The artwork Francis Street Boys 1994 by John Ahearn, from the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, opens to the public on Thursday 17 October 2005 at the Presentation Convent, College Street, Carlow.  Francis Street Boys 1994 is the result of collaboration between American artist John Ahearn, the boys of 6th Class, Francis Street CBS, Dublin, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.  John Ahearn’s practice involves working with community groups whose access to fine art and museum culture is often limited. The exhibition is part of the SPLANC festival and is shown in collaboration with the County Carlow Arts Office.

The process of making the series of portrait busts that go to make up Francis Street Boys 1994 involves a lengthy co-operation between artist and sitters – the development of a trusting relationship between them is central to the success of that process. The boys had to submit to having their heads and shoulders encased in quick-drying latex rubber to make the moulds from which the final plaster casts were made. The resulting portrait group of the 15 boys provides a dynamic record of the class of  ’94’ while it also documents a very real exchange between the boys, the artist and the Museum.

SPLANC is a new festival conceived to enhance the year round programme of cultural activities in County Carlow for young people including visual art, storytelling and literature programmes.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of workshops with Ballon and Leighlinbridge National Schools and will be facilitated by artist Terry O’Farrell in response to the work Francis Street Boys 1994. Work resulting from these workshops will be exhibited alongside the work from the Collection.

The National Programme is designed to create access opportunities to the visual arts in a variety of situations and locations in Ireland.  Using the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and exhibitions generated by the Museum, the programme facilitates the creation of exhibitions and other projects for display in a range of locations around the country.

Francis Street Boys 1994 continues until 28 October 2005.

Opening Hours:
Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm
Saturday 11am – 5pm
Sunday 12noon – 5pm

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

12 October 2005

A major retrospective of the work of the Irish painter Tony O’Malley, one of the most important and best-loved Irish artists of the past 100 years, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 26 October 2005. The exhibition, entitled simply Tony O’Malley, focuses particularly on certain core aspects and key moments in an extraordinarily productive career. It covers O’Malley’s early years as an amateur artist painting the landscape of his native Co Kilkenny, through his years in St Ives and the Bahamas and his return to Ireland in 1990, to some of his last works, created shortly before his death in 2003. The exhibition comprises more than 60 works, drawn mainly from private collections. Tony O’Malley is curated by the curator and critic Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith. It is presented in association with THE IRISH TIMES and H&K International.

Born in Callan, Co Kilkenny, in 1913, Tony O’Malley was until the late 1950s a part-time artist working, from 1934 to 1958, with the Munster and Leinster Bank in various branches around Ireland. Although suffering chronic ill-health, he continued painting throughout the 1950s, developing his craft through a process of trial and error and through studying, in reproduction, the works of the great masters such as Cezanne and Van Gogh. A number of works in the exhibition date from these early years. Winter Landscape, Arklow (1953) and Winter Landscape, New Ross (1957) present the viewer with bleak, geometrical landscapes where small houses huddle together against the elements, reflecting something of the economic and social conditions in the country and of the personal losses O’Malley suffered – the deaths of his mother and brother – around that time.

In 1960 O’Malley moved to St Ives in Cornwall, which he had already visited on a number of occasions and where he was to live for the next 30 years. The change wrought in his work by his new circumstances and surroundings – St Ives had been a well-known artists’ colony since the 1930s – can be seen in two self-portraits painted just two years apart.  In Self-Portrait, Heavy Snowfall at Trevaylor (1962-63) the artist is depicted in muted tones, in a solemn, ordered studio as the snow piles up outside. In Bird Painter (1965), by contrast, he is suffused with an elemental energy, poised to transform nature into art, his interest in birds, present from the start, having taken on a new life in St Ives. This leitmotiv recurs again and again in a variety of works, including the powerful The Hawk Owl (1964) and in Hawk and Quarry in Winter, in Memory of Peter Lanyon (1964), his tribute to his close friend and fellow painter Peter Lanyon, who died in a gliding accident in1963.

In the early 1960s, O’Malley began one of his best-known series of pictures, which he continued until the late 1990s. Painted every Good Friday and frequently drawing on images from local Kilkenny tomb carvings, they address, often obliquely, the theme of Christ’s passion. These ranged from Wooden Collage, Good Friday (1968), a strikingly simple evocation of the Crucifixion in blackened fragments of wood and slate, to Good Friday Painting (1994), which bears the expanded repertoire of gesture and colour resulting from his visits to the Bahamas in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Tony and his wife, Jane – the Canadian artist Jane Harris, whom he had married in 1973 – made their first visit to Jane’s family in the Bahamas in 1974.  This radically different environment initially posed some challenges for O’Malley, more especially in terms of the vastly different nature of the Caribbean light. However, O’Malley’s legendary persistence won out. In Bahamian Butterfly (1979) the formal idiom developed in gloomier climes is expanded to accommodate the visual resplendence of his new surroundings. During this period O’Malley’s work began to be exhibited much more regularly in Ireland, particularly at the Taylor Galleries. In 1984 he had a retrospective in Belfast, Dublin and Cork. A solo exhibition by the Newlyn Gallery in Cornwall toured to a number of English and Irish venues. The inclusion of four of his larger Bahamian canvases in the 1988 ROSC came as a considerable surprise to those whose knowledge of his work was confined to his paintings from the 1960s and ‘70s.  The first exhibition of O’Malley’s work at IMMA was held in 1992-93.  Following receipt of a major body of his work on loan from George and Maura McClelland in 2000, a further exhibition from that collection, was held in 2001.  Since then the Museum has received a heritage donation from Noel and Anne Marie Smyth of 60 of the O’Malley works from that collection to add to those already in its Collection. 

