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

An exhibition of prints by one of England’s most celebrated artists, William Hogarth (1697 – 1764) opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 6 June. Comprising some 50 prints from the Madden Arnholz Collection, it includes many of Hogarth’s most famous print series such as A Harlot’s Progress and Marriage-á-la-Mode. The collection of some 2,000 Old Master prints was donated to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in 1988 by Claire Madden, in memory of her daughter Étaín, and son-in-law Dr Friedrich Arnholz. Now housed as part of the IMMA Collection, the Madden Arnholz Collection constitutes an important part of the nation’s artistic archive.
  
Hogarth was one of the most innovative, versatile and influential of British artists, to the extent that the phrase “The Age of Hogarth” is frequently used to describe the first half of the 18th-century. A self-appointed commentator on the morals of his day, Hogarth made works that appear distinctly modern, as they address subjects such as crime, political corruption, sexuality and patriotism, issues which continue to preoccupy the contemporary world. A highly reputable painter, it is in the medium of copper-plate engraving that Hogarth truly excelled and for which he is arguably most famous. With his wit and satirical eye he used print-making to document the social and political mores and follies of the rich and poor of his day as he observed them in the urban setting of his native London.

A Harlot’s Progress (1732) deals with the hapless life of a prostitute. Her male counterpart in A Rake’s Progress (1735) describes the decline of a vain profligate young man into a life of debauchery and his ignominious death in Bedlam. His masterpiece Marriage-á-la-Mode (1743) questions the upper class folly of marriage for money while Beer Street (1751) and Gin Lane (1751) warn against the unpleasant consequences of alcoholism. The Times (1762) is Hogarth’s anti-war satire. The exhibition also includes a rich selection of individual prints including Self Portrait with Pug (1794); Southwark Fair (1733); The March to Finchley (1750); The Distrest Poet (1736) and Strolling Actresses dressing in a Barn (1738).

Hogarth’s relevance today is best illustrated in his later political works. Addressing the state of electioneering during this time, William Hogarth turned from his usual practice of social satire to make a series of politically motivated prints entitled Four Prints of an Election (1755-1758). The first of the prints, An Election Entertainment (1755) depicts a feast, held by the Whig Party candidates, which has turned into a drunken and debauched affair. The following print, Canvassing for Votes (1757), shows the opposing party, the Tories, participating in underhanded campaigning tactics, such as the solicitation of votes in exchange for money. The third print in the series, The Polling (1758), shows what an absolute mess the polling process was, while the fourth and final print, Chairing the Member (1758), depicts the resultant riotous Tory victory. These works represent the extension into the political realm of Hogarth’s unprecedented knack for representing moralistic tales of everyday life degraded by social ills. 

Hogarth was the son of a shopkeeper mother and his father was a schoolmaster and publisher. After a brief apprenticeship as a silversmith, Hogarth studied for a time at Sir James Thornhill’s then recently opened art school. His first employment was in designing plates for booksellers until he began producing work on his own account. His first big financial success was with A Harlot’s Progress, a series of paintings from which he produced engravings in 1732. This was the first of the wholly innovatory genre that Hogarth called his ‘modern moral subjects’ and which first gave him his position as a great and original artist. Their humorous quality had little precedent in England and aided their wide reception, facilitated too by the new practice of  exhibiting prints in shop windows, taverns and other public buildings, as well the newly established printseller shops. The piracy of his prints, which Hogarth fought fervently, led to the introduction in 1735 of a copyright law which became known as Hogarth’s Act.

An exhibition guide accompanies the exhibition.

William Hogarth Prints from the Madden Arnholz Collection continues until 9 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]

21 May 2007

A major exhibition of the work of the celebrated British artist Lucian Freud, regarded by many as the most important figurative painter working today, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 6 June 2007. Entitled simply Lucian Freud, the exhibition comprises some 50 paintings and 20 works on paper and etchings from the last 60 years, several completed just months prior to the exhibition and others being shown for the first time in a public venue. The exhibition is particularly strong in portraits of mature men, many connected to horse racing; in little-known, small-scale works; in a painting and nearly identical etching of the same person, and in that triumph of Freud’s art – nudes depicting “the body in the round”.

