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

The first performance in Ireland by Japan’s leading electronic composer/artist Ryoji Ikeda takes place at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 5 October at 8.00pm. Ikeda’s work focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. Since 1995, Ikeda has been active through concerts, installations, and recordings, integrating sound, acoustics and sublime imagery. In his compositions, music, time and space are shaped by mathematical methods as he explores sound as sensation, pulling apart its physical properties to reveal its relationship with human perception.

This performance at IMMA includes two of his most influential and acclaimed works, C4I and datamatics (ver.1.0). Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few international artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media. Using computer and digital technologies to the utmost limit, his audiovisual concerts datamatics (ver.1.0) (2006 – present) and C4I (2004 – present) suggest a unique orientation for our future multimedia environment and culture.

Ikeda has been hailed by critics as one of the most radical and innovative contemporary composers for his live performances, sound installations and album releases. His albums +/- (Touch, 1996), 0°C (Touch, 1998) and matrix (Touch, 2000) pioneered a new minimal world of electronic music, employing sine waves, electronic "glitch" sounds, and white noise. Ikeda released his critically acclaimed, seventh solo album entitled dataplex (raster-noton), as part of the datamatics series, in 2005.

The versatile range of Ikeda’s research is demonstrated by his collaborations with Carsten Nicolai on the project cyclo and with choreographer William Forsythe/Frankfurt Ballett, artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, architect Toyo Ito and artist collective Dumb Type, among others.

Ikeda has exhibited and performed at many of the world’s leading festivals and venues, including the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 2005 (Melbourne); Centre Pompidou, 2001, 2004 and 2007, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, 1999, and La Villette, 2002 (all Paris); Sónar, 1999 and 2006 (Barcelona); Architectural Association, 2002, Barbican, 2006, Hayward Gallery, 2000, Millennium Dome, 2000, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 2000, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, 2006 (all London); Auditorium Parco della Musica, 2003 (Rome); ICC, 1999 and 2005, Tokyo International Forum, 2006 (Tokyo); Göteborg Biennial, 2003 (Göteborg). In 2001, Ikeda was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica prize in the digital music category and he was short-listed for a World Technology Award in 2003.

Ryoji Ikeda’s Dublin performance is presented by the Irish Museum of Modern Art in association with Forma, Note Productions, and the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival.

The opening reception is sponsored by Ketel One Vodka.

This performance is programmed by Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA.

Ticket Information
Tickets  €17.00 (including booking fee).
Available from TicketMaster tel: 0818 719300 or visit  www.ticketmaster.ie and Dublin Theatre Festival Box Office tel: 01 677 8899 or visit  www.dublintheatrefestival.com

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

11 September 2007

An exhibition from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection, organised as part of IMMA’s National Programme, opens to the public in Omagh, Co Tyrone on Saturday 1 September 2007. Collectors’ Choice: An Exhibition of Works Selected by Maura and George McClelland from their Personal Collection and the McClelland Collection at IMMA marks the first partnership between the IMMA National Programme and Omagh’s Strule Arts Centre. The exhibition also celebrates the life of Maura McClelland who died in July 2007.

Collectors’ Choice includes works by William Conor, Gerard Dillon, Paul Henry, Tony O’Malley, Dan O’Neill, Colin Middleton and William Scott amongst others. In the 1960s George and Maura McClelland opened a gallery in Belfast, which grew out of a love for art and was a means of supporting contemporary artists. In 1999 the McClellands offered 400 paintings, sculptures and drawings to IMMA for a loan period of five years. Subsequently, almost half of this collection was donated permanently to IMMA, allowing the McClellands to start a new collecting campaign. This exhibition, drawn from the McClellands’ private collection and some of the works now in the IMMA Collection, is coming home to Omagh where George McClelland grew up and first began to dream of buying and making art. In May of this year the exhibition was shown in Daingean Ui Chuis, Co Kerry, where Maura went to school. In October, the exhibition will also travel, as part of the IMMA’s National Programme, to the Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Co Louth.
 
