PRESS RELEASE                                                    
16 June
2005

           O’Donoghue announces appointments to the Board of the
                     Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA)

John O’Donoghue T.D., Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, today Thursday (16th June, 2005) announced the appointment of eight persons to the Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) including the re-appointment of Eoin McGonigal SC as Member and Chairman of the Board.  The appointments are as follows;

Eoin McGonigal, SC – Chairman

Frank X. Buckley – Member of the Contemporary Irish Art Society and
Patron of the Arts

Valerie Connor – Lecturer, Member International Association of Art
Critics (Paris)

Michael Dwyer – Journalist and Broadcaster

Brendan Flynn – Teacher and Director Clifden Arts Festival

Áine O’Driscoll – Artist and Gallery proprietor

Brian Ranalow – Artist, Member of Contemporary Irish Art Society and Collector of 20th Century Irish Art

Patricia Tsouros – Founding member IMMA Foundation, Collector and
Patron of the Arts

Minister O’Donoghue expressed his gratitude to the outgoing members for their significant contribution to the continued success of IMMA.  In confirming the new members of the Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Minister O’Donoghue referred to the status of IMMA as Ireland’s leading national institution for the collection and presentation of modern and contemporary art with a growing international reputation both in Europe and North America. He remarked on the magnificent historic buildings complex of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham housing the collections and which IMMA makes available for State protocol occasions and it being a wonderful setting for corporate events.

Minister O’Donoghue noted the success of recent exhibitions.  "These exciting exhibitions have struck a chord with the public and are a manifestation of the developing interest in modern art throughout the country.  This is borne out by the increasing visitor numbers to IMMA both last year and in the current year."  In that regard, Minister O’Donoghue observed that the establishment of the Luas stop at Heuston had increased the accessibility of IMMA for visitors and tourists and he acknowledged the promotion of IMMA by Luas on its website.

A complete list of the Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art is set out in the attached Note for Editors.
(ENDS)

NOTE FOR EDITORS:

                  Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art

Eoin McGonigal SC – Chairman

Chris Flynn – Principal Officer, Dept of Arts, Sport and Tourism

Gerard Mannix Flynn – Writer and Actor

Emer O’Kelly – Journalist

Jackie Gallagher – Public Relations Executive

Rosemary Ashe – Member Irish Youth Orchestra

Pauline Flynn – Artist and Lecturer

Kevin Kelly – Honorary President Business2Arts

Frank X. Buckley – Member of the Contemporary Irish Art Society and Patron of the Arts

Valerie Connor – Lecturer, Member International Association of Art Critics (Paris)

Michael Dwyer – Journalist and Broadcaster

Brendan Flynn – Teacher and Director Clifden Arts Festival

Áine O’Driscoll – Artist and Gallery proprietor

Brian Ranalow – Artist, Member of Contemporary Irish Art Society and
Collector of 20th Century Irish Art

Louise Bourgeois, one of the greatest and most influential artists of our time, has made a gift of one of her works to the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The work, Untitled, 2001, is one of the artist’s characteristic front-facing fabric heads, which is displayed in a glass vitrine. The head is one of a suite of seven, each unique, made from a soft pink material, originally one of Bourgeois’ jackets. The work, including the vitrine, measures just over 177 cms in height.

The gift has been made in recognition of the success of the Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time exhibition, which was organised by the Museum and was shown at IMMA from November 2003 to February 2004 to great popular and critical acclaim. The exhibition included three similar fabric heads. Sewn with a simplicity that belies their structural sophistication, Bourgeois’ heads are nevertheless uncannily lifelike – with open mouths, and eyes focussed directly on the viewer or deliberately glancing away. They are difficult works to confront; a difficulty compounded by the mute and resistant glass cases which encase them.

Stitches in Time was the largest exhibition of Bourgeois’ work ever staged in Ireland. In addition to the fabric heads, it also included a series of cell-like vitrines housing curious scenes of ecstasy and torture; a group of totemic figures, reinterpreting in fabric her early sculptures from the 1940s and ’50s, and a selection of graphic works. Following its showing at IMMA, the exhibition travelled to the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; the CAC, Centro de Arte Contemporãneo de Malaga, Spain, and to the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, USA. A hugely-popular catalogue, published by IMMA to accompany the exhibition, was reprinted twice due to popular demand and was translated into Spanish for the exhibition in Malaga.

