A staggering 1,300 people turned out over the weekend to attend an amazing three-day performance art event, curated by the distinguished performance artist Marina Abramovic, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Marking the Territory began on Friday 19 October when German artist Daniel Muller-Friedrichsen set the tone for the weekend with, ‘Starless’. The artist arrived into the Museum’s courtyard in a limousine, security men kept back crowds of screaming teenagers as he tried to make his way into the North Range of the Museum. Muller succeeded in creating a heightened sense of anticipation at the opening of the event as visitors wondered who was this famous celebrity? The evening continued with live performances, installations and artists’ interventions by more then 23 artists involved in the event and concluded with staged performances in the Great Hall.

Saturday and Sunday brought a further programme of intriguing and unexpected performances. The Indonesian artist, Melati Suryodarmo, presented ‘Lullaby for Ancestors’, a stunning piece, where the dramatically dressed artist led a beautiful white pony around the cobbled courtyard as she explored the theme of animal energy. Nesket Ekici covered walls, windows, floors and ceilings, and a large number of passers by, with lipstick vivid pink kisses in her piece, ‘Emotion in Motion’. The Class of Abramovic wound up the weekend on Sunday 21 October with a group performance in the Great Hall to great applause.

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

23 October 2001

A major three-day performance art event, being curated by the distinguished performance artist Marina Abramovic, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art from 19 to 21 October 2001, is already almost fully booked. The event, entitled Marking the Territory, brings to Ireland some of the world’s leading exponents of current performance art practice ranging from Chiharu Shiota’s stunning installation, where the artist sleeps under a threaded mesh of wool and light, to Nedko Solakov’s two painters who endlessly follow each other around the gallery space, one painting the walls white and the other changing them to black. Each evening the focus will be on the stage in the Great Hall with individual performances from many internationally renowned artists, which will be introduced by Abramovic herself.

The programme comprises Abramovic’s personal selection of works by 23 artists from 16 countries which she sees as defining a new “territory” in the field of performance art: “I believe that at the present moment there is a strong need within contemporary culture, to express the immateriality which you can find in the direct energy and communicative force of performance. Marking the Territory is my attempt to give a direct and subjective view on the state of performance art today, through a selection of work by 23 artists whose work interests me and who I identify as addressing these current concerns and needs.”

Over the three days, a wide range of work will be presented in the North Wing of the Museum, from live performances on stage, to video installations and artists’ interventions. At 6.30pm on the evening before the event, Thursday 18 October, Marina Abramovic will give a lecture in the Edmund Burke Theatre, Trinity College, at which she will explain her approach to curating Marking the Territory and discuss her view of current performance art practice.

During the event a special menu of “spirit” food, devised by Abramovic, will be served in the Museum’s Grass Roots Café.

A video document will be available on VHS tape to mark the event. It will include an introduction by Marina Abramovic, interviews by the artists and video documentation of their work (price£9.99, €12.70)

The Museum is extremely grateful to the British Council, the Goethe Institut,
Panasonic Ireland and Pro Helvetia for the financial support of the exhibition,
and to the Grass Roots Café at IMMA, Temple Bar Properties, the History of Art
Department, Trinity College, Dublin, and the Office of Public Works for their
assistance with the event.

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

3 October 2001

An exhibition of works based on the theme of the portrait opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday 9 October. enVisage comprises some 60 paintings, sculptures and prints from the Museum’s own Collection, all inspired by the human face, which has been the focus of creative interest since the beginning of time.

Some artists have seen the face as a mask, disguising or concealing the person to whom it belongs; others as a mirror in which the full force of the personality is revealed. The exhibition explores these and other aspects of the genre through works by artists such as John Bellany, who used the puffin as a self-image and Sava Seculic, whose triple-headed ‘Gourd’ is one of the most unusual items on display. enVisage combines portraits in print by Tim Mara, Mimmo Paladino and Wilfredo Lam with sculptures by John Ahearn and Stephan Balkenhol and, for the first time since its acquisition, works from Brian Maguire’s important ‘Casa da Cultura’ project.

Commentating on the exhibition Catherine Marshall, Head of the Collection at IMMA, said: “since the day we were born we are all concerned with faces, either our own, those of the people we love, the imaginary faces we project on to the moon, even the letter ‘O’ in the newspaper. We attribute qualities like guilt, innocence, intelligence and kindness to faces we see on television. The IMMA Collection has an astonishing range of artist’s impressions of the face, including works exhibited here for the first time. This exhibition gives us a chance to assemble these portraits and tease out some of the issues that accompany our perceptions of them. The face becomes a landscape in a painting by Martin Wedge, a split face by Eithne Jordan raises perennial questions of identity and Brian Maguire’s faces from Sao Paolo make us think again about the individual, the political realities we operate within and the traditional contexts for portraiture”.

The exhibition will include a Work in Focus, in which one work, ‘Francis Street Boys’, 1994, by American artist John Ahearn, Úna Kealy and the Sixth class boys from Francis Street C.B.S. will be explored in more depth.

enVisage continues until 21 April 2002.

Admission: Free

The exhibition is accompanied by a guide with a text by Catherine Marshall (price £2.00, €2.52). A Work in Focus leaflet on John Ahearn’s ‘Francis Stree Boys’ is also available (price £1.20, €1.50).

Opening Hours:Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun, Bank Holidays 2 noon – 5.30pm
Mondays: Closed, 24 – 26 December

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

25 September 2001

The first exhibition in Ireland of the work of the internationally-acclaimed Iranian-born film and photographic artist, Shirin Neshat, opens to the public in the New Galleries at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 5 September 2001. Shirin Neshat comprises 18 works – two being shown in Europe for the first time – inspired by the radical transformation which the artist observed in her homeland during a series of visits in the 1990s following an absence of 16 years. Neshat describes her work as “a visual discourse on the subjects of feminism and contemporary Islam”. Beautiful and timeless, it crosses the boundaries between Western and Islamic society and challenges many of the preconceived ideas held in both cultures.

