The Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Enrique Juncosa, today (Friday 17 November) welcomed the substantial increase in funding being made available to the Museum for 2007 by the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism.

“This increase of 9.4% in funding for current expenditure, which equates to €470,000, will enable us to advance our activities in a number of key areas,” he said. “It will allow us to continue to develop the scope and scale of our exhibitions programme, which in 2007 will include such leading international artists as Lucian Freud and Georgia O’Keeffe.  It will also enable us to increase our investment in our highly-regarded education and community programme, with a series of talks by prominent art world figures, a new strand of children’s holiday programmes and a conference in connection with our Artists’ Residency Programme.

Enrique Juncosa said that everyone at IMMA was deeply grateful to the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Mr John O’Donoghue, TD, and to the officials in his Department, for their unfailing support for the Museum and its activities. He also expressed the Museum’s appreciation for the additional funding of €1.7 million for IMMA’s acquisitions budget, announced by the Minister last week. “This special subvention will have a major impact on our plans for acquisitions to the National collection, and will assist greatly with our ongoing policy of addressing significant gaps in the Museum’s collection. It will also facilitate swaps with other international institutions, which are vitally important in the ongoing development of the temporary exhibitions programme. A further sum of €466,000 for the purchase of equipment will help us to move forward more quickly with our modernisation plans”, he said.

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

17 November 2006

Two exhibitions from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection, organised as part of IMMA’s National Programme, open to the public this November – The Borrowing in Cootehill, Co Cavan, and The concept is the thing? in Castlebar, Co Mayo.  The Borrowing is the result of a partnership between the Cootehill Library & Arts Centre and IMMA, which involved members and friends of the library and arts centre curating an exhibition of work from the Museum’s Collection.  The resulting exhibition opens to the public at the Cootehill Library & Arts Centre on Friday 17 November 2006, the official launch will take place on Tuesday 21 November 2006 at 8.00pm.  The concept is the thing? is the second collaboration between Mayo General Hospital and the National Programme aimed at supporting the hospital’s growing arts programme.  The exhibition opens to the public on Friday 24 November 2006. 

The Borrowing comprises some 10 works selected by a panel of 13 curators.  The process began with a series of discussions and visits to IMMA.  The panel explored the curatorial process and the work involved in selecting, presenting and publicising an exhibition.  Works in the exhibition include Barry Flanagan’s Cricketer, 1981, a bronze sculpture of a hare who evokes the expressive attributes of a human being. Flanagan is best known for his hare sculptures which where recently seen on O’Connell Street in Dublin.  Always celebratory and life affirming Flanagan’s hare’s dance, use technical equipment, play musical instruments and, as we see here, engage in sports.  In the painting by Barrie Cooke Megaceros Hibernicus, 1983, the elk emerges majestically from the gloomy bogland with its enormous antlers treated like massive antennae transmitting, as it were, a message from the past.  Curator Nuala Browne describes this work as “magical, dreamy, imposing and reminiscent of the majestic elk of Irish history.  It is significant as the Cootehill area is still a natural habitat of the deer”.

The concept is the thing? comprises some 28 works from the IMMA Collection selected by the Mayo General Hospitals Arts Committee.  The exhibition explores the beginnings of conceptual art and includes work by prominent conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Terry Atkinson and Richard Long. Works by artists who were influenced by the conceptualists of the 1960s and ‘70s are also included.  A leading figure in American conceptual art since the 1960s, Dennis Oppenhiem’s Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970, uses the artist’s body as the canvas.  During a five-hour performance the artist exposed his bare chest to the sun.  Allowing the sun to become the paint he explores the boundaries of the self and the endangerment of the body.  Hamish Fulton’s work’s Fourteen Works relates to a series of walks taken by the artist between 1982 and 1989, as far apart as Australia, Nepal, Portugal, Britain and Canada.  His artistic practice calls for a greater respect and understanding of the environment and asks us to pause and consider our impact on the routes we take through the landscape. 

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. 

The Borrowing continues at Cootehill Library & Arts Centre, Bridge Street, Cootehill, Co Cavan, until 9 December 2006.

The concept is the thing? continues at Mayo General Hospital, Castlebar, Co Mayo, until 4 February 2007.

