poland alone. Obviously, this is an extremely difficult theme due as much to the scale of the horror suffered as to the impossibility of comprehending it, but also because some scars of history do not heal easily”

Born in 1958, Miroslaw Balka studied at the Warsaw Academy from 1980 to 1985. He first came to international attention in the early 1990s. He has exhibited widely since then and represented Poland at the Venice Biennale in 1993. His solo exhibitions include those at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) London in 1995-96; Institut Valencia d’Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia, Spain, in 1997; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb in 2002; the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York in 2004, and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf in 2006.

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

Miroslaw Balka: Tristes Tropiques continues on show until 27 January 2008

Public Talks
On Tuesday 13 November at 5.00pm Miroslaw Balka will discuss his work in-conversation with the writer and critic Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith in the Lecture Theatre at IMMA.

On Wednesday 14 November at 7.00pm Miroslaw Balka will give a talk in Polish in the gallery space, an event which should be of particular interest to the Polish community in Ireland.

Admission to both events is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected].

A full-colour catalogue with a republished text by Claude Lévi-Strauss and new texts by Enrique Juncosa and Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, plus the script from Balka’s 2005 film 140 x107 x 122/Wydawaloby Sie (It Would Seem), accompanies the exhibition.

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sunday, Bank Holidays, 28 – 30 December and 1 January 2008: 12 noon – 5.30pm
Monday, 24 – 27 and 31 December: Closed

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

25 October 2007

An exhibition of works by three leading artists from the IMMA Collection, Maria Simonds-Gooding, Charles Brady and Callum Innes, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 10 October 2007. Three is the first in a new strand of programming that presents three artists in solo displays from IMMA’s Collection. The exhibition features works across some 30 years from three different generations of artists of varying nationality, juxtaposing works in a variety of media, yet united by a shared sensibility. The intention is to offer an extended experience of each artist’s work and process on its own terms, but with the potential for that experience to be made more meaningful by the proximity of the other two displays. The exhibition will be opened at 6.00pm on Tuesday 9 October by the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Mr Séamus Brennan, TD.

Three reflects the diversity and richness of IMMA’s Collection, presenting a range of work by living artists at various points in their career as well as marking the unique expression of one of Ireland’s most respected painters, the late Charles Brady. The physical frame for the exhibition is the architectural setting of the three adjoining spaces of the Gordon Lambert Galleries. The conceptual frame is the consideration of each artist’s work and process through works in IMMA’s Collection together with works drawn from the artists themselves or other collections. Each space focuses on an individual artist, yet is open enough to allow for a flow of readings and comparisons between each artist with possible, and maybe unexpected parallels, and encounters between works emerging. Installed in this way, the exhibition allows each artists work to be observed over a period of time in an intimate enviroment with a new perspective.

New York-born artist Charles Brady (1926-1997) settled in Ireland in 1959. He is widely recognised as a painter of insignificant, even banal objects, which he treated with monumental grandeur and dignity, combining a spare, almost minimal aesthetic with an open, painterly approach. Everyday objects such as an open matchbox, a bus ticket or an eyedrop box, float in a distorted perspective. Sparely rendered they are imbued with a sense of the mystical. Forced by poverty to paint on small pieces of cardboard, the artist retained this intimacy of scale throughout his life. White Shoe Box, 1987, is typically understated, presented on a modest scale that belies the sense of potential and mystery that it contains. Although his works remained figurative they retain the detachment of abstraction. The display of Brady’s works from IMMA’s Collection is greatly enhanced by the generous loan to IMMA of eight of Brady’s paintings by the National Gallery of Ireland.

Born in India in 1939, Maria Simonds-Gooding has lived in Kerry since 1947. Since the 1970s she has worked principally with plaster and fresco pigment to create highly schematic works which reference man’s relationship with the land. The works in this exhibition range across her career from the 1970s onwards and show a continuation in style which finds its latest expression in her current work, a highly rigourous and aesthetically sophisticated handling of brushed stainless steel and plaster, combining her control of plaster as a material with a love of metal developed over 30 years as an etcher and printmaker. In the work Up The Mountain, 1995, Simonds-Gooding fascination with the landscape is evident. Light is an intrinsic element in all her work in the way it reflects off the materials surfaces and also in the way it renders the shadows of incisions and irregularities as a form of drawing.