Welcoming the gift IMMA Director, Enrique Juncosa, said, “This generous gift by Louise Bourgeois is a wonderful addition to IMMA’s sculpture collection. As one of the most important artists of our time, her works command prices which would be well beyond our acquisitions budget. We are all delighted that Louise’s generosity will allow the Irish public to enjoy her work on an ongoing basis. We hope to install the sculpture in the West Wing Galleries by the end of the year, alongside other newly-acquired works, such as James Coleman’s filmwork, Initials. The gift is also a tribute to the work of the Museum’s Exhibitions Department, which has managed to tour IMMA shows to Britain, Italy, Spain, Iceland and the US in the past year, and has further tours scheduled to Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal and the US over the coming months. The Bourgeois piece is the latest in a series of important acquisitions of sculptures by Michael Craig-Martin, Gary Hume, Cristina Iglesias and Alice Maher.”

Born in Paris in 1911, during the heyday of Cubism, Louise Bourgeois moved to New York in 1938, where she continues to live and work. Her career has spanned seven decades and several artistic movements, including  Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, all of which she engaged with, but none of which adequately contain or describe her work. Over this time she has built up a complex and beguiling body of work, primarily concerned with sculpture – created from an extraordinary array of materials – but also including drawing, painting, printmaking and installation. Autobiography and identity have been important influences on her practice, as have her family connections with furniture and tapestry making, still evident in her work. Bourgeois was the first woman artist to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One of her most celebrated projects was I Do, I Undo, I Redo, an installation comprising three nine-metre-high steel towers which she was commissioned to create for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern to mark the opening of that museum in 2000.

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

17 May 2005

An exhibition of works from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection opens to the public on Saturday 28 May 2005 at St Caimin’s Church of Ireland, Mountshannon, Co Clare, as part of the Iniscealtra Festival of the Arts. Uisce takes its theme from the Festival, which this year focuses on water, and includes works by well-known Irish and international artists, such as Hamish Fulton, Lawrence Weiner, Mary Lohan and Brian Maguire. A selection of individual works from the Collection will also be placed in four venues in Scariff, Co Clare.

The works in the exhibition, selected by the Iniscealtra Festival, represent many diverse interpretations of the central theme in a wide variety of media. 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.  As artist-in-residence in State prisons, Maguire sees himself as much an outsider as the inmates with whom he works.  His Expressionistic painting brings the hidden corners of the individual’s experience to our attention with a raw energy and psychological power. The artist states: “All my pictures come from a need to accept reality as I find it.  But they are pictures.  I spend a lot of time trying to make them coherent in a formal sense, to make them beautiful – beautiful to me, maybe not to others”. Liffey Suicides effectively shows the artist’s ability to demonstrate the distances that separate us, by choosing to paint his picture from the darkness of the water below the bridge from which the living peer down.

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.

The sea is a central element in Mary Lohan’s landscape paintings, with its constantly changing character reflecting both sky and the surrounding land. Her work represents the restlessness of the seasons, the changing play of light and shade; that constant flux that we experience in front of nature. Yet the work on show, Donegal Bay, does not evoke a sentimental or mythical reading of nature. As the artist states: “ I start from the realisation that it’s impossible to paint a landscape. You just can’t do it, because you experience a place on so many levels and in such a complex way. So you have to paint what you see, which isn’t the same thing. And you hope that something of the feeling of the place will come across”.
 
In tandem with the exhibition, artist Nicola Henley, a member of IMMA’s Artist Panel, will facilitate workshops with local national school pupils from the East Clare area. The workshops are supported by the Department of Education and Science.

Catherine Marshall, Head of Collection, IMMA, who will be speaking at the launch of the Festival, said “IMMA has been proud to be associated with the Iniscealtra Festival each year since its commencement in 1996.  I am amazed at what a small but dedicated and imaginative team can do with such limited material resources.  The Iniscealtra Festival is a model of excellence in terms of its artistic goals and its outreach activities.”
 
The National Programme’s involvement with the Iniscealtra Festival of the Arts is one of its most successful collaborations.  The 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.
 