This new chromatic range was carried over into O’Malley’s later Irish paintings, following his permanent return to Ireland in 1990. Undeterred by failing eyesight, he found new modes of expression in works such as Sense of Old Place (1997) in which the watery depths of the pond spread out to encompass the entire landscape. Tony O’Malley continued working almost up to the time of his death in January 2003, true to his feelings, expressed in an interview with The Sunday Tribune in 1984, “I have no time for people who mess about, doing nothing when it suits them …There’s so much to do. If I run out of canvas I just paint over something I’ve already done. I’m an old man and I started painting late. I don’t want to waste any time”.

Curator’s Talk
The curator of the exhibition, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, will give an illustrated talk on the exhibition at 5.00pm on Tuesday 25 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]

A major publication with an introduction by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, essays by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Catherine Marshall, Head of Collections, IMMA, and an interview by writer and critic Brian Fallon, accompanies the exhibition (price €29.00).

Tony O’Malley continues until 1 January 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
Monday and 24 – 27 December Closed 

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

28 September 2005

The distinguished international mezzo-soprano Bernadette Greevy will lead a concert featuring a number of young professional singers from her Irish Museum of Modern Art Masterclasses at the Museum on Sunday 16 October at 3.00pm. The four singers, Margaret Collins and Suzanne Dunne, sopranos, Edel O’Brien, mezzo-soprano, and Jamie Rock, baritone, will join Dr Greevy in An Exaltation of Larks, an afternoon of enchanting music from Strauss to Brahms and Mozart to Gilbert & Sullivan. The accompanist for the concert is the leading Irish pianist Deborah Kelleher.

The programme features a number of well-loved works from such famous arias as No più andrai and Porgi, Amor from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro to the sublime lieder of Brahams, Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf. These are followed after the interval by two of Gilbert & Sullivan’s most popular operettas The Pirates of Penzance and The Yeoman of the Guard.

The Exaltation of Larks concerts, now in their ninth year, are designed to carry forward the work of Bernadette Greevy’s Masterclasses, held at the Museum in January each year, by providing the participants with an opportunity to work in the public arena with one of this country’s most respected and successful artists.

Dr Bernadette Greevy is internationally recognised as one of the finest mezzo-sopranos singing today. At the beginning of her illustrious career, a USA recital given by her provoked the remark by the music critic of the Washington Post that she would undoubtedly become ‘one of the noble and beloved artists of our time’. Born in Dublin, she has performed on all five continents with considerable success. Renowned as a Mahler interpreter all over the world, she has also sung in a wide variety of operatic roles including Carmen, Eboli, Orfeo, Herodiade, Azucena, Delilah and Ariodante. Bernadette holds Honorary Doctorates of Music from the National University of Ireland and Trinity College, Dublin. In addition, the honour of Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice was conferred on her by the Holy See. She was the first Artist-in-Residence of the Dublin Institute of Technology and Faculty of Applied Arts, and is also Founder/Artistic Director of the Anna Livia International Opera Festival.

Margaret Collins received her performance diploma from the Royal College of Music, London, and achieved great success in the Feis Ceoil winning the Geoghegan Cup, the Gervase Elwes Trophy and the Raymond Kearns Bursary. She is a regular performer in the Exaltation of Larks concerts in IMMA and her operatic roles include the Firebird in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges by Ravel and Yvette in Puccini’s La Rondine in the inaugural season of the Anna Livia International Opera Festival. She achieved great success in all the Anna Livia Fringe Festivals to date, performing the principal female roles in Mozart’s Bastien et Bastienne, Barber’s A Hand of Bridge, Menotti’s The Telephone and Wolf-Farrari’s Susanna’s Secret. She has also taken part in the Anna Livia Carol Concerts in Farmleigh House.

Suzanne Dunne studied singing in the DIT College of Music and later joined the Cór na nÓg Youth Choir, the Philharmonic Choir and Lumina Chamber Choir, as well as touring nationwide with Liam Lawton’s Legend to Light tour. She was also one of the leading sopranos in the Bunratty singers. She has sung in many oratorio concerts in Dublin, Cork and Kildare and has appeared with the Drawing Room Opera Company. Following her participation in Bernadette Greevy’s Masterclasses at IMMA, she was a principal chorister in the Anna Livia International Opera Festival’s productions of Verdi’s Il Trovatore and Flotow’s Martha. She is also a regular participant in An Exaltation of Larks and has performed in an Anna Livia Carol Concert in Farmleigh House.

