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

An exhibition of sculptures by two of the giants of 20th-century art – the American sculptor Alexander Calder and the Spanish painter and sculptor Joan Miró – opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 4 April 2007. The eleven works in Alexander Calder and Joan Miró have been brought together in IMMA’s magnificent 17th-century courtyard in celebration of the long-standing friendship between the two artists, which began in the 1920s and continued up to the time of Calder’s death in 1976. The exhibition opening is sponsored by The Tea Room Restaurant at The Clarence.

Unlike some previous presentations of their work, the exhibition does not set out to highlight the formal and conceptual connections between Calder and Miró’s art, concentrating, rather, on the powerful burst of creativity which both artists enjoyed in the later years of their career. Works range from the Calder’s dark, majestic The Tall One, 1968, to Miró’s playful and colourful Personnage (Personage), 1967. One of the other Miró Personnage sculptures in the exhibition, from 1974, has already proved a great favourite with Museum visitors since it was given on loan to IMMA by the Successió Miró in May of last year.
 
Alexander Calder and Joan Miró met in 1928, in Paris where they both had studios. They quickly became good friends seeing each other frequently in France and Spain in the following years, a crucial period in the development of modern art. Their work was first shown together in 1932 and, again, in a larger group exhibition the following year. In 1937, Spain’s Republican government invited both artists to create new works for the Spanish Pavilion at the World Fair in Paris, and later that year they had their first joint exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

In 1951 the Contemporary Arts Association in Houston presented the first joint post-war exhibition of their work, and in 1955 both received commissions for the new UNESCO headquarters in Paris. In 1971, Calder donated Mercury Fountain, originally created for the 1937 World Fair, to the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, and the following year Miró wrote a remarkable catalogue text – in the form of an illustrated poem – for an exhibition of Calder’s work in Palma de Mallorca.

Calder and Miró’s friendship also had an interesting Irish dimension in that both were also close friends with the distinguished Irish-American art critic and curator James Johnson Sweeney (1900-86), who curated separate retrospectives of Miró and Calder’s work at MoMA in New York in 1941 and 1943 respectively. This association of the artists’ work has continued into the present century with, most notably, the spectacular Calder Miró exhibition in Basel in 2004.  

Born in Pennsylvania, Alexander Calder (1898–1976) was one of the most innovative and influential sculptors of the 20th-century. Calder developed a new method of sculpting by bending and twisting wire – he essentially “drew” three-dimensional figures in space.  He is renowned for his striking mobiles, whose suspended, abstract elements move and balance in changing harmony. Calder also made large outdoor sculptures from bolted sheet steel for public buildings and spaces. He is also noted for his book illustrations and stage sets.  In 1977 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honour, by President Gerald Ford. 

Born in Barcelona, Joan Miró (1893-1983) is widely recognised for his immense contribution to Surrealist and Modern art. His enormously varied body of work, drawn from the realm of memory and imaginative fantasy and created over 75 years, is among the most original of the 20th-century. Miró paintings are instantly recognisable from their distinctive use of bright colours – especially blue, red, yellow, green and black – and their unaffected mixture of childlike innocence and artistic sophistication. Sculpture was a major focus of his work in the 1960s and ‘70s, both painted sculptures and bronzes. He also worked in a wide variety of other media, including etchings, watercolours and collage.

The exhibition is curated by Alexander S C Rower, Director of Calder Foundation and a grandson of Alexander Calder, and Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA.

Talk
On Tuesday 3 April at 5.00pm Dr Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Senior Curator of the Phillips Collection in Washington and an expert on early 20th-century art, will discuss the hidden connections between Calder and Miró’s work. The talk will take place in the courtyard; those attending should assemble at the Lecture Room. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948; email: [email protected].

Alexander Calder and Joan Miró continues until 1 July 2007.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with a foreword by Enrique Juncosa and texts by Alexander S C Calder, Emilio Fernández Miró, grandson of Joan Miró and administrator of the Miró Estate, and Dr Elizabeth Hutton Turner. The publication will include views of the works installed at IMMA.