Catherine Marshall will give a lecture on the exhibition on Saturday 28 May at 2.30pm.
 
Uisce continues until 6 June 2005 at St Caimin’s Church, Mountshannon, Co Clare, and at four venues in Scariff, Co Clare – the Medical Centre, the Bank of Ireland, the Credit Union and Loughnane & Co.  The work produced by the national school pupils with Nicola Henley will be exhibited at the Community Centre, Mountshannon, Co Clare, until 6 June.

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

16 May 2005

The first large-scale exhibition in this country of the work of the internationally-acclaimed Irish artist Dorothy Cross opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 3 June 2005. The exhibition, entitled simply Dorothy Cross, comprises more than 40 works, including sculpture, installation, performance, photography and film, and covers the period from the late 1980s to date. A number of Cross’s iconic sculptures, such as, Amazon, 1988, and Virgin Shroud, 1993, are included alongside some of her best-known films, among them Eyemaker, 2000, and Jellyfish Lake, 2002. The exhibition is presented in association with THE IRISH TIMES.

In his foreword to the catalogue IMMA Director, Enrique Juncosa, the curator of the exhibition, describes Cross’s art as “a poetic amalgamation of found and constructed objects; sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing, always intellectually stimulating and physically arresting”. The exhibition includes a key work from the 1980s, when Cross first came to public attention with a series of witty and inventive works in a variety of media exploring contemporary sexual and political mores. Shark Lady in a Ball Dress, 1988, brings together many of the elements central to Cross’s past and present work. The shark’s accentuated breasts and woven bronze dress serve to undermine its usual status as an archetype of aggression, while its upright stance has clear phallic undertones.

In the 1990s much of Cross’s work took the form of an extended series of sculptures using cured cowhide or stuffed snakes, again drawing on the symbolic associations of these materials to powerful effect. In one of the best-known of these works, Virgin Shroud, now in the Tate Collection, a life-size cowl – made using cow hide and her grandmother’s wedding veil – mimicks the form of a traditional statue of the Virgin Mary, its crown formed by four udders. Shuttlecock, 1993, Rugby Ball, 1994, and Croquet, 1994, all employ the same combination of unlikely subject matter and material. Another strand of Cross’s work in this period was her exploration of found or disused structures and their contents. Bible, 1995, makes use of an illustrated bible discovered in her family’s attic and retained until a use presented itself. In this case the artist carefully drilled an inch-and-a-half hole through the entire book. The fortuitous appearance of the hole in the quaint Victorian images providing a very contemporary comment on religious iconography in a modern secular society.

More recently, Cross has devoted much of her time to developing large-scale public events and projects, most notably in Ghostship, 1998, chosen for the prestigious Nissan Art Project, organised by the Irish Museum of Modern Art. This homage to the lightships which once encircled the Irish coast, took the form of a ship covered in luminous paint, which faded and glowed creating a breathtaking spectacle in Dublin Bay, and drawed large crowds of on-lookers for a three-week period in 1998. Among the films in the exhibition is Stabat Mater, 2005, documenting an event which took place in a disused slate quarry – now a Marian grotto – on Valentia Island, off the coast of Co Kerry, in 2004. Using the proscenium arch of the quarried cave, Cross produced with Opera Theatre Company a performance of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. As the music came to an end, it was replaced by the roar of industry accompanied by video images of the trinity that Cross had brought together in the work – nature, industry and religion.

Commenting on the exhibition Enrique Juncosa said, “We are delighted to present a comprehensive overview of this leading Irish artist’s work at IMMA, particularly given her long and successful association with the Museum, from early acquisitions to our Collection and the memorable Ghostship to her participation in the important Irish Art Now exhibition. The Dorothy Cross exhibition forms part of an important strand of programming at IMMA that aims to produce defining mid-term retrospectives of Irish artists of international repute. This series has already included shows by Kathy Prendergast and Willie Doherty.”

Talk
Dorothy Cross will give a talk on her work in the Lecture Room at IMMA at 7.00pm on Tuesday 6 September 2005. 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].

A large publication with a foreword by Enrique Juncosa and essays by Marina Warner, writer and critic, Ralph Rugoff, Director, CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, and Patrick T Murphy, Director, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, accompanies the exhibition. It is published in association with Charta, Milan (price €36.00).