Commenting on Maura McClelland’s passing IMMA’s Director, Enrique Juncosa, said: “Everyone at the Museum was deeply saddened to learn of Maura’s death. Through the very generous loan of their collection, Maura and George made an immense contribution to IMMA at a crucial stage in its development. The fact that almost half of that collection now forms part of the Museum’s permanent Collection stands as a lasting testament to the important place they will always hold in the history of the Museum. We all hope that this exhibition will go some way to celebrating Maura’s wonderfully full and interesting life.”

Strule Arts Centre opened to the public in June 2007 and is purpose-built to house, nurture and present a hive of artistic talent, offering creative outlets and opportunities for the people of Omagh District Council and beyond. It is a state-of-the-art building which will play host to music, theatre, comedy and dance performances, lectures, workshops, and exhibitions. This landmark Arts Centre, which is owned and operated by Omagh District Council, boasts a 398 seat auditorium, 125 seat studio theatre and conference room, dance studio, recording studio, print workshop, ceramics workshop, photographic studio, rehearsal rooms, exhibition space, outdoor amphitheatre and Tourist Information Centre alongside a bar and cafe bar.

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.

Collectors’ Choice. An Exhibition of Works Selected by Maura and George McClelland from their Personal Collection and the McClelland Collection at IMMA continues at The Strule Arts Centre, Omagh, Co Tyrone until 30 September 2007. 

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

Or Shauna McNeilly, Arts Marketing & Education Officer, Strule Arts Centre at Tel: 028 8224 5321; Email: [email protected]

9 August 2007

The first showing in Ireland of one of the most important works by the internationally-acclaimed Irish artist James Coleman opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 27 July 2007. The slide installation, Lapsus Exposure, 1992-94, is one of a trilogy of pioneering works by Coleman from the 1990s, acquired by IMMA through funding from the Heritage Committee of the National Cultural Institutions in 2004. The work will be shown in the Great Hall at IMMA, following the successful showing of the first part of the trilogy, I  N  I  T  I  A  L  S, 1993-94 in the Great Hall in 2006. The final work in the trilogy, Background, 1991-94, will be shown in 2008.

James Coleman is widely regarded as having a uniquely influential role in a range of media that dominate large areas of current art practice. For more than 30 years he has used the photograph, the projected film still, the transparency, the slide show with sound track and the film as powerful means of conveying his reflections on the meaning of the image, whether moving or static. The importance of the medium itself, and its role in shaping our understanding of what we see, is a key concern in Coleman’s work, with the technical equipment for his slide works regularly installed inside the exhibition space.Communication, subjectivity and the use of media are central concerns in Lapsus Exposure, 1992-94, and in the other works in the trilogy – I  N  I  T  I  A  L  S, 1993-94 and Background, 1991-94.

Lapsus Exposure, 1992-94, is one of Coleman’s most important slide projection installations, for which Coleman is widely recognised. Large projected images are presented in a darkened space with synchronised audio narration, incorporating the use of image dissolves. In Lapsus Exposure, 1992-94, a series of tableaux-vivants are interspersed with panoramic and dissolving views of a production set, suggesting the location of a film or fashion shoot. The characters appear to be musicians, in both contemporary and recent historical costume, with production personnel and equipment also present, as though a mise-en-scène is being staged. The relationship between past and present is also evidenced by the non-linear narrative of the voiceover, which suggests allusions to recorded and live performance, and allegories of analogue and digital photography.

Uncertainty is introduced through the variety of different genres in which the artist chooses to present the images, from popular television soap opera, documentary and film. Lynne Cooke in a recent essay on Coleman’s work describes the process whereby “weaving references drawn from film, from drama and from painting, Coleman situates his trilogy in a hybrid realm, one that allows him to comment obliquely on these canonical art forms and their traditions without, however, fully subscribing to any.” As with many of Coleman’s works, the viewer is free to move in the space and find their own vantage point, in relation to the architectural space.