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 6 April Closed

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

27 March 2007

Garrett Phelan: Trusted Servant on YouTube as part of the exhibition
.all hawaii eNtrées / luNar reGGae at IMMA

As part of the group exhibition, .all hawaii eNtrées / luNar reGGae, Irish artist Garrett Phelan has been invited by the curators to officially close the exhibition with his project Trusted Servant.  .all hawaii eNtrées / luNar reGGae, curated by French artist Philippe Parreno and Rachael Thomas, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA, was shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art from 29 November to 18 February 2007. More than 20 artists, writers and thinkers were invited to participate in this project that focused on the notion of ‘process’. Parreno’s approach is to go beyond the physical space of the Museum, as a part of this process on the gallery closing date of the exhibition, 18 February 2007, Phelan uploaded the video performance work Trusted Servant, 2007, onto YouTube – a popular free video sharing website which lets users upload, view, and share video clips. 

To view Trusted Servant please go to http://www.youtube.com/trustedservant   

Primarily known for radio, video, drawing and alternative projects, in this instance Phelan becomes the gatekeeper of .all hawaii eNtrées / luNar reGGae. Trusted Servant documents an automated and manic performance of Phelan repeating pre-recorded broadcasts from his MP3 player, which have been compiled and edited from media sources – shortwave and longwave radio, cable link, newspaper articles and webcasts. His working standpoint, calls into question the mainstream methods of endless ingestion of information and communication that influence the formations of our opinions in this ‘don’t stop age’. The removal of Trusted Servant from YouTube at Phelan’s conceptual discretion will mark the official end of the exhibition.

Trusted Servant also functions as part of Phelan’s current exploration into the Formation of Opinion (2003 – ongoing). This work is the final part of a first phase entitled Reception of information, which includes the three drawing projects NOW: HERE, 2003, LUNG LOVE, 2004, GOD ONLY KNOWS, 2005, and a month long artwork entitled Black Brain Radio, 2006, an independent FM/online radio station. Parreno’s .all hawaii eNtrées / luNar reGGae catalogue text After Affects proposes a similar style of communication as technology, as an amalgamation of hidden, coded, obscure, specialized languages, that inscribe all forms of transmission. 

Copyright Garrett Phelan  http://www.garrettphelan.com/foo.htm

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

23 March 2007

The first solo museum exhibition in Europe of the work of Shahzia Sikander opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 28 March 2007.  Comprising some 25 works the exhibition provides a brief overview of Sikander’s career and focuses on her most recent practice.  The exhibition includes two of her animations alongside new large-scale paintings.  While studying at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, Sikander specialised in Indo-Persian miniature painting at a time when there was little interest in this traditional practice. She has described her choice as being regarded with suspicion by her student colleagues, the practice of miniatures seen as "excessively kitsch” and solely for tourist consumption.  Sikander was determined to create a dialogue with tradition, developing an original artistic practice that includes painting, drawing, animation and complex installations.  Now based in New York her practice also incorporates the aesthetic debates of popular iconography and contemporary cultural theory. 

Sikander’s work confronts and interrogates the perceptual distances between the cultures designated as ‘East’ and ‘West’, an area of poignancy and difficulty in the current political climate.  The work of Sikander is particularly relevant in this context, but unquestionably transcends it with an integration and exploration of multiple viewpoints and contexts.  Emerging from a post-colonial and post-partition background Sikander is also interested in exploring both sides of the Hindu and Muslim “border”. 

Sikander has embraced the possibilities of digital technology in her work using it to literally ‘animate’ her paintings.  Two examples of these animations are included in this exhibition SpiNN, 2003 – 2006, (a pun on the news media channel CNN) and Pursuit Curve, 2004.  Sikander has also combined Photoshop technology with screen printing to create large-scale paintings inspired by the miniature tradition.  The second of the series The Illustrated Page, 2007, is shown for the first time in Dublin.  

Shahzia Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan, and currently lives in New York.  She received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 1995. In 1997, her work was selected for the Whitney Biennial, coinciding with a simultaneous exhibition of her work in the Drawing Centre in New York.  In 2003, she was invited to participate in the Istanbul Biennial, followed by the inaugural 2004 Seville Bienal and the Venice Biennale in 2005.  Her work featured in the 2005 group show Translation in the Palais de Tokyo, and most recently held Miniphilia, a solo show in the Valentina Bonomo Gallery in Rome late last year. Sikander has received many awards for her work – in 2006 she was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship. 