Edel O’Brien has an Honours Masters degree in music from Maynooth and a Distinction Postgraduate Diploma and Gold Medal from Trinity College of Music, London. In 2001 she sang with great success, two principal roles in Il Tabarro and Gianni Schicchi from Puccini’s Il Trittico at the Anna Livia International Opera Festival. In 2002 she was one of seven singers to be invited to study on the Young Artists Programme for Opera National de Paris, Opera Bastille, and while there, she won the Prix Lyrique awarded annually to one male and one female singer. Edel has appeared in oratorio and recital in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Farmleigh House, St. Martin in the Fields London, St. Alban’s Cathedral, the Sorbonne, Le Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, L’Hotel de Velle, Versailles and Opera de Rouen on tour around France.

Jamie Rock studies singing at the RIAM and also with Jorge Chamine in Paris. He has taken part in several Masterclasses including Bernadette Greevy’s IMMA series. At the Feis Ceoil he has won many prizes including the baritone solo, the McCormick Cup & the O’Mara Cup. Jamie’s solo roles to date include Ein Deutches Requiem by Brahms, Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas, Acis and Galetea by Handel and Rossini’s Petite Messe Solenelle with Bray Choral Society in Germany. This is his second appearance in the IMMA Exaltation of Larks Concerts. In 2004 he won RTE Lyric FM’s Divas and Divos competition and appeared is Lyric’s Christmas Concert in Limerick. He has given recitals in Sligo, Wexford and Carlow and future engagements include recitals in Ballymaloe House and Tuscany in Italy.

Deborah Kelleher studied piano with Frank Heneghan and harpsichord with Aisling Heneghan at the DIT Conservatory of Music & Drama. She obtained her B.A. Mod. from Trinity College, Dublin and M.A. (Musicology) from University College, Dublin. She was awarded a teaching fellowship in that institution in 2001 and has undertaken a PhD in Queens University, Belfast, on the subject of twentieth-century Art Song in Ireland. She is much in demand as one of Ireland’s leading accompanists and has given solo and chamber recitals and broadcasts in Ireland, England, Belgium, Austria and America. She has appeared in concert with Bernadette Greevy, Geraldine O’Grady, Cora Venus Lunny and Ailish Tynan. She has accompanied all events in the Anna Livia Fringe Festival with great personal success.

Tickets for the concert are €15.00; concessions €10.00. Booking, including credit cards, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Parking at the Museum is free of charge, tel: 01-612 9900, email: [email protected]. Tickets will also be available at the door.

For further information please contact Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900, Fax: +353 1 612 9999, Email: [email protected] 

16 September 2005

A major exhibition of contemporary Latin-American art opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 5 October 2005.  The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America comprises 121 works from the Daros-Latinamerican collection, one of the most important private collections of contemporary art in Europe, with its own museum in Zürich. For the past five years the museum has been collecting works by many of Latin America’s most influential contemporary artists, creating one of the world’s foremost collections of Latin-American art. This is the largest exhibition of Latin-American art ever staged in Ireland. The exhibition is organised by Daros-Latinamerica, Zürich, in co-operation with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and is curated by Sebastián López, former Director of Gate Foundation, Amsterdam, and Curator of the Shanghai Biennale 2004.

The exhibition presents works by some of the most celebrated Latin-American artists working today, including Guillermo Kuitca (Argentina), Doris Salcedo (Colombia), Los Carpinteros (Cuba) and Vik Muniz (Brazil). The work of rapidly-emerging younger artists, such as María Fernanda Cardoso (Colombia), Nicola Costantino (Argentina) and Dario Escobar (Guatemala), is also featured. In addition to the works in the galleries, the exhibition will also include a number of off-site public works – in IMMA’s grounds and in a number of locations in Temple Bar – and a performance piece by Tania Bruguera (Cuba).   A number of works in the exhibition have already been shown at Documenta 11, the 2005 Venice Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, the Shanghai Art Museum and in other prestigious venues worldwide.

As the title suggests, in curating the exhibition Sebastián López has taken the concept of time as a revealing perspective from which to explore and present the works. This, in his words, “reveals some of their most significant traits and permits us to isolate them within a historical moment in the production of Latin American art. Many of the works reflect the social and political circumstances of particular countries or regions. Other deal with the past and the way it still plays a role in the present”. López takes his inspiration for this approach from the works of the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, in whose work time plays a central role, enabling him to inhabit various real and imagined worlds at the same time.

López sees a world of affinities between Borges’ universe and the artists in The Hours.  His aim is to “enable us to traverse different levels, spaces and times of varying intensity, with the mornings, siestas, afternoons and evenings that we find in the production of contemporary Latin American artists”.   In November the 6th, 2001, Doris Salcedo uses one of the most important dates in recent Colombian history, on which guerrillas overran the palace of justice killing 115 people, not only to anchor her work in a particular time frame, but also to indicate the wounds which these events left on her country. In An Eight Day Diary Guillermo Kuitca is engaged in a retracing of time through a series of drawings, created since 1981, populated by subjects and images, which have recurred throughout his career. Vik Muniz, familiar to IMMA visitors from his very popular exhibition in 2004, uses images from publications on modern art and the history of photography, but transforms them to make them relevant to the present. His Che (Black Pepper Soup), 2000, based on Alberto Korda’s famous photograph, is a witty take on modern-day Cuba and on the status of Che Guevara’s image in contemporary society. The work of the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto and Santiago Sierra, born in Spain and now living in Mexico, have also already been shown at IMMA.   Placed in the contexts of their peers in this exhibition, their work shows the rich connections one can find in contemporary Latin America art.