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

13 November 2006

An exhibition by 20 leading international artists based on the physical and conceptual processes involved in making and exhibiting art opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 30 November 2006. .all hawaii eNtrées / luNar reGGae comprises works in a wide variety of media by such cutting-edge artists as Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carsten Höller and Sarah Lucas, many being shown for the first time in Ireland. All of the artists involved have participated in researching and developing the exhibition, whose title is an anagram of the Irish and English for “new galleries”, the building in which it is being held.  The exhibition is curated by the French artist Philippe Parreno, director of the recent much-acclaimed film on the French soccer star Zinedine Zidane, and Rachael Thomas, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA. 

.all hawaii eNtrées / luNar reGGae takes as its starting points Parreno’s fascination with different types of convergences – of past, present and future, of fact and fiction, and of memory and history – and his long-standing commitment to collaborative practice and to re-writing exhibition conventions. Works range from Ulysses’ return home to sci-fi short stories, changing how we look at an exhibition, re-adjusting our vision.  He forces his audience, and his collaborators, to revise their assumptions concerning an exhibition’s remit and scope. Many of those involved already have ongoing collaborative relationships with Parreno or with one another – in artistic practice, critical dialogue and, even, in real life.

Inspired by an observation by Michael Faraday (in a course of six lectures on the Chemical History of a Candle) in David Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality that “there is no more open door by which you can enter into a study of natural philosophy than [by] considering the physical phenomena of a candle”, Parreno’s goal for the exhibition was to use its methods of display and artworks to explore the idea of light as an entity – one which alters what we see, and camouflages what we cannot. As the process of research continued, this expanded into a multi-faceted investigation of light, space and events. The exhibition includes a number of seminal pieces, such as Anri Sala’s video work Mixed Behaviour, 2003, and Fischli & Weiss’s film The Way Things Go, 1987. Several newly-commissioned works are being shown, some of which engage directly with the architecture of the building, as in Jorge Pardo’s creaking doors which fit over the Museum’s windows and Rirkrit Tirananija’s Untitled, 2006, where he creates a neon light that spells out the first four lines of a Nirvana song by Kurt Cobain.

In some cases the works are neither tangible nor visible, demonstrating the primacy of the process over the finished work. In 7.8Hz, 2006, by the German artist Carsten Höller, currently in the news for his slide installation at Tate Modern, a change of frequency in the electrical system causes all the lights to flicker at set intervals, bringing about a change in perception across the entire exhibition space and echoing Parreno’s 2003 exhibition Fade Out in which the works only became visible when the exhibition lights were switched off.

A unifying thread can be found in Parreno’s dedication to alternative models of exhibition display, in which distinctions are blurred and uncertainties cultivated. Following in the footsteps of such curatorial pioneers as the early 20th-century museum director Alexander Dorner and the artist Marcel Duchamp, he treats the exhibition as a compendium of stories contributed by each of the artists. For example, past and present come together in Douglas Gordon’s Above All Else, 1991, a re-imagining of a work presented at IMMA in the early 1990s. A ceiling painting, it subverts our expectations by replacing the cavourting angels, traditionally seen in such works, with four-foot high letters reading “We Are Evil”. This in turn is not, as one might expect, some fundamentalist dictat, but rather a football supporter’s chant overheard on a train.

Commenting on Parreno’s approach to the exhibition, co-curator Rachael Thomas said: “Over the last 15 years, Philippe Parreno had turned group and individual collaborations into an art form. Echoing Marcel Duchamp’s statement that ‘art is a game between all people of all periods’, his collaborations – which involve other artists, nature, chance, material and the viewer – redefine exhibitions as not only a display of objects but also a space of negotiation, a place where a series of games can be played.”

In the accompanying publication, which Parreno considers of equal importance to the exhibition, he again taps into the theme of optics, with recalibrated images and blurred print contributing to the overall feeling of fluidity. In addition to an essay by co-curator Rachael Thomas, the book also contains texts by the Canadian science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, the artist Liam Gillick, the British comics writer Grant Morrison, the Dutch social scientist Hans Pruijt and the American science fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut (price €49.00).

Winter Lecture
IMMA’s Winter Lecture this year takes the form of a panel discussion on Wednesday 29 November at 3.30pm, which will form a continuation of .all hawaii eNtrées / luNar reGGae. The curators and a number of the participating artists including Liam Gillick, Declan Long and Grant Morrison will explore themes such as the notion of display, exhibition making and the territory where the artist’s interests intersect with those of the curator.