Best known for his portraits and nudes, Freud’s subjects include his family, friends, lovers and fellow artists. His early works date from the 1940s. Several drawings and paintings from this period show the artist experimenting with dream-like ideas and with people and plants in unusual juxtapositions. For example, in Interior Scene, 1948, painted during a stay in the Zetland Hotel in Cashel Bay, Connemara, he shows his female subject partly covered by a blackberry branch and a curtain.  From the 1950s Freud began to paint portraits and the nude, using muted colours. The artist’s decision to reject a reliance on drawing, to paint with less control – standing instead of sitting – and to handle thicker paint more loosely, changed his work. The consequence, sustained for 40 years, has been a wholly original way of depicting people he gets to know intimately, ‘I didn’t want to get just a likeness like a mimic, but to portray them, like an actor.’

The works in this exhibition are organised around a number of themes. They begin with models ‘awake with closed eyes’, in a particular state special to painting from life. There is a concentration of paintings from the mid-1960s, like A Man, 1965. Self portraits are well represented, beginning with Self Portrait, 1940, and Man Wheeling Painting, 1942. In the latter the figure, apparently a labouring man, transporting a canvas in a wheelbarrow is, in fact, the artist. Also included are the extraordinary Self Portrait Reflection, Fragment, 1965, and a powerful self-portrait etching of 1996.  The Painter’s Garden, 2005-06, and an etching After Constable’s Elm, 2003, connect closely to Freud’s lifetime interest in John Constable, renewed when he acted as a selector for an exhibition in Paris in 2003.

Portraits of the same person at different ages and of people who are related form another important group and include those of several daughters, Annie, Esther and Bella and ‘the Irishman’ and his two sons. These works epitomise Freud’s approach to his subjects: “I am quite tyrannical. The more I know them, I wouldn’t say it makes it easier, it makes it more potential, I have to refer less and less to things that happen to be there. I’m in a stronger position to choose what I want to use”. This intensity is manifest in the grand nudes that began in the 1980s. One masterpiece in the exhibition is Leigh under the Skylight, 1994, the last full-length study of the performance artist Leigh Bowery. There are also bold pictures from the last five years, like Irishwoman on a Bed, 2003 – 04.

The exhibition also presents several fragments, or early versions of better known works, allowing the viewer to peer still further into Freud’s working process. A number of remarkable photographs capture something of the atmosphere in Freud’s studio. In the accompanying catalogue, the curator of the exhibition, Catherine Lampert, describes Freud’s magnetic hold on people and his instinct to use this as a tool, while varying his ‘style’ with each work. Many years ago Freud described something akin to this in his assertion: “ The subject must be kept under closest observation: if this is done, day and night, the subject – he, she or it – will eventually reveal the all without which selection itself is not possible.”

In addition to the Cashel Bay painting and the recurring affinity to racing and animals, there are other Irish connections. In the 1940s and ‘50s, Freud made several working visits to Dublin, where he found the rawness of the city of that time stimulating. Dead Cock’s Head, 1951, for example, is the result of his fascination with the butchers’ displays of unwashed meat. By contrast one of his most recent portraits, The Donegal Man, 2006, a portrait of a leading Irish businessman, shows the face of a more modern, enterprising Ireland.

Lucian Freud, grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was born in 1922 in Berlin, but his family moved to the UK in 1933.   He attended the Cedric Morris’s East Anglican School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham.  His first solo exhibition, at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, featured the now celebrated painting The Painter’s Room, 1944, and he was one of three artists to represent Britain at the Venice Biennal in 1954.  Since then Freud has become one of the best-known and most highly-regarded British artists of recent times. He was awarded the Companion of Honour and the Order of Merit. A major retrospective of his work was held in Tate Britain in 2002 and at the end of 2007 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, will present an exhibition organised around his etchings.  He lives and works in London and is represented by the Acquavella Gallery.