The exhibition also has a special programme of video works which includes works by Juan Manuel Echavarría (Colombia), Priscilla Monge (Costa Rica), Lilliana Porter (Argentina-USA), Martin Sastre (Mexico) and Santiago Sierra (Spain–Mexico).

In addition to the works in the galleries, The Hours will also include a number of off-site projects.  Chilean/US artist Alfredo Jaar’s video A Logo for America, is being shown in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar. Challenging the near universal USA-centred perception of “America”, at the expense of the southern continent, the work made a major impact when originally seen in Time Square, New York. A much-acclaimed sound installation, by the Colombian/UK artist Oswaldo Macia, will be located in the colonnades at IMMA. Entitled Vespers, it traces its origins to the role of the female chorus in Greek tragedy and was created using 55 different testimonies of women recorded in seven languages, set in a hauntingly beautiful choral arrangement similar to those found in Greek Orthodox liturgical music. Another off-site work by the Cuban artist Wilfriedo Prieto will take the form of a series of flags along the Liffey. Nicola Costantino’s striking works on gender and objects will be displayed along the corridor beside the Museum’s bookshop and café.

The exhibition also has a Reading Room with relevant literature on the artists in the show.

Since the beginning of 2000, Daros-Latinamerica has been devoted to building up a collection of contemporary art from Latin America. Today the collection contains the work of more than 70 artists from almost every country in Latin America. All genres and media are represented, in work created largely over the last 20 years and complemented with a few selected earlier works.

Panel Discussion: Wednesday 5 October at 3.00pm in the Chapel at IMMA Sebastián López, curator of the exhibition, will chair a discussion with a number of artists      represented in the exhibition. 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]

A substantial full-colour publication with a foreword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, and Hans–Michael Herzog, Director of the Daros-Latinamerica collection with essays by Sebastián López and Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, curator and critic, accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue comes with an art historical description of the works in the exhibition authored by Herzog, López and Valdés Figueroa.

The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America continues until 15 January 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

Monday and 24 – 27 December  Closed

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

14 September 2005

An exciting, new exhibition resulting from a collaboration between the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Youngfringe opens to the public at IMMA today (Tuesday 13 September 2005). Precaution provides alternative spaces for work to be shown in seven different locations around the Museum; a tree on the east avenue, the front lawn, an artists studio, a shipping container, a staircase, the Process Room and the Project Room. This is the first year that the Dublin Fringe Festival has included a Youngfringe programme as part of the festival. Much of the work in the exhibition is being exhibited for the first time. 

John Beattie has produced a site-specific piece, Extension, physically linking the grounds of the Museum with an installation inside. The performative painting involves the use of a customised video camera attached to the artist’s foot and arm, which documents actions around areas surrounding the Museum. This act is also documented through photography. The video/sound piece created while the artist walked is shown on the screen of the customised video camera that was used to record it. This work is process-driven, with the idea itself as the core of the piece. The Museum space, the equipment, the artist’s walk and the artistic documentation of the experience become both the process and the finished work.

An installation by Eoin McHugh involves a number of framed drawings hung in close proximity to each other that depict objects, experiments, performances and narratives. McHugh states that he is ‘interested in the structuring of language involved in the interpretation of ambiguity in an artwork; in the space between the image, the object and the idea.’  Objects and ideas depicted in his drawings are further explored in a new dimension through the development of an ambitious new sculpture and a site-specific work on the front lawn of the Museum titled Garden. This temporary intervention is again exploring a conceptual space, that between the physical plants and the idea of transience.

Vanessa Donoso López explores the complexities of human relationships. Through the use of patterns, colour, line drawing and collage set against stark backgrounds she creates energetic and sometimes eccentric characters bursting with life and complexities. Continuing with some of the themes such as childhood memories, dreams and fantasy in her mixed media pieces, López has created a number of delicate clockwork kinetic sculptures to bring a new dimension to the characters from her paintings.

In Caroline Donoghue’s work, created on a found handwritten ledger – a ‘day book’ from Belfast Gasworks dated 1916, a miniature forest of trees appears to grow randomly from the open pages. The miniature landscape that is conjured presents a dreamlike state and perhaps promises escape. Within the ledger is the sense of a time past, the model trees the only reference point. Trained as a printmaker, Donoghue also uses new media and sculpture to express her ideas. Her video works in this exhibition deal with her interest in the human need to collect and archive. 

Eilis McDonald gathers debris from her surroundings on which to make paintings.  Located in a shipping container outside the main entrance to the Museum, McDonald’s site-specific work reacts to the constraints of this space in an explosive manner. The piece has an anxious energy, which results from the layering of paintings, noise, lights and video work. The installation combines a range of media that bring together themes relating to confusion and popular culture, art history and value systems.

Nina Canell combines found and custom-built objects to make sculptural and sound works. Objects are balanced and positioned in order to sustain a flexible state in which formations move with a seeming randomness, provoking an interesting clash between the visual and the sonic impact. Canell creates an alternative perspective on structures that we may normally perceive as purely utilitarian. She finds the hidden language of these objects and with ingenuity turns these everyday objects into works of art.