Other events

Discussion: Monday 22 January 2007 at 5.00pm
The London based writer, editor and curator, Jan Shumon Basar, discussion on the ‘Professional Amateur’ will lead into the ‘Spatial Practitioner’ (someone who trespasses into alien fields of knowledge). 

Lecture: Monday 29 January 2007 at 6.00pm
Oxford quantum physicist, David Deutsch, presents a lecture entitled Why are flowers beautiful? from his new book The beginning of Infinity. 

Admission is free to all talks and lectures, but booking is essential. To book please telephone the automatic booking line on +353 1 612 9948 or email to [email protected]

.all hawaii eNtrées / luNar reGGae continues until 25 February 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
Mondays Closed

Christmas Opening Hours:  24 – 26 December Closed
27 December – 1 January 12noon – 5.30pm

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

6 November 2006

An exhibition of work by one of Brazil’s most prominent contemporary artists, Iran do Espírito Santo, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 9 November 2006. Comprising some 28 works ranging from 1999 to 2006, the exhibition includes sculpture, drawing and installation, as well as one painting – a seductive but disturbing black version of the flag of Brazil. Espírito Santo’s work deals with structure, design, place, surface, space, light and material, and is based on a subtle subversion of Minimalism through abstracted everyday items.  

Among the artists favourite materials are glass, stainless steel, granite, marble and sandstone, which help to give a timeless feel to simple forms of recognisable objects such as lamps, bricks, boxes, keyholes and tins. His work is a stylish reflection on daily objects and their representation as an ideal, the functional nature of these objects disappears and they become aesthetic objects. His palette is reduced, almost exclusively to white, grey and black.

Espírito Santo’s work is primarily concerned with the physical, rather than the metaphysical, and his themes are conceptual in nature. At first glance, his sculptures seem to represent simple everyday forms, however, on closer inspection they suddenly evolve into something more complex. Untitled (Keyhole), 2002, for example, is a spherical visualisation of a keyhole in black basalt. Its surface reflects its surroundings, but we are of course, denied the possibility of delving into its interior and have to content ourselves with moving around it. The Night, 1998, is a black painting on steel which shows a series of stars on a black background. It takes some time before one notices that it is a version of the Brazilian flag in which the colours green and yellow have disappeared. This work is a response to the artist’s experience of growing up in Brazil during the years of the dictatorship.  In recent works such as the marble boxes White Box, 2003; Grey Box, 2003, and Black Box, 2003, where they are identical in technique and dimensions, colour provides a key to the interpretation of the works in their individuality and a clue about their contents.

The effects of light on the surface of the objects and their placement in architecture are highly significant. In works where the artist uses sandblasted glass, crystal or mirrors, as in Restless 25, 2005, the transparency of the material enables one to view the space behind the sculpture as well as the external, frontal, and lateral spaces that the work incorporates in its reflecting surfaces.  The result is that the viewer’s perception of the work goes beyond its clear-cut physical boundaries, expanding and taking in the setting in which it is placed. In addition, its texture also influences our perception of the weight of an object, which in the artist’s work contradicts the data presented on the purely formal plane.

Iran do Espírito Santo was born in 1963 in the state of São Paolo, where he still lives and works. He has exhibited widely in museums and galleries worldwide. His works are included in the collections of many prominent international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. His works have been included in the Venice Biennale, Bienal de São Paulo and the Istanbul Biennal. Recent exhibitions include Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil, and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.

The exhibition is curated by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, in collaboration with Paolo Colombo, Curator, MAXXI – Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome. This is a touring exhibition organised by IMMA and MAXXI.  It was first shown at MAXXI and after been shown at IMMA will travel to the Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo.

A publication, with texts by Enrique Juncosa, Paolo Colombo and Lilian Tone, Curator, Museum of Modern Art, New York, accompanies the exhibition (price €35.00).

Lecture
Iran do Espírito Santo will present an illustrated lecture on his work practice on Tuesday 7 November at 3.00pm in the Lecture Room. Admission is free, but booking is essential. To book please telephone the automatic booking line on Tel: +353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected]

Iran do Espírito Santo continues until 21 January 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
Mondays, 24 – 26 December Closed

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

1 November 2006

An exhibition based on a collaborative project between the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Focus Ireland opens to the public at IMMA on Thursday 2 November 2006. Entitled Hearth: Concepts of Home from the IMMA Collection in collaboration with Focus Ireland, it is being shown to mark the 21st anniversary of Focus Ireland, a national voluntary organisation working to prevent, alleviate and eliminate homelessness. The exhibition aims to create an awareness of the meaning of home in contemporary Ireland. It has emerged as a result of an access programme run by IMMA’s Education and Community and Collection Departments.
 