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

A publication, published by IMMA in association with Charta, accompanies the exhibition with texts by Seán Kissane and Professor Homi Bhabha, Professor of English and American Literature, Harvard University.

Gallery Talk
On Tuesday 27 March at 5.00pm, Shahzia Sikander will present a talk on her exhibition in the East Ground Floor Gallery. Admission is free but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected]

The exhibition continues until 7 May. Admission is free.

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday 10.00am-5.30pm
except Wednesday 10.30am-5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays 12 noon- 5.30pm
Mondays and Friday 6 April Closed

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

21 March 2007

An exhibition of work by the distinguished Irish artist Robert Ballagh opens to the public at the Heywood Community School, Ballinakill, Co Laois, on Monday 5 March 2007.  Comprising seven works the exhibition focuses on works produced by Ballagh during the 1970s.  This exhibition is the fourth collaboration between IMMA’s National Programme and the Heywood Community School and coincides with the school’s ninth Annual Arts Week. 

Robert Ballagh is a self taught artist whose work combines elements of pop culture, commercial art and technology.  He was a leading figure in the introduction of Pop-Art to Ireland in the late 1960s.  The art collector Gordon Lambert commissioned Ballagh to make a number of portraits some of which are included in this exhibition.  Portrait of Gordon Lambert, 1972, uses both elements of figuration and abstraction – the figure of Lambert is shown holding an exact replica of a painting by the German Abstract artist Josef Albers that he had been instrumental in purchasing for the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.  Ballagh took this opportunity to introduce a new freedom into this genre.  He drew on such advertising techniques as the unframed cut-out and a screenprinted photograph as a basis for his painting, combining these with a sculptural cast of the model’s hands to create a new kind of portrait. 

A portrait of mezzo soprano Bernadette Greevy, Homage to Bernadette Greevy, 1978, was commissioned by Lambert in 1977 to acknowledge her great contribution to classical singing in Ireland.  The singer is represented in a variety of ways, through painted imitations of photographs, her record and cassette covers and through her voice.  The viewers presence triggers the playing of one of her best known recordings from a cassette player, concealed behind the fictitious cassette player in the picture. 

Robert Ballagh was born in Dublin in 1943, he originally studied architecture and worked as an engineering draughtsman, a musician and a postman before dedicating himself to painting in 1967.  Alongside his paintings he has also worked on a large variety of other projects including designing of over 70 stamps for An Post, the final series of Irish banknotes before the introduction of the euro, set design for the Riverdance Company and the Gate Theatre and the staging of the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics in Croke Park in 2003.  Ballagh is represented in the IMMA Collection by 19 works and his work is held in many other collections including the National Gallery of Ireland and the Ulster Museum.  A recent retrospective of his work took place at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2006.  

The Heywood Community School is committed to exposing their students and the broader community to the arts at a national and international level. Previous exhibitions programmed at the school’s Annual Arts Week have included works by Pauline Bewick, Brain Bourke, Paddy Graham, Michael Kane, Louis le Brocquy, Fergus Lyons, Brian Maguire, Michael Mulcahy and Tony O’Malley. These exhibitions have been carried out in partnerships with the Arts Council of Ireland, the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, and the Irish Museum of Modern 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.

The exhibition continues until 9 March 2007. 

Opening Hours:
Monday – Friday 10am – 3pm
Groups visiting the exhibition should book in advance.  Contact: Tel: 057 87 33333.

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

5 March 2007

An exhibition of the work Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the legendary figures of 20th-century American art, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 7 March. Georgia O’Keeffe: Nature and Abstraction comprises 28 works dating from 1918 to 1977, less than a decade before her death at the age of 98 in 1986. The exhibition presents a survey of her entire career, exploring the central focus of her work – the transformation of nature into abstraction by expressing an object’s essence through colour, form and allusion. It includes landscape paintings, flower studies and abstract works, her major areas of interest throughout her remarkable career.