Dorothy Cross continues at IMMA until 11 September 2005. Admission is free.

Selected works from the exhibition will travel to CAC, Centro de Arte Contemporãneo, Malaga, Spain.

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

For further information please contact Patrice Molloy or Daniela Sabatini at Tel: +353 1 612 9900: Email: [email protected].

12 May 2005

A major exhibition from the Museum’s own Collection has just gone on show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Eye of the Storm spans the years from the 1940s to date, covering the entire period from which the Museum collects work. Comprising 68 works, mainly by artists with considerable reputations, it presents a wide range of media, including painting, installation, sculpture, film and photography. A number of new acquisitions are shown, including works by Hughie O’Donoghue and Sean Scully, acquired through the Section 1003 Heritage Donation Scheme.  The exhibition takes its name from a painting by the distinguished Irish-born painter Michael Craig-Martin, acquired for the Collection earlier this year.

Eye of the Storm does not focus on any particular subject or theme, but rather on the Collection itself, demonstrating its depth and variety and the manner in which it has developed since the Museum’s inception in 1991. A prime mover in that development and one of the Museum’s most important benefactors, the late Gordon Lambert, is remembered in Robert Ballagh’s Portrait of Gordon Lambert, which is shown alongside two other works by the same artist, also commissioned by Gordon Lambert.

The exhibition begins in the Ground Floor Galleries – named in honour of Gordon Lambert – with some of the earliest works in the Collection. These include works ranging in style from expressionistic to surrealist to cubist by Patrick Collins, Mainie Jellett, Colin Middleton, Jack B Yeats and others; abstract paintings by artists such as Josef Albers, Cecil King and William Scott, and more gestural works by Tony O’Malley and Richard Gorman.

In the First Floor Galleries, while some spaces are dedicated to individual artists, such as Charles Brady, Michael Craig-Martin and Neil Jordan, most are structured around groupings of works by different artists. The largest display comprises paintings by mainly Irish artists who came to prominence in the 1970s and ‘80s, including Barrie Cooke, Felim Egan, Ciarán Lennon, Anne Madden, Stephen McKenna, Patrick Scott, Sean Scully and Camille Souter. The exhibition also highlights the international aspect of the Collection with works by Thomas Ruff and Ulrich Rueckriem (Germany), Vik Muniz (Brazil), Gilbert & George (UK and Italy), Gary Hume and Craigie Horsfield (UK), Joseph Kosuth (USA) and Juan Uslé (Spain).

The exhibition is curated by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, and Marguerite O’Molloy, Assistant Curator: Collection, IMMA. A full-colour publication on the Museum’s Collection will be published in July 2005. With essays by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, and Catherine Marshall, Senior Curator: Collection, IMMA, it will feature some 180 works from the Collection.

Eye of the Storm continues until 31 October 2005 (in the Gordon Lambert Galleries) and 6 November 2005 (in the First Floor Galleries).

Admission is free.

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

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

   
4 May 2005

An exhibition from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s own Collection, selected by the writer and former chief critic of The Irish Times Brian Fallon, opens at Siopa na BhFíodóirí, Dingle, Co Kerry on Monday 2 May 2005 as part of the Féile na Bealtaine Festival. Against the Tide – I gcoinne na Taoide – A personal view comprises paintings, prints and sculpture through which the artists concerned had a message to communicate to a wider public. Featured in this exhibition are works by Irish and international artists such as Jean Arp, Basil Blackshaw, Patrick Caulfield, Barrie Cooke and Brian Maguire amongst others. The Museum has a long-standing relationship with Féile na Bealtaine lending works from the Collection through the National Programme for the last six years.
 
Basil Blackshaw is one of the foremost Northern Irish painters of his generation. While his post-Expressionist treatment of the Northern Irish landscape has characterized his work throughout his career, the work on show in this exhibition, Anna on a Sofa, is not typical of Blackshaw’s work. It is more minimalist in composition and the canvas has been less exploited in terms of colour and composition than is characteristic of Blackshaw’s style. However, the artist’s tendency to balance his paintings with horizontal and vertical markings is a strong feature in this work where the vertical figure of Anna is balanced against the horizontal lines of the sofa.