Focus Ireland was founded in 1985 by Sr Stanislaus Kennedy in response to research into the needs of homeless women in Dublin. Through listening to the experiences of the women, the research team realised the importance of involving people who were experiencing or had experienced homelessness, in the development of services for people out-of-home. Initially, Focus Ireland provided street services to young people, advice, advocacy, information, help with finding a home and a place to meet and have a meal. Since then, Focus Ireland has continued to expand its services opening low rent, quality housing developments and service projects in Dublin as well as housing developments in both Limerick and Waterford.

Comprising 16 works, Hearth represents a variety of works ranging from Power Cuts Imminent by Tim Mara, in which the artist depicts the normal scenario of a family home in the 1980s but disrupts the scene to include an insert of his time at art-college, to Hereafter a recent work by Paddy Jolley created when, in 2002, Jolley was commissioned to make a film in Ballymun, Dublin, – an area targeted for radical social and economic change. As part of this plan, residents were requested to move from flats in tower blocks, which in many cases were their lifetime dwellings, to new contemporary houses. Jolley focused on the newly vacated flats – and the physical items left behind.

Other works include Property by Beat Klein and Hendrijke Kuhne, a response to the property boom in Ireland in the late 1990s. Cut from estate agents advertisements in The Irish Times over a period of months in 1998, at the height of the property boom in Dublin, these flimsy houses of card illustrate the fragility of those dreams of wealth, while How to make a refugee by Phil Collins’ is the story of a family caught up in a very different reality, the dispossessed who are forced to find new homes and a sense of identity as a result of war.

Commenting on the exhibition Helen O’Donoghue, Senior Curator: Education and Community Programmes, IMMA said, “The collaborative process of working between IMMA and Focus Ireland aims to engage people with contemporary art and artists. Through sharing and exchanging skills and knowledge of the curatorial process it aims to demystify and reveal the often hidden process of exhibition planning and realisation, opening out the meaning of public access into the resources of a museum in general and IMMA in particular”.      

Declan Jones, Chief Executive of Focus Ireland said, “Focus Ireland’s vision is that ‘everyone has a right to a place they can call home’. Hearth provides a unique opportunity to explore this vision and to reflect on what home means in contemporary Ireland. The historical experience of Ireland as a place of mass emigration and our more recent experience as a country of migration means many of our community have an acute understanding of home as more than a place of shelter, but as a sense of belonging, of knowing and being known, of connecting – and not just belonging to a homestead but to a wider place, a community, a culture. We hope that through this exhibition the need and concept of home are presented to the public in an innovative and unique way that will contribute to the awareness and advocacy objectives of Focus Ireland.”

The works included in the exhibition have been selected by a process of consultation between Helen O’Donoghue, Senior Curator: Education and Community Programmes, IMMA, Catherine Marshall, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA and the customers and staff of Focus Ireland. 

A catalogue, sponsored by Red Dog Design Consultants, accompanies the exhibition.

Hearth continues until 1 April 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
Mondays and 24 – 26 December Closed

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

25 October 2006

The Irish Museum of Modern Art today (Tuesday 17 October 2006) announced the acquisition of Children in a Wood I, 1988, by the distinguished Irish artist Louis le Brocquy, considered to be one of the most important works in the artist’s emblematic Procession series. The acquisition, under Section 1003, was made possible by the generous support of Brian Ranalow, businessman, artist, collector and IMMA Board Member and that of Louis le Brocquy himself. The work is currently on show at IMMA as part of a display of seven major works, selected by Pierre le Brocquy, to mark the artist’s ninetieth year.

