A major international symposium on curating contemporary art in public museums and galleries will be held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, from 10 to 12 November 2004.  Curating Now, one of the most important events of its kind ever staged in Ireland, will bring together ten leading international curators, who together represent a vast range of experience across all aspects of the curator’s role.

The speakers, from Europe, North and South America and Japan, will give illustrated presentations on their, often diverse, curatorial practice.  Topics will include programming, acquisitions and purchasing policies, as they relate to artists, arts practice and the audience for art.  They will also set out the context in which their institutions operate – nationally and internationally, and in terms of their relationships with other museums and galleries and general global trends. 

The symposium is aimed at curators, artists, critics, arts administrators and students, and anyone interested in the subject of curating contemporary art.

Curating Now will be chaired by IMMA’s Director, Enrique Juncosa.  The speakers are:
Daniel Birnbaum, Director, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main,
Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel, London,
Paolo Colombo, Curator, MAXXI, Museo Nazionale delle arti del XXI Secolo, Rome,
Douglas Fogle, Curator Visual Arts, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
Rachael Thomas, Acting Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin,
Ivo Mesquita, Curator, Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paolo,
Fumio Nanjo, Deputy Director, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo,
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Curator of Contemporary Art, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris,
Kevin Power, Deputy Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and
James Rondeau, Curator for Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Commenting on his reasons for initiating the symposium, Enrique Juncosa said: "Museums have become in recent years major cultural players in our societies.  A debate about their different policies is thus topical and relevant.  Also by inviting highly influential curators from different countries to Ireland we hope to inform them about the Irish art scene."

The fee for the symposium is €150.00, concession €130.00 (students, OAPs, unwaged).  In addition to the presentations, this includes a wine reception, tea/coffee and light lunch at IMMA over two days and the symposium pack.

Curating Now is supported by the Arts Council, the Morrison Hotel, CIRCA Art Magazine, the French Embassy, the Italian Cultural Institute and Dublin Bus.

Contact details for bookings
Aoife Ruane, Assistant Curator: Education & Community Programmes
Irish Museum of Modern Art
Royal Hospital
Military Road
Kilmainham
Dublin 8
Ireland
Tel +353-1-6129900 Fax +353-1-612 9999
Email [email protected]  Website  www.imma.ie

Direct Line Aoife Ruane Tel +353-1-6129913
Email [email protected]

Brochure with biographic details of speakers and other information attached.

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

15 July 2004

An exhibition based on three different projects undertaken by the Irish Museum of Modern Art with teachers, artists, and children opens to the public at IMMA on Tuesday 20 July.  The exhibition, entitled Artformations, is organised by the Museum’s Education and Community Department as part of its remit of engaging with the primary school, community and education sectors.
 
Artformations includes work resulting from three specific projects, in which the Museum took a leading role, both as an active participant and instigator of projects as well as a resource used independently by arts organisations and teachers.  The first, Breaking the Cycle, which ran in several schools from 1997 to 2000, was undertaken as part of collaboration with the Department of Education and Science, which also co-funded the project.  The exhibition includes children’s work from classroom sessions with teachers and artists from St Thomas’s Junior National School in Jobstown, Tallaght, which grew from long-term contact with artists and artworks at IMMA.
 
The second project included in the exhibition is Artformations, from which the exhibition takes its title, an action research project with the Abbey Theatre and the Arts Council.  This project explored the relationship between writing and fabric and fibre with the artist Lucinda Jacob.  During a short-term residency, the artist worked alongside two teachers and two groups of primary school children from the North Dublin National School Project and St Killian’s Senior National School, Tallaght.  The residency was followed by a visit to the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time at IMMA and to Argentinian artist Gabriel Baggio’s studio when he was participating on the Museum’s Artists’ Work Programme.
 
The third project, Creativity in the Classroom, an initiative funded by the Department of Education and Science, has been running in six schools from the Canal Communities Partnership area since 1997.  Situated in the locality of the Museum, the project used IMMA as a resource for both the teachers and children.  Artists worked on 10-week programmes with each class, which were planned with each teacher, and included classroom-based work as well as visits to a number of sites, including the Museum.
 