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.  As artist-in-residence in State prisons, Maguire sees himself as much an outsider as the inmates with whom he works.  His Expressionistic painting brings the hidden corners of the individual’s experience to our attention with a raw energy and psychological power. The artist states: “All my pictures come from a need to accept reality as I find it.  But they are pictures.  I spend a lot of time trying to make them coherent in a formal sense, to make them beautiful – beautiful to me, maybe not to others”. New York City (Mother Heater) effectively shows the artist’s ability to demonstrate the distances that separate us in an urban landscape.
 
Electric Elk  by the English-born artist Barrie Cooke represents the artist’s concern with nature, fertility, growth and decay. For Cooke the elk is a powerful symbol of pre-civilised consciousness. 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. The elk, yielded up by the bog, demonstrates the process of perpetual interchange that occurs in life which Cooke believes forces us into a confrontation with what is real.   
 
Commenting on the exhibition Brian Fallon, curator of the exhibition, said: “This exhibition, which I was asked to select, has no central theme, nor does it aim to provide anything in particular, aesthetically or polemically.  I have simply chosen, from the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, a number of works which seem to communicate something genuine to the viewer and in which the artists concerned had something of their own to say.”

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.

Gallery Talks
On Tuesday 3 May at 11.00am Brian Fallon will give a gallery talk in the exhibition.
On Tuesday 3 May at 11.30am Catherine Marshall will discuss the exhibition.
 
A catalogue, with a text by Brian Fallon, accompanies the exhibition.
 
Against the Tide – I gcoinne na Taoide – A personal view  continues until 8 May 2005.
 
Admission is free.

For further info and colour and black and white images please contact Patrice Molloy at Tel: +353 1 612 9900, Fax: +353 1 612 9999, Email: [email protected]

19 April 2005

An exhibition marking the culmination of a collaboration involving IMMA’s National Programme, Ceardlann na gCroisbhealach, Falcarragh, Co Donegal and the transition year students of Pobailscoil Cloich Cheannfhaola, opens to the public at Ceardlann na gCroisbhealach on Saturday 30 April 2005. Ath Rí Rá, selected from the IMMA Collection by the students, represents a celebration of a creative and richly collaborative process for all partners and embodies the spirit and participative objectives of the National Programme.

The project was designed to encourage the students to increase and develop their individual abilities while collaborating with their classmates in a constructive and productive way.  There are two elements to the project. The first was to introduce the students to contemporary visual art and exhibition venues by establishing a relationship with IMMA and the opportunity to explore its national Collection. After visiting the Museum the students set about examining the Collection and selected a number of artworks to include in the exhibition. Secondly, the students identified a number of works that they would re-interpret themselves – creating their own work in response to the original artwork.

The exhibition includes The Gate by Deborah Brown which draws on two sources of inspiration, both dealing with human freedom. The first is suggested by Mahler’s cycle Des Knaben Wonderhor which features a man imprisoned in his cell while his thoughts remain free. In his thoughts he goes up into the mountains and knocks on the door of his lover, who is symbolised in The Gate by an open door frame. The second source for this work lies in the Irish legend of the Merrow which tells the story of a fisherman and his encounter with a Merrow, or man of the sea. The Merrow and the fisherman go to the bottom of the sea where the fisherman sees the souls of drowned sailors trapped and succeeds in setting them free. 

Willie Doherty’s Protecting / Invading is concerned with the way images disseminated through mass media manipulate our interpretations of events and people, particularly in the construction of notions of ethnic or national identity. Doherty’s themes and subjects are drawn from his own local experience of his native Derry. He does not so much seek to present a more authentic representation of the political landscape, but to examine the "question of authenticity".

Tipperary-born Alice Maher, works 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.

Also included in the exhibition are a number of artworks created by the students themselves in response to a number of works from the IMMA Collection including Stack by Kathy Prendergast, Vong Phaophanit’s Neon Rice Field, the Head Series by Enrico Baj and Alice Maher’s Berry Dress.

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.

This project was made possible with the kind support of Údarás na Gaeltachta. 

Ath Rí Rá continues until 28 May 2005.

Venue:  An Gailearaí,
              Ceardlann na gCroisbhealach,
              Falcarragh,
              Co Donegal,
              Tel: 074 9165594

Opening times: Tuesday – Friday 10.00am – 5.00pm
                          Saturday               2.00pm – 5.00pm
 
Admission is free.