Paul Coffey’s works, which are a combination of artistic actions or experiments, are made using familiar everyday materials. His gently humorous and questioning works are so understated that they force us to look for things, to question the why and how.  Rich in metaphor and ambiguity the first of Coffey’s two works is an intervention by the artist with a tree in the grounds of the Museum which involves using a dot punch to create holes in the leaves of the tree. The second installation of a single Christmas decoration, powered through a coil of extension leads, is located on a staircase at the Museum.  Both works link the exterior and interior and use materials from urban daily life in an unlikely fashion playing with expectations and perceptions of the ordinary. 

Brigette Heffernan’s work I propose a toast is an entertaining installation that demands audience participation. The participant chooses a piece of bread and pops it into a toaster before launching it along a measured track. The results are marked onto a score sheet and at the end of the exhibition, the overall winner is told of their victory by their chosen means of contact. Heffernan has a strong focus in her work on whimsy and humour. Access is paramount; there must be no barriers between the artistic endeavour and the audience. 

A full-colour publication with a text by the curators Janice Hough, Johanne Mullan and Marguerite O’Molloy accompanies the exhibition. 

There will be an opportunity to meet the artists at IMMA on Sunday 18 September from 3.00pm – 5.00pm.

Precaution continues until the 2 October.
         
For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900, Fax: +353 1 612 9999, Email: [email protected]

13 September 2005

The first exhibition in Ireland by the renowned British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 21 September 2005.  Isaac Julien comprises three audiovisual works Paradise Omeros, 2002, Vagabondia, 2000, and The Long Road to Mazatlán, 1999.  Each work will be shown for one month and the exhibition space will be re-configured to a two-screen or three-screen format creating a specific environment for each work.  Isaac Julien effortlessly breaks down the barriers that exist between different artistic disciplines, drawing from and commenting on film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture, and uniting these to construct a powerful visual narrative. 

The first film in this exhibition Paradise Omeros was much celebrated at Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, in 2002.  The installation delves into the fantasies and feelings of "creoleness" – the mixed language, the hybrid mental states and the territorial transpositions that arise when one lives in multiple cultures.  Using the recurrent imagery of the sea, the film sweeps the viewer into a poetic meditation on the ebb and flow of self and stranger, love and hate, war and peace, xenophobe and xenophile.  Paradise Omeros is set in London in the 60s and on the Caribbean island of St Lucia today and is loosely based on some of Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott’s poems from Omeros.  Derek Walcott and the musician and composer Paul Gladstone Reid collaborated with Julien on the text and score for the film.  Paradise Omeros is co-scripted by Isaac Julien and Grischa Duncker.

Vagabondia was filmed in Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Here a conservator, played by Cleo Sylvestre, reveals to the viewer the hidden histories and objects within the museum’s cornucopia of curios, collected by Soane during his Grand Tour.  Into this environment Julien places a Vagabond who brings the spirit of the Grand Tour back to life through his movements which where choreographed by the acclaimed dancer and choreographer Javier de Frutos.
 
The Long Road to Mazatlán was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001.  This work is another collaboration with Javier de Frutos and was commissioned by ArtPace and Grand Arts Kansas City.  This work draws on the mythologies of the frontier culture of the American west and in particular the loaded iconographies of the Cowboy and is imbued with a homoerotic quality redolent of Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys.  It also references the work of Martin Scorsese and David Hockney and continues, as with Julien’s earlier film work, to subvert preconceptions of race and sexuality.

Biographical Details
Isaac Julien was born in 1960 in London, where he currently lives and works.  Julien graduated from St Martin’s School of Art, London, where he studied painting and fine art film.  Julien’s recent films include Fantôme Afrique, 2005; True North, 2004; Baltimore, 2003, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Kunst Film Biennale in Cologne; Paradise Omeros, 2002; Vagabondia, 2000; The Long Road to Mazatlán, 1999, which was nominated for the 2001 Turner Prize.  Earlier films include Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, 1996; the Cannes prize-winning Young Soul Rebels, 1991, and Looking for Langston, 1989.  Julien was the recipient of the prestigious MIT Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts, 2001.  Solo exhibitions have included GL Strand Kunstoreningen, Denmark; Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, Canada; House of World Cultures, Berlin; Art Pace, San Antonio, Texas, and Bohen Foundation, New York.  The Film Art of Isaac Julien, curated by Amada Cruz at Bard Curatorial College, was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney and toured to the Bildmuseet Umeå, Henie Onstad Museum, Norway, and Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco.

Exhibitions in 2005 include Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, MAK Center, Los Angeles, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami.  Isaac Julien is currently visiting Mellon Professor at University of Pittsburgh and is a Trustee of the Serpentine Gallery and InIVA in London and of the Art Pace Foundation in San Antonio in Texas.

Exhibition Screening Dates
Paradise Omeros, 2002    21 September – 23 October
Vagabondia, 2000      4 November  – 4 December
The Long Road to Mazatlán, 1999  20 December – 15 January

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

A fully-illustrated catalogue, with texts by scholars Giuliana Bruno and José Esteban Muñoz, Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, Seán Kissane, and an interview with Derek Walcott by Marie-Hélène Laforest, accompanies the exhibition (price €29.00).