Although the children’s ages and project timelines vary greatly in each project there are connecting themes, such as the extraordinary use of materials.  These range from watercolours and charcoal drawings, created by children from St Thomas’s Junior National School, to artwork made from fabric, fibre and stitching in both St Killian’s Senior National School and the North Dublin National School Project, to coloured pastel work from the children participating in Creativity in the Classroom.   
 
The staging of an exhibition based on this work serves to underline the importance which the Museum places on making the outcomes of such projects available to a wider public.  This policy has been endorsed by the level of interest in such projects shown both by fellow museum professionals within Ireland and internationally, and by the general gallery going public.      
 
Commenting on the exhibition, Helen O’Donoghue, Head of Education and Community Programmes at IMMA, said: "In 1999 the revised Primary School Curriculum was implemented and visual arts was one of the first subject areas to be introduced.  Galleries and museums are a critical factor in ensuring that teachers and children have ongoing access to and engagement with a full range of excellent and innovative artwork and artists.  IMMA’s potential as a resource to a broad range of schools has been extended and enhanced as a result of working in close co-operation with both the Department of Education and Science and the Arts Council.  Ongoing collaboration with our sister institution the Abbey Theatre has facilitated IMMA in extending the breath of our work and enabled us to bring children, through their teachers, into contact with artwork and artists of the highest quality."
 
A review of the IMMA/Breaking the Cycle initiative, carried out by Eibhlin Campbell and Anne Gallagher, entitled Red Lines between My Fingers is available (price €18.00).  This publication will be launched at a Seminar for artists, teachers and educators taking place from 24 – 25 September 2004. 
 
Artformations continues until 10 October 2004.
 
Admission is free.
 
Opening Hours : 
Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun and Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Closed Mondays
 
For further information and colour and black and white images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel : + 353 1 612 9900, Fax : +353 1 612 9999, email : [email protected]
 
9 July 2004  

An exhibition of some 37 works from IMMA’s Collection examining the diverse ways in which artists respond to the landscape opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday 27 April 2004.  Bearings: Landscapes from the IMMA Collection looks at how artists engage with the landscape, addressing timeless, fundamental questions about man’s place in the world.

Bearings looks at the way in which artists adapt their practice to engage with the changing landscape around them, echoing how building, exploration and cultivation alter our surroundings.  As artists attempt to find their bearings in this rapidly-changing environment they are driven to challenging traditional ways of interpreting and framing the landscape.
The Laotian-born artist Vong Phaophanit intergrates traditional methods of farming with signs of urbanisation in the remarkable installation Neon Rice Field.  In this work the contours of a ploughed field are created using eight tonnes of loose, long-grain rice illuminated from within by red neon lighting.  Other urban landscapes are explored in works by artists Oliver Comerford, whose recently acquired painting Out Here III depicts a night-time scene on the peripherary of the city, and Beat Klein and Hendrijke Kuhne, whose installation Property comments on how our cities expand at an alarming rate, encroaching on the countryside.

Hamish Fulton, Denis Oppenheim and Richard Long all engage very directly with the earth as part of the process of making their artworks; their activities in the landscape being essential to the finished work.  Human presence in the landscape is also dealt with in paintings by Peter Doig, Eithne Jordan, Dan O’Neill and Jack B Yeats, while political issues of land ownership, colonization, mapping and borders are addressed by Willie Doherty, Terry Atkinson and Kathy Prendergast.

Paintings of land and sea by Sean Fingleton present a dramatic reading of nature and its elemental forces, while works by Sean Scully and Patrick Scott look to the essence of the landscape in their more abstract depictions. Lawrence Weiner’s text work from the Museum’s Collection (…) WATER & SAND + STICKS & STONES (…) will be installed in a new configuration as part of the exhibition.

The exhibition is curated by Marguerite O’Molloy, Assistant Curator: Collection at IMMA.

Bearings continues until 17 October 2004. 

Admission is free.

An exhibition guide accompanies the exhibition (price €3.00).