The exhibition is curated by Catherine Lampert, specialist on the work of Freud, a friend of the artist and former Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery.  The exhibition will travel to the Louisiana Museum, near Copenhagen, and to the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, in 2008.

The exhibition is sponsored by The Tea Room at The Clarence Hotel and is presented in association with THE IRISH TIMES.

Gallery Talk – New Galleries
On Tuesday 5 June at 5.00pm Catherine Lampert will discuss the various considerations which have influenced the selection and presentation of works in the exhibition. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected].

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with texts by Catherine Lampert, art critic and writer, Martin Gayford, and Freud’s son, Frank Paul.

Lucian Freud continues until 2 September. 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]

4 May 2007

Two exhibitions from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s own Collection, organized as part of IMMA’s National Programme, open to the public in Wexford and Daingean Ui Chuis, Co Kerry this April. Roots, Beanstalks and Growing Up, a partnership between Art Alongside and IMMA, opens to the public at Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford, Co Wexford on Monday 23 April 2007. An Exhibition of Works Selected by Maura and George McClelland from their Personal Collection and the McClelland Collection at IMMA, being shown as part of IMMA’s longstanding relationship with Féile na Bealtaine, opens to the public at Clós na BhFíodóirí, Daingean Ui Chuis, Co Kerry on Saturday 28 April 2007.   

Art Alongside, which began in 1999, aims to provide a dynamic experience of the visual arts for children and adults of Co Wexford. Each year, the Art Alongside artists, explore a specific theme in their work with primary school children. The current project is based on the theme of growth and includes work by Barrie Cooke, Tom Molloy, Thomas Ruff and Vik Muniz. Children from nine Co Wexford primary schools have been involved in a range of projects connected to the theme. In Roots, Beanstalks and Growing Up a selection of this work will be exhibited in the Wexford Arts Centre alongside works from the IMMA Collection on the same theme.

An Exhibition of Works Selected by Maura and George McClelland from their Personal Collection and the McClelland Collection at IMMA 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 McClelland’s offered 400 paintings, sculptures and drawing to IMMA on a five-year loan. Subsequently, almost half of this collection was donated permanently to IMMA, allowing the McClelland’s to start a new collecting campaign. This exhibition, drawn from the McClelland’s private collection and some of the works now in the IMMA Collection, is coming home to Daingean Ui Chuis, where Maura McClelland went to school and in September 2007 to Omagh, where George McClelland grew up and first began to dream of buying and making art.      

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.

Both exhibitions are accompanied by workshops supported by the Department of Education and Science. 

Catherine Marshall, former Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA will interview George McClelland in Collectors’ Choice: Bringing it All Back Home at Siopa na BhFíodóirí, Daingean Ui Chuis at 11.00am on 1 May 2007. Telephone: 066 915 1688

Roots, Beanstalks and Growing Up continues at Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford, Co Wexford until 7 May 2007.

An Exhibition of Works Selected by Maura and George McClelland from their Personal Collection and the McClelland Collection at IMMA continues at Clós na BhFíodóirí, Daingean Ui Chuis, Co Kerry until 6 May 2007. 

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

23 April 2007

A new exhibition of works acquired by the Irish Museum of Modern Art since 2003 opens to the public at IMMA on Wednesday 25 April 2007. Featuring 37 pieces acquired through purchase, donation and long-term loan, the exhibition concentrates mainly, but not exclusively, on new media. (I’m always touched) By Your Presence, Dear, includes film-works by Pierre Huyghe, Lu Chunsheng and Brian Duggan, an installation by Dorothy Cross, a painting by Hughie O’Donoghue and a photo work by Candida Höfer. The exhibition, whose title is taken from a 1978 song by the American punk rock band Blondie, will be officially opened by Gavin Friday on Tuesday 24 April, at 6.00pm.