Scottish artist Callum Innes was born in 1962. His paintings emerge not only from the application of paint but from its removal with washes of turpentine which results in meditative, highly atmospheric abstract works. Innes approach is critially dependent on time, the crucial moment when the whole surface starts to move and flow as turpentine ‘unpaints’ the canvas rendering veils and streams of disembodied pigment. It is his manipulation of that moment which gives his works their complex character. Each painting is a result of unique but irreversible action, which if unsuccessful is destroyed. Innes works alternately in varying series which he revisits, the paintings in this exhibition are from the Exposed Paintings series. Exposed Painting, Charcoal Grey / Yellow Oxide / Asphalt, 1999, has a quite meditative quality which slows down the viewer’s response and demands a closer, more contemplative look.

The exhibition is curated by Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA.

Lecture: Three Artists in Proximity
On Sunday 14 October at 1.00pm, Christina Kennedy presents a lecture about the work of Maria Simonds-Gooding, Charles Brady and Callum Innes, in the Lecture Room at IMMA. Admission is free but booking is essential on Tel: +353 1 612 9948; Email: [email protected]

The exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition guide.

Three continues until 17 March 2008. Admission is free.

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays, Bank Holidays, 28 – 30 December and 1 January 2008: 12 noon – 5.30pm
Mondays, 24 – 27 and 31 December: Closed

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

27 September 2007

Full Circle, an exhibition of artworks selected from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection, organised as part of Baboró, Galway International Arts Festival for Children in partnership with IMMA’s National Programme opens to the public at the National University of Ireland Galway Gallery and the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, on Monday 15 October 2007.

Baboró International Arts Festival for Children is recognised as the leading Irish arts festival devoted exclusively to children with an attendance record of over 72,000 since its foundation in 1997. For the last ten years, one week in October has been devoted to presenting high quality national and international arts performances, exhibitions and workshops for children both in schools and as families. Venues in and around Galway are used for the presentation of this festival with selected artists travelling out to schools and youth and community centres. Baboró’s aim is to advocate access to high quality arts experience for children in the community and in their schools.

Earlier this year the residents of Henry Street, Galway, selected artworks from IMMA’s Collection for an exhibition, Radharc, in Galway Arts Centre. Sharon Lynch, an artist working for Baboró’s Outreach Project, and Joan Burke, classroom teacher, brought a class from Scoil Sheamais Naofa to see this exhibition. This is where the class first encountered LaFontaine’s work, Waves, "pourrais-je emporter dans l’autre monde ce que j’ai oublié de rêver?” 1998. Since that initial viewing in Galway Arts Centre in February, Sharon has worked with the class to create their own work in response to the LaFontaine piece. The process has been documented orally and photographically and the students’ response to this work, Tonnta, can be viewed alongside the original piece at the NUI Galway Gallery.

Sharon Lynch is a Galway-based artist who works in multi-media. She has worked with Baboró for a number of years as part of the Baboró Arts Team, creating workshops for both children and teachers and has developed a strong relationship with many community groups in Ireland.

Marie-Jo LaFontaine’s film, Waves, was shot on the west coast of Ireland. LaFontaine shows the theatre of the elements in fury, the power and passion of the natural world. The viewer is drawn into the work through Lafontaine’s use of sound that alternates between dramatic pieces of classical music which the artist distorts post-production, and mysterious otherworldly voices.

Two artworks from IMMA’s Collection are also being shown at Town Hall Theatre as part of Full Circle. These are Greetings, 1996, by Caroline McCarthy and Hereafter, 2004, by Paddy Jolley, Rebecca Trost and Inger Lise Hansen. In Caroline McCarthy’s video work Greetings, the artist inserts herself abruptly and repeatedly into a typical Irish landscape, familiar to us from tourist brochures and traditional Irish art, in a deliberately awkward and comic way. The reference to picture postcard messages in the title suggests the artist is only visiting the location. McCarthy questions where she belongs in our rapidly changing culture from the once rural to the new urban focused contemporary Ireland. The film, Hereafter, is part of a project which was commissioned in connection with the regeneration of Ballymun in Dublin, Ireland’s largest public housing project. As part of this regeneration plan, residents were requested to move from flats in tower blocks, which in many cases were their lifetime dwellings, to new contemporary houses.  Hereafter focuses on the freshly departed flats and the physical items left behind. 

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.

Full Circle continues at National University of Ireland and Town Hall Theatre, Galway until 21 October 2007. 