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

11 April 2005

A series of five lectures on the development of contemporary music by the celebrated composer and pianist Kevin Volans begins at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 21 April 2005. The series, which continues until 5 May, will deal with European music in the 1950s and ‘80s, post-modernism in European music and the works of the renowned German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. In addition, a special guest lecture on American music in the 1950s will be given by the composer Christian Wolff, a leading authority on that period, on Sunday 15 May.

The series will also explore links between the visual arts and music, a particularly relevant topic given the close relationship between these two art forms in the work of Laurie Anderson, whose exhibition continues at IMMA until 2 May. Other forms of artistic expression, including contemporary music, have also played an important part in the career of Jasper Johns, whose work was shown at the Museum earlier in the year.

Kevin Volans has been described, by Village Voice, as “one of the planet’s most distinctive and unpredictable voices”. Born in South Africa in 1949, he studied in Cologne with Karlheinz Stockhausen and later became his teaching assistant. In the mid-1970s his work became associated with the New Simplicity movement – the beginnings of post-modernism in music. In 1979 he embarked on a series of works based on African compositional techniques, which quickly established him as a distinctive voice on the European new music scene. In 1986 he began a productive collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. Their recordings of his White Man Sleeps and Pieces of Africa broke all records for string quartet disc sales.

Volans has also written for dance, collaborating with Siobhan Davies, Jonathan Burrows and others. Latterly, he has turned his attention to writing for orchestra and to collaborating with visual artists and has recently completed a piece with the South African artist William Kentridge. In 2004 he received the Martin Toonder Award from the Arts Council. He has lived in Ireland since 1986.

The lectures are aimed at music professionals, students, contemporary music enthusiasts and a wider public. They will take place on 21, 27 and 28 April and on 4 and 5 May. Four of the lectures (21 and 27 April and 4 and 5 May) will run from 7.00 to 8.30pm. The lecture on 28 April, entitled An Analysis of a Stockhausen Piece will run from 7.00 to 9.30pm – see schedule attached.

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].

For further press information please contact Patrice Molloy at  tel: +353 1 612 9922; email: [email protected]

31 March 2005

An exhibition of eight works by the younger-generation Dutch artist Mark Manders opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 16 March 2005. Mark Manders: Parallel Occurrence comprises sculptures, drawings and installations, several of which have been created specifically in response to the Museum’s historic location at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. It includes one of Manders’ defining works Inhabited for a Survey, (First Floor Plan from Self Portrait of a Building), 1986, part of a fictional architectural plan, Self Portrait of a Building, which has had a central place in his work since he began his career as an artist at the age of eighteen.

Inhabited for a Survey presents the floor plan of a building, outlined on the gallery floor using pencils, crayons, markers and other materials. Part of a perpetually-changing, unrealised whole, which evolves further with each manifestation, the fictional building is designed to function as a portrait of a fictional persona, who shares the artist’s name and is described by him as neurotic and poetic in equal parts.  Manders describes this alter ego as “a character that lives in a logically designed and constructed world, which consists of thoughts that are halted or congealed at their moment of greatest intensity. He is someone who disappears into his actions. He lives in a building that we continually abandon; the building is uninhabited”

This strange world is also populated by a number of other objects linked in a seemingly off-hand manner by their position in a particular space or their relationship to one another, In Cupboard with Newspapers, 2005, we see newspapers stacked in the alcoves of the gallery space, the title of the piece commandeering the gallery space itself as a element in the work. In Fox/Mouse/Belt, 1992, instead of the mouse having been eaten by the fox, as we might expect, it is strapped to its side, as they lie on the gallery floor united in death as in life. Both animals are frozen in the act of jumping, an action strangely at odds with death-like stillness of the piece.

The aim in all this is not to create a straightforward narrative description of an event, place or person, but rather to explore distinctions between nameable things and things we cannot name, between thoughts and objects. Manders states: “My work is an ode to the fictional, ‘as if’ way of thinking. I believe it’s important that people deal with fiction as if it were reality, while understanding that it’s fiction”.