Louis le Brocquy is undoubtedly one of Ireland’s best know artists, whose long and fruitful career has made him the most loved and admired living Irish artist. Le Brocquy has a longstanding relationship with IMMA, he was a founding Board Member of the Museum from 1989 – 1994, in 1998 he was awarded the IMMA Glen Dimplex award for a sustained contribution to the visual arts in Ireland, and in 1996 IMMA hosted a major retrospective exhibition of his work. The IMMA Collection is fortunate to currently hold some 38 works by le Brocquy, among them a portfolio of 22 lithographs of Joyce’s Dubliners and a complete set of the Táin Tapestries. These works are shown as part of displays from the Collection at IMMA, in international exhibitions from the Collection and nationwide through the Museum’s National Programme.

Commenting on this significant acquisition, IMMA Director Enrique Juncosa said “Everyone at IMMA is delighted at the acquisition of this major work by Louis le Brocquy, which fills one of the gaps in our holdings of his work and fits perfectly with our policy of acquiring major works by leading Irish artists. It also compliments our rich collection of tapestries and prints by the artist. We are extremely grateful for the support of Brian Ranalow, the artist and the State, via Section 1003, which together have enabled us to add this important work to our Collection”.

Le Brocquy’s work is represented in the collections of numerous museums in the USA, the UK, France, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Japan, India, Korea, New Zealand and, of course, Ireland. Highlights of his career include representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1956, being elected a Saoi of Aosdána in 1994 and exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1976), the New York State Museum (1981) and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (1988).

Louis le Brocquy: A Celebration of the Artist’s Ninetieth Year continues until 10 December 2006. 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
Closed Monday

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

17 October 2006

Issues surrounding the ways in which people access contemporary art and artists in public museums and galleries will come under the spotlight at a symposium at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, from 9 – 10 November 2006.  Access All Areas…, will present a vast range of perspectives from programming policies to learning methodologies and institutional critique. It will also explore the role of national cultural institutions in today’s society, new roles for artists and audiences and artistic production in a ‘hostile’ environment due to severely limited funds. The symposium will be officially opened by the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Mr John O’Donoghue, T.D., at 9.45am on Thursday 9 November.

Access All Areas…, brings together ten leading international educators, writers and curators from Europe, North and South America and China. These will include such noted figures as Carol Duncan, Professor Emerita, Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA, Dr Howard Hollands, Principal Lecturer, Art and Design Education, School of Art and Design, Middlesex University, UK, and Davide Quadrio, Curator and Director, Biz Art, Shanghai, China, amongst others.

The symposium, which has already generated considerable interest among curators, artists, educators and arts administrators, will be chaired by Dr Niamh O’Sullivan, Head of Faculty, Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design.

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE

Opening Reception – Wednesday 8 November, 6.00pm – 8.00pm

Registration, wine reception and preview of the exhibition by Iran do Espírito Santo.

Day One – Thursday 9 November

Speaker: Carol Duncan, Professor Emerita, Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA
Title: A Usable Lesson from the Past: Newark’s “New Museum” a Century Later

Speaker: Helen O’ Donoghue, Senior Curator, Education & Community Programmes, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland
Title: Engage or Educate?

Speaker: Victoria Hollows, Museum Manager, Scottish Museum of Modern Art (GOMA), Scotland
Title: To be confirmed

Speaker: Luiz Guilherme Vergara, Director, The Museo de Arte Contemporanea, MAC, Niteroi, Brazil
Title: Why collect experiences? The communicative challenge of contemporary art as a mission for MAC

Speaker: Kaija Kaitavuori, Director KEHYS, Art Museum Development, Finland
Title: The role of a National Gallery in today’s society

Day Two –  Friday 10 November

Speaker: Dr Howard Hollands, Principal Lecturer, Art and Design Education, School of Arts and Education, Middlesex University, UK
Title: Blackboard Singing in the Dead of Night: the loss of a pedagogic palimpsest from the gallery and the classroom

Speaker: Davide Quadrio, Curator and Director, Biz Art, (Self-supported and not-for–profit art center and Artists Residency Programme), Shanghai, China
Title: To be confirmed

Speaker: Maria Lind, Director of Iaspis (International Artist Studio Program in Sweden), Stockholm
Title: Re-imagining the Institution

Speaker: Janusz Byszewski, Curator, Laboratory of Creative Education, Centre of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland
Title: The Art of Encounter

Speaker: Dr Veronica Sekules, Head of Education and Research, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia and Project Manager, Visual Dialogues (2005-6), Tate Britain, UK
Title: ‘The edge is not the margin’

The fee for the symposium is €175.00 for organisations, €130.00 for individuals, or €100.00 concession (students, OAPs, unwaged).  In addition to the presentations, this includes an opening reception (8 November), tea/coffee and light lunch at IMMA over two days and the symposium pack.