Artist’s Talk
Isaac Julien presents an illustrated lecture on his work practice on Tuesday 20 September at 5.00pm in the Lecture Room at IMMA.  Admission to the talk is free but booking is essential as space is limited.  To book please call the automatic booking line on tel: 01 612 9948 or email [email protected] 
 
The exhibition continues until 15 January 2006.  Admission is free.

Opening hours:  Tuesday to Saturday  10.00am – 5.30pm
                           except Wednesdays  10.30am – 5.30pm
                           Sundays and Bank Holidays  12noon- 5.30pm

                           Mondays and 24 – 27 December  Closed

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

12 September 2005   

An exhibition of works from the Collection of Irish Museum of Modern Art opens to the public on Thursday 1 September 2005 at the Iontas Arts Centre, Castleblayney, Co Monaghan. Visual Eyes: Selected artwork from the IMMA Collection is shown in collaboration with the Iontas Arts Centre and is the Centres inaugural exhibition. The exhibition includes work by prominent artists such as David Godbold, Tim Mara, Brian Maguire and Paul Winstanley.  

Brian Maguire deals with ideas of alienation and isolation within society and in personal relationships.  His work has been at the cutting edge of contemporary Irish art in spite of the fact that he continued to use the medium of painting at a time when many artists were turning to other media. In 1998 he was commissioned to represent Ireland in the Bienale de São Paulo. The resulting Casa da Cultura Project was donated to IMMA in 2000. During his stay in Brazil, Maguire worked on a series of drawings at an arts centre where local children from the Favela Vila Prudente, one of the city’s slums, attended classes. Maguire made drawings of sixty children during his four month residency. Two drawings of each child were completed, one was given to the child to take home, and the other drawing remained with the artist.  When Maguire visited the children’s homes, the portraits had found their niche, sometimes in the most unexpected places: drawings were hanging from coat-hooks, on curtains and perched alongside treasured nick-knacks and soft-toys on sideboards. The photographs which were taken make up the series called Favela Vila Prudente and serve not only as a document of the exchange between the artist and the children but also as a testament to the duality of the life of these portraits. Bare concrete walls and naked bulbs are the backdrop to the drawings in the photographs – a striking contrast to the white walls of the Museum. 
 
Paul Winstanley’s paintings are meticulous, meditative renderings of vacated spaces such as waiting rooms, deserted passages and lobbies. Sometimes looking out from these interior spaces onto the landscape, Winstanley frames the natural world with the clean lines of 1970s utopian architecture. The spaces he is interested in are those spaces which are most often the last place you want to be – like doctors’ waiting rooms or official spaces where people count minutes and wait their turn. Time is slowed down here and the smallest of details occupy the eye as it wanders over the interior, becoming familiar with its every crack and crevice. In Veil a common white net curtain is elevated to the poignant and poetic status of a veil. We can imagine its folds and edges stirring slightly in the breeze, but somehow the image is not benign and innocent, instead it is melancholic and unsettling. We are excluded or deprived by the veil, the space beyond it is hidden from us and we are concealed from the outer world.

Also included in the exhibition are prints by Tim Mara who is widely considered to be one the most important printmakers of our time. The self-portrait Reeded Glass and Shadow is one of a series of three prints. On the left, there is an image of the artist wearing his father’s black-rimmed glasses, his face distorted by the textured glass; on the right Mara’s silhouette is barely visible against the cream wall suggesting the passage of time and the importance of family history.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of workshops facilitated by artist Cliona Harmey in response to the film Hereafter by Paddy Jolley, Rebecca Trost and Inger Lise Hansen. A projection of the resulting work will be shown alongside Hereafter as part of the exhibition. IMMA staff will also facilitate workshops and talks for local national and secondary schools, supported by the Department of Education & Science. 

The exhibition will be officially opened by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA.
 
The National Programme is designed to create access opportunities to the visual arts in a variety of situations and locations in Ireland.  Using the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and exhibitions generated by the Museum, the programme facilitates the creation of exhibitions and other projects for display in a range of locations around the country.

Visual Eyes continues until 7 October 2005.

Opening Hours: Sunday – Saturday 10.00am -5.30pm

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900, Fax: +353 1 612 9999, Email: [email protected]

1 September 2005

An exhibition of works from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection opens to the public on Monday 5 September 2005 at County Buildings, Wicklow Town. Cherrypicking is an exhibition of artwork from the IMMA Collection curated by the staff of Wicklow County Council. The exhibition includes well-known Irish and international artists such as Hamish Fulton, Brian Maguire, John Kindness and Alice Maher.

The Wicklow County Arts Office in partnership with IMMA’s National Programme invited staff members of Wicklow County Council to curate an exhibition of work from the IMMA Collection. This process involved a series of discussions and visits to the Museum. The panel of staff from various departments within the council explored the curatorial process and the behind-the-scenes work involved in selecting, presenting and publicising an exhibition.

Hamish Fulton’s art takes the form of walks in the landscape.  In the past 20 years, he has covered more than 20,000 miles on five continents.  The photographs and texts produced as a result of these walks are simply objects, intended to bring his own experience within nature to the viewers of his art. Fulton’s philosophy is “no walk, no art.”  Thus each object is based directly on a specific journey, in this case Seven Days Walking and Seven Nights Camping in a Wood, Scotland. Fulton’s work can be seen as part of the wider Conceptual art movement in the 1960s and 1970s in particular Land Art which in his case embraced performance, photography, text, mapping and digital imagery.