Opening hours:  
Tue – Sat   10.00am – 5.30pm, Sun and Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Mondays, 30 April, 1 & 2 May  Closed
 
For further information and colour and black and white images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy at Tel : +353 1 612 9900, Fax : +353 1 612 9999,  Email : [email protected]

26 April 2004

An exhibition featuring an interactive digital model allowing a virtual exploration of the former home of Osama bin Laden opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 10 December 2003.  The model is one of six works by British artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell on show in Langlands & Bell: The House of Osama Bin Laden over the next two months.  All of the works are the result of a two-week visit to Afghanistan in October 2002 on a research commission for the Imperial War Museum, London.

Using a still and a digital video camera, Langlands & Bell recorded visits to ISAF HQ (the multi-national task force in Kabul led by the Turks at that time), the American airbase at Bagram, a murder trial at the Supreme Court in Kabul, the site of the statues of Buddha at Bamyan that were destroyed by the Taliban, and, after a long and dangerous journey, the former home of Osama bin Laden at Daruntah, west of Jalalabad, where he lived for a brief period in the late 1990s.

In The House of Osama Bin Laden, 2002, viewers can navigate through whitewashed rooms, store cupboards and bunkers and even gaze out of the windows at the surrounding countryside.  While bearing testimony to bin Laden’s absence, it also serves as a reminder of his forbidding presence in the Wests’ collective consciousness.

On arriving in Afghanistan Langlands & Bell were immediately struck by the large number of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations), UN and other donor agencies operating in the country and began taking photographs of the signs they place in the streets to advertise their presence.  These images are being shown as a slide sequence in the exhibitions alongside an animated film using the acronyms of the NGOs in a series of graphic templates.

Zardad’s Dog (2003) is a short film edited from live footage that the artists shot at the trial of a notorious war commander at the Supreme Court in Kabul.  In this extraordinary piece, justice does battle with evil in scenes that seem to have come straight from Biblical times.

Ben Langlands (born London 1955) and Nikki Bell (born London 1959) have been collaborating since 1978, and exhibiting internationally since the early 1980s.  Based in London, they create works which explore the complex web of relationships linking people and architecture.
Langlands & Bell examine our experience of architecture, and our primarily urban culture, on many different levels, exploring the places and structures we inhabit, and the routes that penetrate and link them.  Their work looks at real buildings and the ways we think about them, revealing their histories and associated human activity.

Major exhibitions of the work of Langlands & Bell include: Serpentine Gallery, London, 1996; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, 1996; Architecture as Metaphor, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1997; Venice Biennale, 1997; Sensation, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1997; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 1998 and Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1999; Frozen Sky, Centre for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan, 1997; TN Probe, Tokyo, 1998; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 1998; Yale Center for British Art, New Have CT., US, 1999; The Central House of The Artist Moscow 2000; Turner Studio Residency Exhibition, Petworth House, Petworth, UK, 2002; The House of Osama bin Laden, Imperial War Museum, London, 2003; Henry Urbach Architecture, New York.

The exhibition is commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, London, and is curated by Angela Weight, its Keeper of the Department of Arts.  It is organised in collaboration with IMMA.

An exhibition of large-format photographs by Belfast-born artist Paul Seawright created in response to his recent travels in Afghanistan, also commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, has been on show at IMMA from 18 September to 30 November 2003.

Artists’ Talk
Wednesday 10 December at 11.30am.
Langlands & Bell will discuss the works in the exhibition.
East Ground Floor Galleries at IMMA.
Booking is essential as space is limited.
Tel: 01-612 9948; Email: [email protected]

The exhibition continues until 8 February 2004.
 
Admission is free.

Opening hours:  Tue – Sat   10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun and Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
and 27, 28, 30 and 31 Dec
Mondays and 24 – 26 Dec Closed 

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

20 November 2003

An exhibition of large-format photographs by the Belfast-born artist Paul Seawright, created in response to recent travels in Afghanistan, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 18 September 2003. In June 2002, Seawright was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, London, to travel to Afghanistan to investigate landscapes that had been contaminated with exploded ordinance and mines. The twelve works in Paul Seawright: hidden are his response to that experience.