Contact details for bookings

Sophie Byrne, Administrator: Education & Community Programmes, IMMA, Tel: +353-1-6129919
Email: [email protected]

Book online at [email protected]

9 October 2006

Two exhibitions from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection open to the public this October – one in Carlow town, the other in Tallaght, Co Dublin – as part of IMMA’s National Programme. Bogadh comprises selected works from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection and works by students from St Joseph’s Primary School, Hacketstown, Co Carlow, and coincides with the second SPLANC Childrens’ Festival. Bogadh (movement) opens to the public at Presentation Convent, Carlow on Saturday 14 October 2006. In Tallaght Community Arts Centre the film work Hereafter by Paddy Jolley, Rebecca Trost and Inger Lise Hansen opens to the public on Monday 16 October 2006.

For Bogadh students from St Joseph’s Primary School, worked over six days with artist Terry O’Farrell to create their own unique art work inspired by pieces on loan from the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The young people’s work is shown alongside Irish and international artists. The children’s workshops were supported by the Department of Education and Science. Works included in the exhibition range from Helena Gorey’s Red 1, a work on dvd which pays homage to the endless diversity hidden in the overall order of the universe, to Rebecca Horn’s Take me to the other side of the ocean, which measures the passage of time and life.

Hereafter was created when, in 2002, Paddy Jolley was commissioned to make a film in Ballymun, Dublin, – an area targeted for radical social and economic change due to Dublin City Council’s plan to regenerate the area by demolishing and rebuilding residential housing and services. As part of this plan, residents were requested to move from flats in tower blocks, which in many cases were their lifetime dwellings, to new contemporary houses. Jolley in collaboration with German artist, Rebecca Trost and Norwegian artist/animator, Lise Inger Hansen, focused on the newly vacated flats – and the physical items left behind. Hereafter will be accompanied by a series of workshops for primary schools supported by the Department of Education and 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.

Bogadh continues at Presentation Convent Carlow until 20 October 2006.

Hereafter continues at Tallaght Community Arts Centre until 14 December 2006. 

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

3 October 2006 

A large-scale retrospective of the work of the internationally-acclaimed painter, sculptor and installation artist Michael Craig-Martin opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 4 October 2006. Michael Craig-Martin: Works 1964-2006 is only the second retrospective of the Irish-born artist’s work, the first having taken place in the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1989. Spanning more than 40 years of Craig-Martin’s radical and innovative practice, it presents some 50 paintings, sculptures, wall drawings, neon works and text pieces. One of the most striking works in the exhibition will be a newly-commissioned wall painting in the colonnades of IMMA’s beautiful 17th-century courtyard.

Michael Craig-Martin traces the remarkable evolution in the artist’s work from his early sculptures to his recent works using computer software. Despite the range of his oeuvre certain consistent themes are clearly discernible, particularly the dialogue between representation and reality within art. The everyday objects that constantly recur in Craig-Martin’s works have been described as “functioning as words do in language”. The selection of these objects, their colour, spatial relationship and juxtaposition is what provides the tension and narrative within his work.

The influence of Craig-Martin’s early years in America, where he witnessed the birth of minimal and conceptual art, can be seen in such works as On the Table, 1970, comprising four metal buckets suspended on a table, which is part of IMMA’s Collection; also, in arguably his most iconic and provocative piece, An Oak Tree, 1973, which consists of no more than an ordinary glass of water on an equally ordinary shelf, accompanied by a text in which Craig Martin’s asserts the supremacy of the artist’s intention over the object itself. Greeted with surprise, and even scorn, on its first showing, this work is now widely regarded as heralding something of a turning point in the development of conceptual art.

Prompted by a growing frustration with the limitations inherent in the use of actual objects, Craig-Martin soon began to make drawings of the objects he had been using. In a published interview with Rachael Thomas, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA, he describes this new-found freedom: “Once I’d made a work using a glass of water, every time I used a work featuring a glass of water I was referencing my own work.…On the other hand … [with a drawing of a glass of water] I can make an image five stories high or the size of a postage stamp. I can make it green and purple, upside down. I can do anything, because these are manipulations that language allows.” 