Belfast artist John Kindness began his career as an illustrator before moving on to large- scale painting and sculptural installations. His work is characterised by its sharp-witted satire and derives as much from popular culture and kitsch as it does from conventional fine art. Dog with Altar Piece and A Monkey Parade are satirical representations of the two opposing factions in the "troubles" in Northern Ireland. The orange sash and symbolic imagery of King Billy and his white horse crossing the river Boyne belong here to an order of monkeys who are foolishly following a blindfolded leader in the wrong direction while their Catholic counterparts are led by vicious hounds with studded "dog-collars".

Commenting on the selection of the John Kindness works A Monkey Parade and Dog with Altar Piece Garvan Hickey, employee of Wicklow County Council who selected the work said:‘’ I chose these pieces not for any particular artistic feature or achievement, which I would know nothing about, but because I liked them and they struck me as being particularly vibrant and humorous. The paintings are engaging and the strong use of colour draws one in and shows that emotive issues, which are the potential source of conflict, can be viewed in a humorous way. The paintings show that there is more than one way of looking at and engaging with any one situation.’’

Tipperary-born Alice Maher works within the realms of nature and culture, subversion and transformation, mythology and memory. Working with materials like bees, berries and hair she builds up a strong relationship with their histories and cultural associations in the creation of surreal works that appear like enchanted objects from a medieval folk tale.  Berry Dress presents the delicate shape of the child’s dress, decorated with ripe berries.  On closer inspection, the dress loses its innocence, taking on a more sinister appeal. The pins, which hold the berries in place, are arranged internally and should the dress be worn, these pins would pierce the skin. Coma Berenices, another work by Maher included in the exhibition, refers to a classical story concerning the hair of Berenice, the wife of Ptolemy III of Egypt. In return for the safe return of Ptolemy from war Berenice offered her beautiful tresses to Aphrodite.

The National Programme is designed to create access opportunities to the visual arts in a variety of situations and locations in Ireland. Using the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and exhibitions generated by the Museum, the 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 will be accompanied by workshops for national and secondary students supported by the Department of Education & Science.

Cherrypicking continues until the 30 September 2005 at County Buildings Wicklow.

Opening Hours: Monday – Friday 10.00am – 5.00 pm.

For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900, Fax: +353 1 612 9999, Email: [email protected]

24 August 2005

The first solo exhibition in Ireland of the internationally acclaimed German artist Franz Ackermann opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 20 July 2005. Franz Ackermann comprises a series of large brightly coloured paintings and installations which reflect the changing nature of today’s increasingly globalised society. Two of the works have been designed especially for the spaces at IMMA. The exhibition also includes smaller works on paper in which the artist has been creating since 1991, reproducing the cities and landscapes he visits in the form of a topographic memory.

Ackermann’s work derives from his wide-ranging travels from Tokyo, Manila, Hanoi and Bangkok to Rome and São Paolo.  His experiences within this world are that of a tourist, rather than a traveller, and his work reflects this dizzying sensory overload.  Ackermann’s large installation paintings depict urban dynamics in the form of organic energy centres via documentation, postcards and newspapers.  His works read as a geographical metaphor for the ways in which travel and digital communication can be substituted for each other in a world which is becoming faster and easier to navigate every day.  For this exhibition Ackermann explores the conflict between fears and freedoms inherent in 21st-century travel and tourism and what precisely it means to participate in the global tourist economy.
 
Faceland III was first shown as part of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.  Ritualistically, as with all his works, Ackermann spent time in the weeks leading up to the exhibition walking the well-trodden tourist paths of Venice, actively scanning the environment and morphing into the identity of the tourist.  Faceland III is characterized by interconnecting works, which look like a hallucinatory urban planning system, there is a distinct centre around which are built interconnected satellite systems that suggest a fragmented sense of detail and other scenes from the landscape which contain obvious sites of tourist interest in Venice.  As part of the installation one area is illuminated by a sphere of light bulbs, that look like a builders demolition ball, ready to demolish the environment.  It also could be seen as an advertising sign for Ackermann, as we see a graphic black and white outline of his face, with the obligatory tourist’s RayBans. 

In Travelantitravel, 2004, Ackermann explores the dialogue between tourism-terrorism and the emotions associated with theses issues.  Berlin is the subject of this work, where Ackermann is resident and returns to from his travels.  There is a violent beauty to this work as we see the imposing prominent steel cages which house most of the paintings.  A steel and glass structure reminiscent of an interrogation area adds a sense of surveillance to the installation, which could allude to Berlin’s past and present histories.  Guns, a sleeping bag and structural carnage are also included in the installation and are hung in a way that forces us to confront the relationship between violence, mobility and tourism.  A prominent theme in Ackermann’s work is how easily travel can be disrupted, in the work we see a network of passages blocked by iron railings.  These architectural forms suggest the numerous physical, social, political, economic and ethnic upheavals that have characterized urban centres over the past decade.
 