Seawright deliberately avoids the more familiar, exotic vision of Afghanistan, as the spectacle of ruins portrayed by the media. His photographs of bleached desert landscapes and bomb-damaged buildings are sparse and understated, silent and depopulated; less concerned with the visible scars of war than the hidden malevolence of its terrain. Seawright’s response to these heavily mined desert landscapes draws upon, extends and reworks the distinctive aesthetic he has established through earlier photographs of contested, politically contaminated landscapes made first within his home city of Belfast and more recently on the fringes of a number of European cities. In one of the catalogue essays Mark Durden, Reader in the History and Theory of Photography, University of Derby, draws parallels with Seawright’s Sectarian Murder series, made in Belfast in the late 1980s: “One finds a similar pictorial innocence, a contradictory sense of calm and normality in the image. One also finds the attempt to confront that which cannot be seen, the sense of an invisible threat on menace.”

Born in Belfast in 1965, Paul Seawright studied at the University of Ulster and Surrey College of Art and Design. Since first coming to international attention in the 1980s, his work has been widely exhibited throughout Europe and the USA. In 1997 he was awarded the IMMA/Glen Dimplex Artists Award. He lives and works in Newport, Wales, where he is Professor and Director of the Centre for Photographic Research.

Paul Seawright: hidden is an Imperial War Museum commissioned exhibition and is curated by Angela Weight, its Keeper of the Department of Art. The exhibition tour is organised in collaboration with the ffotogallery, Llanduno, Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Cardiff, and IMMA. Paul Seawright’s visit to Afghanistan was made possible with assistance from Landmine Action, the HALO Trust and the United Nations.

On Thursday 18 September at 11.30am, in the Ground Floor Galleries, Paul Seawright will discuss his exhibition and Angela Weight, Keeper of the Department of Art, Imperial War Museum, will give an introduction to the commissioning programme at the Imperial War Museum. Booking essential on tel: 01-6129948; email [email protected].

A fully-illustrated catalogue, published by the Imperial War Museum, with essays by Mark Durden and John Stathatos, artist and writer, accompanies the exhibition (price €24.00).

The exhibition continues until 30 November 2003.

Admission is free.

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun and Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Closed Mondays

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

20 August 2003

An exhibition of works from the Irish Museum of Modern Art Collection opens to the public on Monday 1 September 2003 at Tallaght Community Arts Centre, as part of a collaborative exhibition between Tallaght Community Arts Centre and IMMA’s National Programme. ‘Scraping the Surface…’ includes drawings and sculpture by the Belfast-born artist John Kindness.

The title of the exhibition is taken from one of the works included in the exhibition, ‘Scraping the surface…’. This work was part of a series which Kindness worked on while he was based in New York using ‘treasures’ which he found in the city. Kindness is interested in the detritus of human life and in this work he has etched a familiar New York Taxi Cab door, which he found lying abandoned in the street. The familiar yellow paint of the door is scraped away and the scratched metal is then darkened with a metal oxide resulting in a black image on a yellow background – deliberately reminiscent of classical Greek attic vases.

Kindness is interested in exploring what it is we are leaving behind us, and this work with its archaeology reference suggests that the debris in the gutter will be the artefacts of the future. The subject of the work is a classical figure who crouches down to the gutter to clean up after his pair of aristocratic looking dogs but he ignores the other discarded items such as a hypodermic needle, a used condom, a disposable coffee cup and plastic fork.

Also shown in this exhibition are the works ‘Dog with Altarpiece’ and ‘A Monkey Parade’, both of which make humourous references to the culture of both communities in Northern Ireland. ‘A Monkey Parade’ shows a monkey riding a white horse, symbolic of the white horse historically associated with King William of Orange. The monkey, however, is seated back to front on the horse and is blindfolded. Dog with Altarpiece portrays a bulldog with a leather studded collar imitating the attire of a Catholic priest while another dog is shown crucified on a cross in the background. The image of the dog is used again in the sculpture ‘Big School Dog’. The dog strikes a menacing pose with penetrating red glass eyes while the surface of the dog takes on the role of a school blackboard with school lessons written onto its surface in chalk, harking back to Kindness’ school days in Belfast.