Commenting on the forthcoming exhibition of Lapsus Exposure and on what the acquisition of the trilogy means to IMMA, the Museum’s Director, Enrique Juncosa, said, “We are very happy to present this second work of the trilogy of slide projected works by James Coleman that IMMA acquired through the Heritage Fund in 2004. These works from the 1990s were fundamental in building up his international reputation. They are also one of the core pieces of the IMMA Collection. The trilogy belongs to the tradition of experimentation with language initiated by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. The impact of James Coleman’s influence can be seen in the work of a new generation of artists, including Douglas Gordon, Liam Gillick, Steve McQueen, Jaki Irvine or Gerard Byrne, for whom he is an unquestionable master. The presentation of this work coincides with the participation of James Coleman in the documenta 12 exhibition in Kassel, where again he is one of the core artists in the show.”

James Coleman was born in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, in 1941. By the mid-60s Coleman had already begun creating works using photography and video, and later developed a number of live performed works in Ireland, Portugal and Holland. Since the 1970s, Coleman has exhibited extensively in international museum and galleries, including the Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1994-95), Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucern (1995), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1996), Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (1999), Kunstbau Lenbachhaus, Munich (2002), Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2002), and Museu do Chiado, Lisbon (2004-05). In 2003, Coleman developed a unique project at the Louvre in Paris for the exhibition Léonard de Vinci: dessins et manuscrits. Coleman has also participated in many international group exhibitions.

Lapsus Exposure continues until 26 August 2007.

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 July – August 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]

11 July 2007

The first solo exhibition in Europe by Nalini Malani, one of India’s most prominent artists, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 11 July 2007.  Comprising paintings, wall drawings, video installations and a shadow play, the exhibition provides an overview of Malani’s career and includes new work completed in 2007. Known for her politically charged work, Malani has gained an international reputation for her multi-layered mixed-media installations. Sourced from history and culture, and mixed with Malani’s personal influences and experiences, they build up a narrative of epic proportions. Images from Palestine and Bosnia, and from the American destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are projected over Indian references, mixing universal concepts with specific historical and personal ones.

Works in the exhibition refer to female figures from both Indian and European traditions, which have been the focus of Malani’s work since the 1970s and give additional meaning to her complex layered surfaces.  Included in her paintings are Alice, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Medea, the sorceress of Greek myth.  The Indian figures include Sita, daughter of the Earth Mother Avni, who betrayed by her husband returns to the Earth from whence she came, and Mahadeviyakka a young girl from the 12th-century, betrothed to a rich older man, who defied her family and community, rejecting her arranged marriage by claiming to be already married to the God Shiva. Malani’s new paintings have been inspired by the poems of Muddupalani (1730–90), whose erotic poetry presents the love story of Radha and Krishna in a new light, highlighting the woman in a dominant role. 

In Malani’s work these figures appear in isolation or intertwined – not necessarily in their expected contexts but in multi-layered narratives and open to interpretation. In Alice in the Map of Lohar Chawl, 2006, Alice wanders around the streets of Lohar Chawl in Bombay. In Sita/Medea, 2006, Sita and Medea are the same character and imagined as alchemists born from the earth, both betrayed by their men, de-gendered and deprived of their mothering status. All the works juxtapose different visions from the realms of memory, myth, desire and fantasy, mixing these with specific references to local and global politics, and to gender and identity issues. Malani describes the re-telling of existing stories in her work as “The story has complex functions. What one invests in the human image includes the skill to map out social destinies through the art of narration. For me history, fantasy, ritual remembrance, dream life, memory, transformation can all be melded in the crucible of the narrative”.

One particular aspect of Malani’s practice, which she calls the shadow play, takes the layering that appears in her paintings and drawings even further, almost to the point of them becoming three-dimensional animations. Remembering Mad Meg, 2007, is a shadow play specially created for IMMA.  Central to the shadow installation are painted, but transparent, rotating cylinders, onto which light and images are projected to create a multi-layered work. Accompanied by music and text, they fill the room with shadows.

A five channel video installation Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of Pain, 2005, is influenced by Malani’s experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India in 1947.  Stories of this time have overshadowed her life, her family were refugees from Karachi, now in Pakistan, to Bombay.  Feelings of loss, exile and nostalgia are evident throughout Malani’s work.  This video play reveals various parts of this tragic history and is inspired by the essay Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain, 1998, by the social scientist Veena Das.