The Landing Room and The Staying Room, both 2005, are based on Ackermann’s relationship to Dublin from the invitation to show his work at IMMA and an unplanned visit to Dublin during an emergency airplane landing due to a bomb warning.  As he took to the role of tourist in Dublin, from viewing the Spire to walking down Grafton Street and visiting Temple Bar, Ackermann considered the socio-economical and political effect of the Celtic Tiger.  The dynamics of contemporary tourism where affected by the Celtic Tiger and many believe the culture of Ireland has been eroded by growing consumerism and the acceptance of American capitalist ideals.  Cities like Dublin are organic breathing entities to Ackermann and as they expand he captures the changing urbanization and profound social values reflecting the shifting nature of attitudes to cities in an ever more globalised society. 

Franz Ackermann has exhibited internationally including Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; the Castello di Rivoli, Turin; White Cube, London; Portikus, Frankfurt and the Galerie neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Recent group shows have included the São Paulo Biennial, 2002, Casino at SMAK, Gent, 2002, and Painting at the Edge of the World, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2001.

Panel Discussion: The Condition of Painting: Franz Ackermann and Contemporary Painting
Tuesday 19 July at 4.00pm, Lecture Room, IMMA.
The panel will examine Franz Ackermann’s work and aims to consider some of the issues relating to contemporary painting.  The panel is chaired by Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA, and includes Marcella Beccaria, Curator: Castello di Rivoli, Italy, and Raimar Stange, freelance curator, Germany. Admission is free, but booking is essential on Tel: +353 1 612 9900 or on the automatic booking line +353 1 612 9948: Email: [email protected]

The exhibition is curated by Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA.

The exhibition is supported by the Goethe Institute, Dublin.
A publication with essays by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, curator and art critic, Daniel Birnbaum, Director of Portikus, Frankfurt, and Rachael Thomas accompanies the exhibition. (Price €25.00).

Franz Ackermann continues until 23 October 2005.

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

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

14 July 2005

An exhibition of some 30 works by the American sculptor Catherine Lee opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 22 June 2005. Entitled Catherine Lee, this small retrospective focuses on the artist’s work from the past decade, exploring the period from which her work began to deploy three-dimensional space through the powerful use of material, colour and form.

Catherine Lee’s works are a hybrid of painting, sculpture and installation. Juxtaposing the simplicity of a repeated form with an astonishing variety of materials, they give expression to the artist’s preference for materials that are changeable, for “anything that has been in a liquid state – clay, concrete, fibreglass, all sorts of metals. I have difficulty with wood, because it begins as one thing and remains that thing. Mutability is what interests me”. Her small table-top objects, such as White Cubic, 2004, made of fired clay have a delightful fluidity, which can also be seen in the glazed surfaces of Russian Cubic, 2005 and Red Cubic Copper, 2005, with their almost watery shimmer.

Lee’s work is frequently presented in groups or “families”, ranging from simple wall pieces to large formal arrangements comprising a number of separate elements. In this exhibition, however, the families have been dismantled and the works are displayed chronologically, giving a clear overview of the development of her work since the mid-1990s. Lee began her career as a painter and her wall sculptures, mostly dating from the late 1980s, could be seen as a continuation by other means of her early interest in two-dimensional works.

Her free-standing sculptures, mark an acceleration of this process. In Union Two, 1992, a figure reaching upwards seems to cast a shadow above and behind it, simultaneously embracing and threatening the very figure which created it in the first place. Lee’s recent large-scale bronzes, The Hebrides Series, which will be shown in the courtyard at IMMA, mark the latest stage in this evolution. Several of the artist’s works also evoke tribal artefacts, such as shields and masks. Archaic Figures, 2004, comprises eight glazed shapes closely resembling broad-bladed knives, although the material from which they are made might also suggest serving trays.

Above and beyond all of this writer Nancy Princenthal, in her catalogue essay, describes the central quality of Lee’s work as an ability to dissolve the distinction between the animate and the inanimate. “From her most intimate table-top ceramic objects to the large free-standing bronze sculptures, Lee’s work is endowed with a presence that is simultaneously geological and human. Indeed, although all sculpture can be said to participate in the fourth dimension . . . Lee’s sculptures cross a further threshold between still imagery and moving pictures; their painterly surfaces and distinct, eccentrically shaped facets create isolated images that assemble themselves, as one engages with them I turn, into almost filmic sequences”.

Born in Texas in 1950, Catherine Lee first exhibited in New York at P.S.1 in 1980 and since then has participated in numerous exhibitions internationally. Her exhibition, The Alphabet Series, was shown in Texas, Washington, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. More recently her work has been shown in Barcelona, Salzburg, Milan and Copenhagen. Her work is included in the collections of SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London, and the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.

A catalogue, with essays by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA; Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, curator and critic; Lorand Hegyi, Director, Musee d’Art Moderne, Saint Etienne, France, and Nancy Princenthal, critic and curator, accompanies the exhibition.

Talks
On Tuesday 21 June at 4.30pm  Catherine Lee will talk about her work in conversation with Enrique Juncosa. Admission is free, but booking is essential on Tel: +353 1 612 9900 or the automatic booking line: +353 1 612 9948; Email: [email protected].

Catherine Lee continues at IMMA until Sunday 4 September 2005. 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

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

27 May 2005