Throughout his career, Kindness has used traditional methods of working such as mosaic and fresco painting and enjoys the idea of exploring contemporary themes in traditional media. He has always wanted to engage rather than alienate his viewer and consciously creates art which has both an appealing aesthetic to draw the viewer in and a strong narrative to engage the viewer further. Another tool he uses to engage the viewer is the wit and ironic humour ever present in his work, even when dealing with such emotive issues as the political situation in Northern Ireland.

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.

A series of workshops and gallery talks will be held alongside the exhibition as part of the Branching Out project. Branching Out is a programme designed by the Irish Museum of Modern Art and National Irish Bank to bring the visual arts to the community and provide opportunities for the community to get involved.

Scraping the Surface… continues until 10 October 2003 at the Tallaght Community Arts Centre, Unit 1, Village Square, Tallaght, Co Dublin.

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

19 August 2003

The first solo exhibition in Ireland of the work of the widely-praised British artist Paul Morrison opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 6 August. haematoxlyon, takes its title from the botanical term for a type of tree known for its blood-red wood. The title illustrates Morrison’s practice of drawing on both botanical imagery from popular and classical sources and quasi-scientific references for his breathtaking, highly-stylised compositions.

The exhibition comprises some 14 works including site-specific wall installations, paintings and a new video piece. All are produced by eliminating colour leaving the viewer to project their own vision onto the canvas utilizing “colour from behind the eye”. The video work introduces an additional focus on light and shadow using heavily modified footage from a variety of different sources. The scenes presented in all three media appear clearly recognisable, yet Morrison’s treatment of them somehow renders them unfamiliar, stark and unsettling. Our primordial relationship with the landscape is here manipulated and disturbed by it being drained of colour, one of its most defining characteristics, and sometimes vastly increased in size

Morrison’s landscapes are also devoid of any human presence, remaining dark and unknowable. In ‘protoplasm’, 1999, we are invited, at first glance, into an open countryside. However, certainty gives way to uncertainty as a fence blocks our path, through which a solitary tree can be seen silhouetted in white against a black sky. ‘Set’, 2001, all but overwhelms us with its distorted perspectives of a giant cartoon-like flower and tightly-spun spider’s web, while ‘feld’, 1998, draws us unconsciously into his depicted reality. Morrison’s works are concerned with the issues of growth, life and death. Not only do his extraordinarily beautiful paintings examine the heart of nature’s darkest mysteries, but also, the phenomena of life itself.

Born in Liverpool in 1966, Paul Morrison now lives and works in London. He holds a BA Fine Art from Sheffield City Polytechnic and an MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths College of Art, London. Since his first exhibition in 1996 he has shown widely throughout Europe and also in the United States, Japan, Mexico and New Zealand.

Jörg Heiser, Berlin-based Associate Editor of frieze magazine, London, will present a lecture based on landscape and abstraction in Paul Morrison’s work at 6.00pm, before the preview, on Tuesday 5 August in the Lecture Room, IMMA.

Rachael Thomas, Curator: Exhibitions at IMMA, will present a guided tour of the exhibition on Sunday 10 August at 3.00pm.

Simon Wallis, Head of Exhibitions, ICA, London, will present a lecture on the work of Paul Morrison on a later date. The talks are free, but booking is essential.

haematoxlyon continues until 5 October 2003.

Admission is free.

A publication, with essays by Jörg Heiser, Editor of frieze magazine, Berlin, and Rachael Thomas, Curator: Exhibitions at IMMA, accompanies the exhibition (price €20.00).

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun, Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Mondays Closed

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

24 July 2003

The first exhibition in Ireland of the work of the Spanish sculptor and installation artist Cristina Iglesias opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 17 July. Cristina Iglesias brings together some 20 works, created over the past 20 years, which combine traditions and techniques from sculpture, architecture, theatre, printmaking, and photography and video. Iglesias choreographs all these elements to present sensual and evocative environments featuring soaring canopies, intricate Moorish labyrinths and walls masquerading as forests.

Cristina Iglesias is an international travelling exhibition organised by Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea Porto, Portugal. It is curated by Michael Tarantino and co-produced by Whitechapel, London, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. It is supported by Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Spain, ESB International and Culture 2000. The exhibition will be officially opened by HE Mr Enrique Pastor, Ambassador of Spain on Wednesday 16 July at 6.00pm.