Born in 1946, Malani trained as a painter and received her Fine Arts degree from the Sir J J School of Art, Bombay, in 1969.  She has exhibited widely and has had residencies in both the US and Europe.  Recent solo shows include the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, 2002-03, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, 2005-06.  Her works were also included in the recent landmark international exhibitions Unpacking Europe, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2001; Century City, 2001, and Cinema of Prayoga, 2006, Tate Modern, London; and Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense, Venice Biennale, 2007.  She has also participated in the recent biennales of Istanbul, 2003, Seoul, 2004, Sharjah, 2005, and Venice, 2005.  Malani lives and works in Mumbai, formerly Bombay.

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

Gallery Talk – East Wing, First Floor Galleries
On Tuesday 10 July at 5.00pm Nalini Malani will discuss her work with Thomas McEvilley, Professor of Art History at the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected].

The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial catalogue published by IMMA in association with Charta, Milan. It includes texts by Dr Chaitanya Sambrani, art historian, curator and Head of Art Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra; Thomas McEvilley; Enrique Juncosa; and an interview with the artist by curator and art historian Johan Pijnappel.

Nalini Malani continues until 14 October 2007. 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
Summer late opening July – August 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]

28 June 2007

In a new initiative, the Irish Museum of Modern Art is introducing late-night opening on Thursdays throughout July and August. Starting on Thursday 5 July and continuing until Thursday 30 August, IMMA will remain open each Thursday until 8.00pm. The Museum’s café and bookshop will also be open until 8.00pm.

The longer opening hours will afford visitors an added opportunity to enjoy the most high-profile and popular series of exhibitions in the Museum’s 16-year history. These include:

• The exhibition of 70 works by Lucian Freud, one of the world’s most celebrated artists, which has already attracted 22,000 visitors since it opened on 6 June.

• The major Anne Madden retrospective, spanning the artist’s career from the 1950s to date, which opens on 27 June.

• The large-scale display of recent acquisitions, with works by such leading artists as Dorothy Cross, Hughie O’Donoghue and Candida Höfer.

• The exhibition of prints by the 18th-century’s master printmaker William Hogarth, including some of his best known satirical series.

In addition, from 11 July a selection of works by the distinguished Indian artist Nalini Malani will also be on show, followed from 27 July an installation by the internationally-acclaimed Irish artist James Coleman.

Admission to all exhibitions is free.

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

20 June 2007

A major retrospective of the work of the acclaimed Irish artist Anne Madden opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 27 June 2007. Spanning the artist’s entire career, Anne Madden: A Retrospective comprises some 60 works from the 1950s to date, including a number direct from the artist’s studio. The exhibition features some of Madden’s most important paintings, including early works inspired by the Burren and her series of Megaliths, Monoliths and Doorways, from the 1970s. The exhibition also presents early sculptural works, paintings from her Elegy, Pompeii, Odyssey and Garden series and new paintings from her Aurora Borealis series. The exhibition will be opened by the distinguished Irish artist and writer Brian O’Doherty (Patrick Ireland) at 6.00pm on Tuesday 26 June.

Although the exhibition covers Madden’s entire oeuvre, it was this new body of work – the Aurora Borealis paintings – which prompted IMMA Director, Enrique Juncosa, to stage the exhibition, the latest in a long line by leading Irish artists at the Museum, at this time. In the catalogue essay he describes the works, inspired by the glowing atmospheric phenomenon seen in the northern night sky, as “ambitious in scale, spectacular in their depiction of chromatic contrasts and highly accomplished in their technique”. 

This assured technique is already evident in the very earliest painting in the show, the serene and confident Self Portrait, 1950. Perhaps more indicative of what was to follow, however, are Madden’s abstract landscapes from the late 1950s, the result of long periods spent in the strange and eerie landscape of the Burren in Co Clare.  In Burren Land, 1960, for example, we see the beginning of that engagement with conceptual space which would become a constant feature of her work. Also being shown are some fine examples of a body of experimental work from the 1960s created by pouring paint over a horizontal canvas. The result, in works such as Mountain Sequence Red Quadripartite, 1967, seems to echo the chance nature of geographical formations.
 