Over the course of seven decades Georgia O’Keeffe became a major presence in American art; renowned not only for the stylized beauty of her work but also for steadfastly remaining true to her own unique vision amid the many shifting artistic trends of the time. The distinguished curator of the exhibition, Richard D Marshall, former Curator at the Whitney Museum in New York, notes that despite this, O’Keeffe’s work aligns with that of some of the major figures of 20th-century Modernism – both European and American – such as Monet, Picasso and Ellsworth Kelly who shared with O’Keeffe “the observation of nature as the inspiration of their subject matter. Her subjects were taken from life, and related both generally and specifically to places where she visited and lived.”

The exhibition includes several examples of O’Keeffe’s most emblematic work, among them Series I, No 4, 1918, and Series I, No 8, 1919, highly abstract compositions, heralding the dramatic change which her work underwent after her move to New York in 1918. This was followed in the early 1920s by an extensive series of works investigating the abstract potential of a single flower, enlarged to fill an entire canvas, of which Flower Abstraction, 1924, is an outstanding example, with its strong warm shapes and powerful three-dimensionality. The exhibition also includes two of O’Keeffe’s most lyrical compositions, Abstraction, 1926, and Abstraction Blue, 1927, which although related in concept and structure, differ in form and palette. 

The dominant influence on O’Keeffe’s work in the 1930s and 1940s was the landscape of New Mexico, which she first visited in 1929 and where she spent almost every summer for the following 20 years, eventually settling there in 1949. O’Keeffe’s paintings were now inspired by desert themes, including bleached bones, desert landscapes and isolated churches and buildings. Her transformation of nature into abstraction continued in works such as Rust Red Hills, 1930, which appears to be a completely abstract composition in brown, red and black, until the title reveals the subject. Green Patio Door, 1955, is one of the artist’s sparest abstractions consisting of three bands representing the blue sky, the adobe wall and green door of O’Keeffe’s own New Mexico house and the grey earth. 

For the rest of her career this same New Mexico landscape provided O’Keeffe with an endless source of inspiration and motivation. In the late 1950s a further group of paintings were created in response to her first experience of flying over the New Mexican landscape, including Blue and Green, 1960 and Winter Road, 1963, while one of her latest paintings From a Day with Juan II, 1976-77, echoes her earliest works in its purely abstract colour and form.

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 in Wisconsin, USA.  She was of Irish descent, her paternal grandparents, Pierce and Catherine O’Keeffe, left Co Cork in 1848 for America.  She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League, New York.   The international photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who later became her husband, promoted O’Keeffe’s work from 1923 until his death in 1946, organising annual exhibitions of her work throughout the United States.  As early as the mid-1920s, when O’Keeffe first began painting her large-scale depictions of flowers, which are among her best-known works, she had become recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists.  Three year after Stieglitz’s death O’Keeffe moved from New York to her beloved New Mexico, whose landscape inspired her work from 1929.  O’Keeffe continued to work in oil until the mid 1970s, when failing eyesight forced her to abandon painting.  She continued to work in pencil and watercolour and also produced objects in clay.  She died in 1986 at the age of 98.  The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, was opened in 1997 and is the first museum in the United States dedicated to a woman artist. 

The exhibition is presented in association with THE IRISH TIMES.

The exhibition is co-organised by the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Richard D Marshall, independent curator, consultant, art historian and curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from 1975 to 1993.  The exhibition will travel to the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, from 6 October 2007 to 13 January 2008.

Gallery Talk
On Tuesday 6 March at 5.00pm in the New Galleries Richard Marshall will give a talk on key paintings selected for the exhibition and the subjects that most inspired the artist. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected].

Georgia O’Keeffe: Nature and Abstraction continues until 13 May. Admission is free.

A fully-illustrated catalogue, published by IMMA, the Vancouver Art Gallery and Skira, Milan, accompanies the exhibition and includes texts by Richard Marshall, Dr Yvonne Scott, lecturer in the History of Art, Trinity College, Dublin, and Achille Bonito Oliva, art critic, writer, curator and teacher of History of Contemporary Art at La Sepienza University, Rome.

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 6 April Closed

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

21 February 2007