The exhibition features a large number of Craig-Martin’s highly-individual paintings, ranging from Painting and Picturing, created in 1978, to Eye of the Storm, dating from 2003, which was shown to great popular and critical acclaim in an exhibition of the same name from IMMA’s Collection in 2005. In these, everyday objects are presented in a flat graphic manner, sharply outlined without tonal variation usually on a brightly-coloured background. Colour is used as an extension of drawing, to distinguish one object from another, or one part of an object from another. Despite their scale, and in some cases their apparent complexity, they still retain the innate simplicity common to all Craig-Martin’s work, which he describes as “simple and sophisticated at the same time.… My picture of our society is that the things that unite us, at a very simple level, are the ordinary things we make to survive. The most universal manifestation of ourselves are the things we make, ordinary things, books, tables, chairs, shoes and beer cans…”

Examples of the artist’s most recent new departure can seen in Reconstructing Seurat, 2004, and Deconstructing Piero, 2005, based on two of his favourite historical paintings –  Georges Seurat’s The Bathers at Asinéres and Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation. Using computer software to separate the figures from their background, Craig-Martin reconstructed the images, replacing the original colour with his own vivid palette. The exhibition also includes Film, 1963, the artist’s only film-work to date, made in Connemara when he was still a student and now part of IMMA’s Collection.

Born in Dublin in 1941, Craig-Martin was brought up in the United States, but continued to visit his father’s family in Dublin throughout his childhood. He studied fine art at Yale University, where he met such influential artists as Richard Serra, Brice Marden and Chuck Close.  He returned to Europe in the mid-1960s, where he became one of the leading figures of the first generation of British conceptual artists.  As Professor of Fine Art in Goldsmiths College, London, in the 1970s and ‘80s, Craig-Martin was a key influence on the yBa generation of artists – Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and many more.  He has shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, both in Britain and internationally, and has produced installations for the Projects exhibition series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1991, and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, 1994. In 1993 he returned to Goldsmiths College as Millard Professor of Fine Art and in 1998 he represented Britain at the Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil.

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

The exhibition is presented in association with THE IRISH TIMES.

An illustrated book written by award-winning art critic, historian, broadcaster and curator Richard Cork, accompanies the exhibition.  The book is published by Thames & Hudson in association with IMMA (price €35.00). An interview book has also been produced to coincide with the show. This is one in a new series of interviews, artists’ statements and essays, being published by IMMA, which will form a collectable edition on Irish and international artists. Michael Craig-Martin is interviewed by Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA.

Lecture
Richard Cork will present a lecture, entitled Discovering Michael Craig-Martin, in the Chapel at IMMA at 5.00pm on Tuesday 3 October.  Admission is free, but booking is essential. To book please telephone the automatic booking line on Tel: +353 1 612 9948 or email: [email protected]

The exhibition continues until 14 January 2007. Admission is free.

Opening hours: 
Tuesday to Saturday 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sunday and Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Closed Monday and 24 – 26 December

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

4 September 2006

A season of rarely-seen films from a defining period in the history of American underground cinema opens at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 15 September 2006. New York: No Wave Cinema focuses on the hotbed of talent and creativity that was New York City’s East Village from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s – a period that marked a new era in the relationship between film, art and music. The season includes such seminal films as Rome 78, Underground USA, Downtown 81 and The Blank Generation.  Continuing until Sunday 1 October, it offers Irish cinema buffs an opportunity to see the films that were essentially responsible for developing the American independent film genre, which went on to become a major force in world cinema. In addition to the screening of seven classics of the genre, the season will also feature the cult classic cable network television programme, Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party.

Of particular interest to Irish audiences will be several appearances by the American artist David McDermott, who, as one half of the celebrated art duo McDermott and MacGough, has been part of the Dublin art scene since 1995. These roles include that of the Roman Emperor Caligula in Rome 78 (1978), directed by the British painter and musician James Nares, and a German spy in Long Island Four (1979) by the Swedish director Anders Grafstrom, based on a real-life World War II story – both of which are given an unmistakeably No Wave treatment.

The East Village of the time was home to an eclectic group of young artists who, thanks to the low rents in the area, had taken up residence there from all parts of America and Europe. No Wave Cinema (1976-1984) was the result of the ever-evolving relationships between these artists and the interchangeable roles they were prepared to undertake across a variety of art forms. Beginning with the explosive Punk/New Wave movement in the mid-1970s, it quickly came to provide a platform for collaborative experimentation, with filmmakers creating projected works for concerts, musicians composing sound pieces for artworks and a variety of artists, including filmmakers Glenn O’Brien, James Nares and Jim Jarmusch, performing in bands.

