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

The first exhibition in Ireland of the work of the radical post-war Cobra group of artists and poets opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 3 July 2003. Comprising over 110 works by 19 artists, it includes a major collection of paintings and drawings by each of the key figures: Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Constant, Asger Jorn and Carl-Henning Pedersen. The main focus of the show is on the ground-breaking Cobra exhibitions held in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam between 1948 and 1951. The exhibition is a National Touring Exhibition, organised by the Hayward Gallery, London, in collaboration with BALTIC, The Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. The exhibition is presented at IMMA in association with THE IRISH TIMES.

The name Cobra was coined in 1948 by the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont from the three cities where the main participants lived: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. Explosively expressive, with an emphasis on myth and the untutored art of children and the mentally ill, the Cobra artists were anti-élitist in their desire to address a universal public. Painting and drawing spontaneously, they produced imagery teeming with fantastic creatures and exuding intense emotions, such as rage, joy and humour. Cobra was also anti-specialist and collaborative: poets painted and organised exhibitions, artists wrote manifestos and illustrated and published books of poetry.

The exhibition conveys the energy and subversive power of this influential movement, its experimental and provocative spirit, and its attempts at forging a new visual language in a post-war climate of both austerity and hope. Key publications of the period and collaborative book projects by the Cobra artists and poets are also included.

The exhibition has been selected by Peter Shield, art historian and chief curator of the exhibition, with Roger Malbert, Senior Curator, National Touring Exhibitions, on behalf of the Hayward, and Sune Nordgren, Director of Baltic.
An illustrated catalogue, published by the Hayward Gallery, with essays by Peter Shield and art historian Graham Birtwistle, and a chronology and artists’ biographies, accompanies the exhibition (price €25.00).

Alongside the Cobra exhibition IMMA is also displaying a selection of works by Outsider artists. The Irish Museum of Modern Art has had an interest in the work of Outsider artists since 1998, when it was given a spectacular collection of work by the Musgrave Kinley Collection of Outsider Art. Since then, works by Outsiders have been represented repeatedly in displays of the Museum’s own Collection and throughout Ireland, North and South, through IMMA’s National Programme. Outsider artists are self-taught, making art as their only viable means of self-expression. They are often marginalised through mental ill health or social disadvantage.

For over 30 years, the Hayward Gallery, part of London’s South Bank Centre has played a key role in creating imaginative, high-profile exhibitions in London and, through National Touring Exhibitions, the UK and, occasionally, in Ireland.

On Thursday 3 July at 11.30am Roger Malbert and Peter Shield will discuss the Cobra movement in the Lecture Room at IMMA. Booking essential on
tel: 01-612 9948 or email [email protected]
Cobra: Copenhagen Brussels Amsterdam continues in IMMA’s New Galleries until 21 September 2003.

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]

13 June 2003

A group of more then 150 older people from East Clare, who for the first time in 70 or 80 years were encouraged to take up a pencil and allow their creativity to flow, have produced drawings, paintings, and works in clay, resulting in an engaging exhibition Journey: Through Memories. Artist Terry O’Farrrell, a member of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s education team, was invited by the Iniscealtra Festival of the Arts to facilitate workshops over a two-month period with ten community groups at Raheen Day Care Centre and Residential Hospital, Co Clare, as part of IMMA’s Branching Out project which is supported by National Irish Bank. Members of the Raheen Hospital and Day Care Centre, Mountshannon, will present their exhibition to St Michael’s Parish Active Retirement Art Group, Inchicore, Dublin, on Wednesday 25 June at the newly-opened Aistear Centre in Mountshannon.

Since 1991, St Michael’s Parish Active Retirement Art Group have been involved in a broad range of programmes with IMMA, through its Education and Community Department, at local, national and international level. During that time they have exhibited both on site and in venues throughout the country. Starting in 2000 the Group participated in workshops with Terry O’Farrell in the Museum’s studios on a project exploring significant themes from their life experiences which resulted in the exhibition, Equivalence, earlier this year, which included paintings, drawings and works in clay.

This meeting between members of the Raheen Hospital and Day Care Centre, and St Michael’s Parish Active Retirement Art Group will give both groups the opportunity to share their experiences and explore the ideas presented in the exhibition. The importance of the role of older people in contemporary visual art is recognized in such collaborations. Pauline McNamara, Matron, Raheen Community Hospital, said “Terry O’Farrell came into our lives earlier this year – leaping, laughing, bounding, singing, shining, piercing our darkness in all things artistic – we the staff, patients and day visitors of Raheen Community Hospital will never be the same again. Research shows continuing creativity is possible in old age and negative attitudes towards capability and contributions of older people are a form of social discrimination. It was a completely new experience for our patients and Day Care Centre attendees and staff. The stimulus of an interested and supportive person helped them explore new avenues of creative self-expression and uncovered latent talents. At first, people needed gentle support and encouragement in order to overcome inhibitions, but within days that was gone and what talent ensued”.

Commenting on her experience working on the project Terry O’Farrell said: “I came to a centre, which has the feel of home and met staff who respect and support the lives that these older members of the community have lived. I invited people to draw a memory, to remember times past. There is a huge wealth here in the memories of the full lives lived and courage still in starting something new, in wanting to know more, willing to be open – continuing to explore”.

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.

Journey: Through Memories continues at the Aistear Centre, Mountshannon, Co Clare, until 26 June. The work can also be seen at IMMA as part of the Branching Out exhibition in January 2004.

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

11 June 2003