Venue:   NUI Galway Gallery
Opening Hours:  10am to 1pm and 3pm to 5pm daily

Venue:   Town Hall Theatre Foyer
Opening Hours:  Saturday 20 October 10am to 7pm and Sunday 21 October 10am to 1pm

Telephone: 091 562 667
Fax: 091 562 642
E-mail: [email protected]

Baboró Galway International Arts Festival for Children
Hynes Building, St. Clare’s Walk, Merchant’s Road, Galway, Ireland.

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy, IMMA at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: [email protected]
Or
Kathy Scott – Publicist Baboró, Tel: 086 359 3553; Email: [email protected]

27 September 2007

An exhibition of 90 drawings by the leading Irish artist Patrick Hall opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 10 October 2007. Patrick Hall: Drawings focuses on works from the past 17 years and includes a series of recent drawings – some being shown for the first time – and a selection of new works direct from the artist’s studio. The exhibition will be opened at 6.00pm on Tuesday 9 October by the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Mr Séamus Brennan, TD.

The exhibition comprises ink, pastel and watercolour works on paper and nude life drawings in charcoal. Although varied in style and subject matter, all reflect Hall’s lifelong interest in human experience, suggesting a quest for meaning and happiness, fuelled by the twin sources of energy behind his work – mysticism and sexuality. Hall has described his works as being intensely private, “all about my own journey”. Exodus I, 2004, for example, was inspired by Hall’s identification with the themes of expulsion and journey in the Biblical account of the departure of the Israelites from Egypt. His affinity with the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich is a further expression of the sense of otherness which imbues much of his work. He sees Friedrich’s depiction of his lonely figures in isolated landscapes as representing, not a forbidding desolation, but rather a very human one.

A series of male nude charcoal drawings, being shown for the first time, echo these feelings. In an interview with IMMA’s Karen Sweeney in the exhibition catalogue, Hall describes the keen sense of aloneness he finds in the male nude: “This sense of aloneness appeals to me aesthetically. Even if I do a ‘bad’ drawing, if I get that sense of aloneness in the drawing, that’s what I’m captivated by – that’s what I aim for”. The artist sees the smaller scale of his drawings as part of their emotional charge and also as a welcome artistic discipline. He describes the process of drawing as a “way of memorizing form and exercising the intelligence and the memory of the hand. You’re just trying to capture a feeling and be as accurate as possible. It’s the actual presence of the model I try to get, that sad aspect of his being which I try to express”. 

Patrick Hall is, of course, best know as a painter, and several works on paper in the exhibition, such as Children in the Forest and A Child in the Forest, both 2007, and Approaching the Yellow Mountain and Yellow Mountain, derive from his 2007 painting In the Vicinity of the Yellow Mountain, developed from a dream about a journey to a mysterious mountain. In order to provide a wider context, a group of other – quasi-Expressionistic – works on paper from 1990 to 1993 is also included, among them Moment of Truth, 1990, Red Nude, 1992, and The Sponge of Gall, 1993. A further selection of male nudes from 1997, which has been exhibited before, is also being shown.

Born in Co Tipperary in 1935, Patrick Hall studied at the Chelsea School of Art and then at the Central School of Art in London, where he was taught by the British artist Cecil Collins, whose influence has been a lasting presence in his work.  In 1966 he moved to Spain, returning to live in Dublin in 1974. His work is widely regarded as fundamental to the so-called return to painting in this country in the 1970s and ‘80s. He has been an influential figure in the careers of many younger generation artists, including William McKeown, Nick Miller and Isabel Nolan. Patrick Hall has exhibited widely both in Ireland and internationally. Solo exhibitions include the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 1995; Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, 2002; Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, 2004, and the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, 2006.  His works are included in many private and public collections including the Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane and the IMMA Collection. He was appointed a member of Aosdána in 1982 and currently lives and works in Sligo and Dublin.

The exhibition is co-curated by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, and Karen Sweeney, Assistant Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA.

In Conversation
On Tuesday 9 October at 5.00pm Patrick Hall will be in conversation with artist William McKeown in the Lecture Room at IMMA. Admission is free but booking is essential on Tel: +353 1 612 9948; Email: [email protected].

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with texts by Michèle C Cone, art historian and critic and writer Karim White, a foreword by Enrique Juncosa and an interview with the artist by Karen Sweeney.

Patrick Hall: Drawings continues until 6 January 2008. Admission is free.

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays, Bank Holidays, 28 – 30 December and 1 January 2008: 12 noon – 5.30pm
Mondays, 24 – 27 and 31 December: Closed

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

19 September 2007