In the 1970s the emphasis changed to man’s early intervention in the landscape in, for example, Megalith, 1971, and Elegy, 1975, derived from megaliths and other prehistoric monuments.  Dark in colour and with strong vertical lines, their size determined by the artist’s height and reach, they mark a period of personal grief and, in some cases, the prevailing Troubles in Northern Ireland, the latter explicitly referenced in Menhir (Bloody Sunday), 1976.

By the 1980s Madden’s focus had moved to a series of window forms. These and her paintings of doors from the same period are in Madden’s words “thresholds between interior and exterior space, a reconciliation of opposites”. They include a beautiful series of paintings made in response to the frescos in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. She describes how Pompeii seized hold of her imagination “because of its apocalyptic destruction it was both a memory and a mirror, a condensation of our possible destruction by a nuclear holocaust. People and dogs were held and seized in their everyday gestures, a whole city snuffed out as it went about its business.”

The exhibition also presents some striking examples of Madden’s paintings of the sea and of nocturnal gardens, and of her 2001-02 series The Garden of Love inspired by lines from William Blake’s poem of the same name: “I went to the garden of love … and I saw it was filled with graves”. Described by Enrique Juncosa as “shimmering, dynamic and sumptuous spaces, filled with gold, silver, violet or red”, they, like Madden’s entire body of work, provide eloquent testimony to her understanding of art as “spiritual in its impulse and mysterious in its force … an essential … part of human experience”.

Anne Madden is particularly well known in both Ireland and France where she has divided her time for the past forty years.  Of Irish and Anglo-Chilean origin, she spent her first years in Chile.  The family then moved to Europe, where they lived in both Ireland and London, where Madden attended the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts. In 1958 she married the Irish painter Louis Le Brocquy and moved to the south of France. In the 1980s Madden stopped painting for a time and devoted herself to drawing, this resulted in a series of large works in graphite and oil paint on paper.  Madden then returned to painting on canvas and has continued to develop and produce a large body of work.  She has exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions and her work is represented in many public collections.  In 1965 she represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale and exhibited at ROSC ’84. Solo exhibitions include RHA Gallagher
Galleries, Dublin, 1991; Chateau de Tours Municipal Art Gallery, France, 1997; Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane, Dublin, 1997; Taylor Galleries, Dublin, 2005, and Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 2005.  

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

Anne Madden: Painter and Muse, the widely-praised documentary film produced by Mind the Gap Films in 2006 and shown as part of RTE Television’s prestigious Arts Lives series, will be screened in the Lecture Room at IMMA at 11.00am and 4.00pm from 27 June to 10 July (excluding Mondays).

Anne Madden will give the annual Winter Lecture at IMMA in December 2007.

A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition and features essays by Enrique Juncosa and the poet Derek Mahon; a poem by Derek Mahon and a short text by Marcelin Pleynet; Anne Madden’s important essay A quest: some reflections on being a painter; and a comprehensive illustrated chronology compiled by Karen Sweeney.  It is published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art in association with Scala.

Anne Madden: A Retrospective continues until 30 September 2007. 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
Late Opening July – August 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]

11 June 2007

An exhibition of works from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection opens to the public on Thursday 7 June 2007 at Ballina Arts Centre, Co Mayo, as part of a collaborative project between Ballina Active Retirement Association, Ballina Arts Centre and IMMA’s National Programme. Súil Eile is curated by the Ballina Active Retirement Group and explores new media works from the Collection.  The group visited IMMA to view works in the Museum’s Collection, the exhibitions on show and visit artists on the Artists’ Residency Programme. The result of this process is Súil Eile an exhibition featuring artworks by Michael Craig-Martin, Dorothy Cross, Clare Langan, Caroline McCarthy, Isabel Nolan and Alanna O’Kelly.

In the video work by Caroline McCarthy’s Greetings, 1996, 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. 