Cristina Iglesias is one of a generation of artists, which in the 1980s expanded the object of sculpture into the new realm of installation while, at the same time, re-engaging with the art of representation. In contrast to their Modernist predecessors, their work is primarily figurative, evoking the body, either directly or as an “absent presence”, and referring to everyday objects such as furniture, rooms and buildings.

Although part of this general movement, Iglesias employs her own very distinctive vocabularly, which draws on architectual, literary and decorative traditions that span the history of Western civilization. Using elaborate casts, curving walls and flying canopies, she creates zones of experience or rises en scène which, crucially, are activated by the viewer and interact with the spaces they occupy. As Iglesias explains: “I am interested in making pieces that are sensitive to the space they occupy, working with it to create meaning. For this reason there are motifs that tend to appear time and again because they change when you change the container.”

In ‘Vegetation Rooms’ we are drawn into a strange, Alice-in-Wonderland-like world of blind corridors, whose walls are variously decorated with casts of bamboo and eucalyptus, decaying leaves and octopus tentacles. The objects on the surface may look functional or natural, but on closer inspection, show themselves to be artificial. In ‘Jealousies’ large mesh screens, composed of small squares and diagonals reminescent of Moorish architecture, are used to form intimate chambers (in Spanish the word ‘celosia’ means a slanted shutter or a vertical blind or the emotion jealousy). The screens are further decorated with extracts from the works of modernist visionary writers like Raymond Roussel and Joris Karl Huysmans.

On Thursday 17 July at 11.30am Cristina Iglesias will discuss her work with the critic Adrian Searle, in the exhibition space. Booking is essential as space is limited (tel: 01-612 9948 or email [email protected])

A catalogue with essays by Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel, London, and Michael Tarantino and an interview with the artist accompanies the exhibition (price €35.00).

Cristina Iglesias continues until 5 October.

Admission is free.

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun, Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Mondays Closed

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

5 July 2003

An exhibition of works from the Irish Museum of Modern Art Collection opens to the public on Thursday 10 July in four branch libraries in County Cork as part of a collaborative project between County Cork Library and Arts Service and IMMA’s National Programme. If you go down for your books today combines artworks by Irish and international artists in a wide variety of media and includes a DVD projection by Alanna O’Kelly, sculpture by Dorothy Cross and prints by Albert Irvin. The exhibition will be formerly opened by councilor, Aileen Pyne, in Fermoy library on Thursday 10 July at 6.30pm.

Works in Fermoy library include, ‘Sanctuary/Wastelands’, a DVD projection by Irish artist Alanna O’Kelly. This work was inspired by a walk O’Kelly took around the town of Teampall Dumach Mhor, or Church of the great Sandbank, at Thallabhawn, Co Mayo. The site was originally a monastic settlement and was subsequently used as a burial mound during the famine. When O’Kelly first walked over the mound constant erosion over the years had worn away the surface and human skeletal remains had re-emerged alongside the new vegetation. The installation was created by juxtaposing images of the mound, the bones and the sparse signs of human habitation that remain along this strip of coast. ‘The Old Man and The Sea’, a set of ten etchings and four screenprints by Scottish artist John Bellany, can be seen in Bandon library. The works are inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ and portray man’s elemental struggle with nature. Bellany was brought up in the fishing community of Port Seton near Edinburgh and the theme of the sea and its fisherman are central to his work. Like Hemingway, Bellany focuses on the human condition – life and death, good and evil, love and fear.

In Ballincollig library the screenprint, ‘When I woke up this morning the feeling was still there’, by British artist Angus Fairhurst, is part of a series of four prints, originally included in his ‘London Portfolio’. In this work a coloured panel is deliberately blurred around the edges to suggest the uncertainty of the emotions mentioned in the title. The emotions portrayed are further heightened by the contrast of colour, the monochrome background and figure are set against a vibrant yellow square which the figure holds up to the viewer. In Carrigaline library, ‘Pink Halls’, by Dorothy Cross is a wooden tower structure which, like many of Cross’s works, address gender issues. While the tower rest precariously on its base, the top of the structure shows a pink interior symbolizing the female sexual organs.