Mark Manders was born in Volkel in the Netherlands in 1968 and began his career as an artist in 1986. He has had solo shows at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 2000; the Drawing Center, New York, in 2000, and the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden Baden in 1998, among others. He has participated in many group exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2002; Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany in 2002; Sonsbeck 9, Arnhem in 2001; the Venice Biennale in 1992 and 2001, and the São Paulo Biennial in 1999.  He will also be showing at the Berkeley Art Museum, California later this year. He lives and works in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

Mark Manders: Parallel Occurance is curated by Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions at IMMA. It continues until 29 May 2005. Admission is free.

The exhibition is realised with the financial support of the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam.

A publication, with essays by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Curator of Contemporary Art, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Marta Kuzma, Curator of Manifesta 5, and Rachael Thomas, accompanies the exhibition (price €25.00).

Artists’ Work Programme
On the evening of the private view for the exhibition, Tuesday 15 March, the artists’ studios at IMMA will remain open from 5:30pm to 7:00pm. The six artists currently involved in the programme will be available in their studios to discuss their current practices and would very much welcome visits from those interested in finding out more about their work and work processes. 

Opening hours:  Tuesday to Saturday 10.00am-5.30pm
                            Sundays and Bank Holidays 12 noon- 5.30pm
                            Closed  Mondays and 25 March

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

 
10 March 2005                                                                 

The first exhibition in Ireland of the work of the New York-based painter Fred Tomaselli opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 9 March 2005. Fred Tomaselli: Monsters of Paradise comprises some 15 recent works, which employ a dazzling array of materials to create rich and beautiful paintings revealing an intensely personal vision of the world. Most have been made since 2002 and show the artist’s greater emphasis on combining the figurative with the abstract that dates from that period.

Drawing on influences from Indian miniatures to punk rock, Tomaselli’s collaged paintings are remarkable compendia of natural and unnatural worlds. They are characterised by the use of unorthodox materials, such as over-the-counter medicines, prescription pills, herbal remedies and psychoactive plants, creating parallels between the mind-altering properties of these substances and the long-standing idea of painting as a window on another reality. Real pills sit alongside painted pills, while cut-out photographs of flowers, leaves and insects jostle for attention with their carefully-pressed and preserved real-life counterparts. His more recent works extend this range of ingredients to whole figures crafted from magazine cut-outs of animal and human body parts, resulting in scenes in which flayed figures, consisting only of flesh and veins, inhabit a surreal, vividly-patterned cosmos.

In Field Guides, 2003, we see a figure hoeing mushrooms pursued by a cloud of butterflies. The handle of his hoe is made from several smaller hoes and, although rogue elements do appear throughout his body, his hands are made of hands and his feet of feet. Airborne Event, 2003, features a female form whose head has mutated into a hexagon of tightly-packed lips, noses and eyes, this in turn being surrounded by mosaic-like patterns of flowers, birds and mushrooms. Tomaselli sees his vast range of materials as interchangeable, “all capable of manipulating reality in perpetual, hazardless potentiality. It is my ultimate aim to seduce and transport the viewer into the space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of the seduction”.

Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1956, Fred Tomaselli grew up so close to Disneyland that, as he has described it, “I could sit on my roof and watch Tinkerbell fly through the night sky”. Fascinated by artifice, he plunged into the prevailing counter culture of 1970s Los Angeles before moving to New York in 1985, where he continues to live and work. Solo exhibitions have included the Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, New York; the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. His work has featured in group exhibition worldwide, including at the 2004 Whitney Biennial; the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; the 2002 Liverpool Biennial and the 2001 Berlin Biennial. His works are held by a number of major American museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, and in many private collections.

Monsters of Paradise is a touring exhibition, organised by the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, where it was shown in 2004. It has also been shown at Domus Atrium, Salamanca, Spain, and will visit the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, following its showing at IMMA.

Discussion

On Tuesday 8 March at 4.30pm Fred Tomaselli will discuss his work in conversation with Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions at IMMA. 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].

A publication, produced by the Fruitmarket Gallery in association with James Cohan Gallery, New York, and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London, accompanies the exhibition.

The exhibition continues until 19 June 2005. Admission is free.

Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday 10.00am – 5.30pm

                          Sundays and Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm

                          Closed Mondays and 25 March

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

1 March 2005