Alanna O’Kelly’s film work Santuary/Wasteland, 1994, refers to an historical site at Thallabhawn, Co Mayo, which lies at the edge of an estuary between Mweelrea Mountain and the Atlantic ocean. This site was a monastic settlement from the 6th-century and a famine burial ground in the 19th-century.  It was known as The Sanctuary to 17th-century map makers and was referred to as The Wastelands by local people in the 19th and 20th-centuries.  O’Kelly employs slow moving film close ups and an undercurrent of somber sounds that reflect the hope and despair, loss and recovery of the history of this site. 

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.
Súil Eile continues until 28 June 2007

Contact Information
Ballina Arts Centre, Barrett St, Ballina, Co. Mayo
Tel: 096 73593 Email: [email protected] Website: www.ballinaartscentre.com

Opening hours of Ballina Arts Centre:
Monday – Friday: 10.00am – 5.00pm
Saturday: 10.00am – 3.00pm
Sunday: Closed

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: 01 612 9900 or Email: [email protected]

28 May 2007

An exhibition of works from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection opens to the public on Friday 25 May 2007 at three venues in Co Clare – St Caimin’s Church of Ireland, Mountshannon; Raheen Hospital and Scariff – as part of the Iniscealtra Festival of the Arts.  Our Fragile Earth is the theme of the festival and includes works by well-known Irish and international artists such as Marie Jo La Fontaine, Clare Langan and Tom Molloy. Individual works from the IMMA Collection will be placed in three venues in Scariff – Tony O’Malley at the Bank of Ireland, Patrick Collins at the Derg Credit Union and Tim Goulding at Loughnane & Co.

The monumental film installation, Waves, 1998, by Belgian artist Marie-Jo La Fontaine, is on show in St Caimin’s Church of Ireland.  Shot on the west coast of Ireland this film-work seeks to capture the power and passion of the natural world.  The viewer is drawn into the work through La Fontaine’s striking use of sound that alternates between dramatic pieces of classical music and mysterious otherworldly voices.  The crescendos of this dramatic piece echo the movements of the breaking waves leaving the viewer with a sense of the mystery and power of the ocean.  Also on show in St Caimin’s Church of Ireland is Irish artist Clare Langan’s trilogy of film-works, Forty Below, 1999, Too Dark for Night, 2001, and Glass Hour, 2002, which also explore the limitless forces of nature. 

At Raheen Hospital 16 delicate leave drawings Oak, 1998 – 99, by the Irish artist Tom Molloy are on view.  After moving to the Burren in Co Clare Molloy became interested in the collection, classification and registration of the natural world.  In this work he focuses on the individual leaves from one particular oak tree, each drawing is governed by the same rules of production allowing the uniqueness of each leave to evolve. Molloy is concerned with reproduction, mechanical representation and questions relating to the very nature of representation itself.  Two works by one of Ireland’s most highly regarded landscape painters Patrick Collins are on view in the Derg Credit Union in Scariff. Collins painting The Wood Pigeon’s Nest, 1974, captures the vulnerability and fragility of the birds nest as it emerges from an abstract landscape. 

The Iniscealtra Festival of Arts is an annual festival held at various locations in and around the beautiful lakeside village of Mountshannon in Co Clare. IMMA has a long-standing relationship with the festival lending works from the Collection through the National Programme for the past ten years.  Clare based artists Nicola Henley and Jane Seymour will facilitate workshops in response to the exhibition with primary school students. The Education & Community programme is supported by the Department of Education & Science.

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.

Our Fragile Earth continues until 4 June 2007

Contact Information:
Iniscealtra Festival of the Arts – Festival Telephone: 087 2686764, Website: www.iniscealtra-artsfestival.org

Opening Hours:
St Caimin’s Church of Ireland: Daily from 2.00pm to 6.00pm
Raheen Hospital: Monday – Friday 11.00am to 5.00pm
Scariff – The Bank of Ireland, Derg Credit Union and Loughnane & Co.: Open office hours Monday to Friday.   

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: 01 612 9900 or Email: [email protected]

22 May 2007