(I’m always touched) By Your Presence, Dear grapples, both conceptually and visually, with issues of memory and sentimentality, and with the part which our own identity plays in the very process of being touched by an artistic “object of desire”. Pierre Huyghe’s film Block Party, 2002, on the early, short-lived hip hop scene, is based on the remembrance of an iconic moment from the past and a consciousness of its effect on the present. Shot in Harlem and the South Bronx, the film recreates a block party in its original environment, which it then presents in the form of a music video, a format that did not actually exist at that time.

Lu Chunsheng’s film-work Before the Appearance of the First Steam Engine, 2003, is a deft commentary of contemporary China, mixing a socialist’s dream, a dark underworld, and a quest for wealth. Like his fellow countryman Yang Fudong, Lu Chunsheng’s films show the influence of French new wave cinema. Until 2000, foreign films were largely unavailable in China with the result that Chinese artists view Western cinema history with fresh eyes.

Alongside international artists are the works of important Irish artists, such as Dorothy Cross’ Parachute, a comment on loss and remembrance. A gannet, hung upside-down, its beak near the ground, hangs upside down from a parachute suspended from the ceiling. Through the recuperation of the remainders of natural physical surroundings – a washed up gannet on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, Dorothy Cross’ work both returns its animal protagonist to its former existence and presents a composition pertaining contemporaneously to the incidental and the highly careful assemblage. If, however, Parachute evokes former selves, it also appears to stem from a highly subtle sense of loss, where the accident – the artwork, the gannet’s death – is both recalled and forever relinquished. The exhibition also includes William Scott’s Parallel Forms Orange, 1971 and Once, 1986 by Sean Scully, acquired with a special subvention made available by the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism in 2006.

The Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art comprises approximately 4,000 works by 20th-century and contemporary Irish and international artists. It has been developed through purchase and donations, as well as long term loans and the commissioning of new works. The Museum’s acquisition policy, like its exhibition and education and community programmes, reflects the changing cultural landscape of the late 20th-century and the new millennium. The Museum not only buys the work of living artists but also accepts donations of works from the 1940’s onwards – a decade of significant social and cultural change, both in Ireland and worldwide. (

I’m Always Touched) By Your Presence, Dear will open on Tuesday 24 April at 6pm and continues until 17 March 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]

19 April 2007

Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism
An Roinn Ealaíon, Spóirt agus Turasóireachta

E-mail:    [email protected]
Web:        www.dast.gov.ie

Press Release                                                       4th April 2007

O’Donoghue announces new appointments to the Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

John O’Donoghue TD, Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, today (Wednesday, 4th April, 2007) announced that he has appointed for a term of five years, Conor Bowman and Anne O’Donoghue as members of the Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.  Minister O’Donoghue is also pleased to announce the re-appointment for a further term of five years, Rosemary Ashe, Kevin Kelly, Chris Flynn and Emer O’Kelly as members of the Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Minister O’Donoghue said: "I am delighted that such distinguished people, who have contributed immensely to Irish society, have agreed to serve as members of the Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. I wish to thank them all for responding so enthusiastically to my invitation to serve. Conor Bowman and Anne O’Donoghue will make an enormous contribution to the work of the Museum and its importance as a major National Cultural Institution, just as Rosemary Ashe, Kevin Kelly, Chris Flynn and Emer O’Kelly have already done and will continue to do.”

Minister O’Donoghue also paid tribute to the notable contribution made to the work of the Irish Museum of Modern Art by the outgoing members of the Board, Pauline Flynn and Jackie Gallagher.

ENDS

Biographies:

New Members

Conor Bowman:                
Barrister and Author of Wasting by Degrees (a novel) and Life and Death in Between (Short stories)

Anne O’Donoghue:
Associate Director, Anglo Irish Bank Private Banking. Board member of the Irish Heritage Trust and a supporter and patron of        the Arts in Dublin and London  

Re-appointed Members

Rosemary Ashe:                
Chairwoman, Business Spouses Association and IrishYouth Foundation Committee

Kevin Kelly:                        
Honorary President Business2Arts

Chris Flynn:                        
Principal Officer, Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism

Emer O’Kelly:                
Writer and Critic