A series of workshops carried out by Cork-based artists in each library will be held alongside the exhibition as part of the ‘Branching Out’ programme supported by National Irish Bank. In Bandon, print workshops will be carried out by the Cork Printmakers in response to John Bellany’s ‘The Old Man and The Sea’. In Fermoy, the Cork Film Centre will facilitate two-week long courses in video art and documentation and artist Alanna O’Kelly will give a public talk on her own art practice on the 14 July in Fermoy Community Centre. Other workshops and talks will continue throughout the running of the exhibition.

‘Branching Out’ is a programme designed by IMMA and National Irish Bank to be national, inclusive and participative, bringing the visual arts to the community and providing opportunities for the community to get involved. 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.

‘If you go down for your books today’ continues until 4 august 2003 at Ballincollig, Bandon, Carrigaline and Fermoy Libraries, Co Cork.

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

A new exhibition of some 60 works from the Musgrave Kinley Collection of Outsider Art opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 3 July 2003. The Tail that Wags the Dog: Outsider Art in the Expressionist Tradition is being shown to coincide with IMMA’s Cobra exhibition, whose artists were inspired and liberated by non-mainstream art, including that produced by Outsider artists. The exhibition is curated by Monika Kinley, co-founder of the Musgrave Kinley Collection of Outsider Art, which has been on loan to the Museum since 1998. Many of the works are being exhibited for the first time.

Kinley has, for many years, harboured a desire to create an Outsiders’ show alongside the Cobra group artists, a radical group of artists and poets active in Europe in the immediate post-war period. She sees Roger Malbert’s (Senior Curator at the Hayward Gallery and co-curator of the Cobra exhibition) description of the Cobra works as “outrageous, irresponsible, funny and beautiful” as equally applicable to Outsider art. This is especially true of their forceful use of imagery and their refusal to set bounds to the nature and scope of their art. “Outsiders know no bounds either. There is no intellectual deliberation, they take up pen, brush and pencil, use anything at hand and start creating their powerful images. What emerges is surprising to them and to us.”

Outsiders images are rarely called forth by the political discussion and theorising beloved of Cobra artists, finding their inspirations rather from the artists’ own dreams, emotions and memories, yet in Kinley’s words “when you look at their work the visual connections, the creative impulse and the freedom from artistic convention that characterise the work of both Cobra and the Outsiders make this an interesting exercise in looking.”

The main affinity that Outsiders share with Cobra is this uninhibited mode of expression. An untypically colourful drawing by Madge Gill, shown in public for the first time in this exhibition, is just one of the many examples of work in the Outsider Collection arising from automatism. Madge Gill, like J B Murry, refuses to take either credit or praise for her remarkable creativity, attributing all her achievements to the work of a spirit that drove her to this form of expression without conscious mediation on her part.

Cobra’s critical espousal of the pictorial value of handwriting finds many echoes, too, in the work of Outsiders. From Carlo Zinelli, working in a psychiatric hospital in Verona in the 1950s, to the decorative scribblings of J B Murry, a retired share crop farmer from the American dustbowl or his compatriot Dwight Mackintosh, the same intuitive connection between picture making and writing as powerful pictorial forms of expression is repeated.

The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection was established in 1981 by the British writer, film-maker and gallery director, Victor Musgrave, and his companion, Monika Kinley. The Collection was to have formed the nucleus of a proposed public museum of Outsider art. When that was not possible the Collection was offered to the Irish Museum of Modern Art- its first public home. Since Victor Musgrave’s death in 1984, Monika Kinley has continued the work of forming a representative collection to be made available to the public. The first Irish exhibition of work from the Outsider Art Collection, Art Unsolved, was held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1998. Since then, works by Outsiders have been represented in most displays of the Museum’s own Collection, throughout Ireland via the National Programme. It was announced in 2000 that the collection of 750-works by some 70 artists will remain on indefinite loan to the Museum.

The exhibition continues until 4 January 2004.

Admission is free.

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun, Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Mondays Closed

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

23 June 2003