The aspirations of the group were, perhaps, best summed up in the words of the Israeli-born photographer Amos Poe, considered by many the father of modern American indie cinema. His first feature film Unmade Beds (1976) was a homage to Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave, arising as he explained from a desire “to start where Godard started, to go back to basics: innocence, romanticism, bohemianism, all things that made up New York City for me at that time”. 

The season traces the history of No Wave Cinema, beginning in 1975, when Poe and Ivan Kral (guitarist with the Patti Smith Group) set out to direct a 16mm film on the punk scene that became the cult classic, The Blank Generation. With seminal performances by the Ramones, Patti Smith Group, Blondie, Talking Heads and Johnny Thunders, it proved to be an important launching point for the development of the genre. Through films such as Unmade Beds and Rome 78 to The Foreigner and Underground USA audiences can chart the movement’s evolution to the significant changes in the New York art scene from 1981 onwards, when developments in the presentation and promotion of artists and their work eventually led to its demise some three years later.

No Wave Cinema reflected the interests, lifestyles and modest means of its participants. These traits provided a common link between its members and served to differentiate them from nearly everyone else involved in filmmaking in America at that time. As the first generation to have grown up with television, they had a strong desire to tell stories based on real-life issues, which were not being portrayed in mainstream American cinema. In Eric Mitchell’s Underground USA and Glenn O’Brien’s Downtown 81, for example, both depict the downtown scene of New York City with authentic locations (Mudd Club and CBGB’s) and true-to-life characters. Up until this time, the story of this creative hub of activity was for most part only available to its actual participants. For these new young filmmakers the B-movie, the avant garde and the French New Wave were the ideal cinematic forms.

Most of the films also share a distinct appearance and sound, having been shot using Super 8mm sound film, largely for the pragmatic reason that it was cheaper to buy and develop. Many were shown not at organised screenings but in unconventional spaces frequented by their makers and their supporters, such as Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Glenn O Brien, Jim Jarmusch, Vincent Gallo, Jean Michel Basquiat, Lydia Lunch, Eric Mitchell, Amos Poe, David Byrne, Vivienne Dick, Patti Smith, John Lurie, Keith Haring, Kenny Sharf, Arto Lindsay, McDermott & MacGough, Patty Astor, James Nares, Ivan Kral, and The Ramones.

Commenting on the season, curator Aileen Corkery, said: “For IMMA’s New York: No Wave programme, I have made a considered selection from countless films which I hope will relay not only a sense of the time but an understanding of how these dynamic artists worked together.  My rationale in selecting the films was assisted by identifying a few members from this period who would be familiar and of interest to Irish audiences and  that, in the programme’s entirety, it would reveal an interesting story. For the most part, the invalauble contributions of the main players in the No Wave movement to the development of the successful, and profitable, business of the American independent film industry has not been adequately acknowledged. I am hoping with programmes such as this, greater interest will be generated, not only into the content of the films, but in the incredibly talented and hardworking individuals who came together and changed our understanding of film, art and music.”

Aileen Corkery is a curator responsible for development and curation of the Dublin-based artist film and video programme, Temple Bar Outdoors: outside visual arts. She has commissioned films from Dorothy Cross, Paddy Jolley and TJ Wilcox and has worked extensively with artists including Matthew Barney, Salla Tykka, Phil Collins, Gerard Byrne and Richard Billingham. Having moved from Dublin in 2005, she is now based in London working at Hauser & Wirth London with the artists Paul McCarthy and Jason Rhoades.

The season opens on Friday 15 September with Rome 78 and Long Island Four and continues from Thursday to Sunday of each week, in the Lecture Room, until Sunday 1 October – see schedule attached. 

For this season, the films have been transferred from their original formats of Super 8mm and 16mm to DVD.  This is due to fragile state of many of the original works many of which have not been duplicated into prints.

Discussion
A public in-conversation between Glenn O’Brien and David McDermott takes place on Thursday 14 September at 6.00pm. Booking is essential as space is limited. Please contact the automatic booking line tel: +353-1-612 9948 or email [email protected]

Admission to all screenings is free.

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

16 August 2006