The exhibition includes three of Neshat’s characteristically compelling films, based on the rigid, ritualistic separation of Iran’s male and female worlds. In ‘Turbulent’, 1998, which won the prestigious Golden Lion Prize at the 1999 Venice Biennale, projected images of two singers – a man and a woman – face each other across a darkened room. The man performs for an audience of other men and is greeted with applause; the woman, her back to the camera, faces an empty auditorium. Despite her apparently disadvantageous position, the work is constructed so that the woman appears to mesmerise her male counterpart.

The other film installations, ‘Passage’ and ‘Pulse’, were both completed this year and are receiving their first European showing. ‘Passage’, a collaboration with the famous American Minimalist composer, Philip Glass, was commissioned for the series Philip on Film, which premiered at the Lincoln Center, New York, this summer. A strangely apocalyptic meditation on life and death, its deceptively simple narrative opens with a glorious view of a calm sea. A phalanx of black-clad men appear carrying a corpse wrapped in white cloth on their shoulders. They approach a group of veiled women, who are digging a grave with their bare hands while a little girl plays innocently nearby. As the body is placed on the earth a circle of fire begins encircling both men and women, leaving only the little girl outside. Photographs from other major film works, including ‘Rapture’, 1999, ‘Soliloquy’, 1999, and ‘Fervor’, 2000, are also being shown.

Born in Iran in 1957, Shirin Neshat moved to the United States in 1974, where she studied at the University of California in Berkeley. She first came to international attention in the early 1990s. This followed her first visit to Iran in 16 years, where she found that “society had changed, ideologically, beyond recognition leaving a collective void”. In 1993 Neshat exhibited the first in a series of arresting black and white photographs featuring herself, sometimes with other women, wearing a chador, or body-length veil. This traditional Islamic garment, which she saw as a metaphor for women’s status in Iran, reveals only the face, hands and feet, on which in her photoworks Neshat inscribed the poetry of Iranian feminists.

Over the last few years Neshat has turned increasingly to film, which, unlike her earlier work, is frequently conceived on an epic scale. She has gained growing international recognition for her work in both media, with solo exhibitions at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York; the Kunsthalle, Vienna, and the Serpentine Gallery, London, and in a number of other American and European cities. She lives and works in New York and continues to make regular visits to Iran.

The exhibition is presented in association with Panasonic Ireland. A catalogue published by Charta, with a text by Farzaneh Milani, is available (price £16.00, €20.31).
Shirin Neshat continues until 16 December 2001.

Admission is free.

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

Closed:Mondays

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

13 August 2001

An exhibition of some 50 paintings and gouaches by the distinguished Irish painter Tony O’Malley opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday 3 July 2001. ‘Tony O’Malley: Paintings and Gouaches from the McClelland Collection’ focuses on O’Malley’s formative period, from 1960 to 1980, when he lived in Cornwall and before he became a household name in Irish art circles. The works are chosen from a larger group of O’Malley paintings in the collection of George and Maura McClelland, who have generously lent these and other paintings, drawings and sculptures to the Museum on long-term loan.

Nature and history form the basic themes in O’Malley’s highly distinctive paintings. Working intuitively, he has, over 40 years, continued to record the moods, movement and bird song of the countryside, usually of Ireland but also of the warmer, more exotic islands where he spends the winter. His paintings, on everything from scraps of recycled paper and canvas to the discarded hoops of an old Guinness barrel, also celebrate the medieval and Gaelic associations of such places as Callan, Jerpoint, and Kells, Co Kilkenny, as well as his ancestral roots in Clare Island on the west coast of Co Mayo. The exhibition concentrates on that middle period of O’Malley’s life, when his full-time career as an artist was only beginning. It was these works and others from that period that excited the interest of George McClelland and lead to his strategic promotion of O’Malley between 1980 and 1983 and inspired the view, still held by McClelland today, that ”Tony O’Malley is the Irish Artist of the 20th century”.

Tony O’Malley was born in Callan, Co Kilkenny, in 1913, where he returned in 1987 and now lives with his artist wife, Jane. He began to paint while struggling with ill health and working as a bank official in various Irish provincial centres. It was only after his retirement on health grounds in 1958 that he went to St Ives in Cornwall where he attended two painting holiday courses given by the artist Peter Lanyon. These were O’Malley’s only experience of formal art education but the artist community around St Ives offered him much-needed support and friendship.

Since 1983 Tony O’Malley has been recognised as one of the leading Irish painters of his time, with major exhibitions throughout Ireland and the United States. In 1999 he was the recipient of the Glen Dimplex Award for a Sustained Contribution to the Visual Arts in Ireland, while a year later his work formed the central, visual focus for the Festival of Irish Culture, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, USA.

‘Tony O’Malley: Paintings and Goauches from the McClelland Collection’ continues until 6 January 2002

Admission is free.

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun & Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm

Closed: Mondays

For further information and colour and black and white images please contact Philomena Byrne or Monica Cullinane at Tel : +353 1 612 9900,
Fax : +353 1 612 9999
20 June 2001

The winner of the 2001 Glen Dimplex Artists Award is the American film maker and sculptor Matthew Barney. The recipient of the award for a Sustained Contriubtion to the Visual Arts in Ireland is the distinguished Irish painter Basil Blackshaw. The awards, sponsored by the Irish-based company Glen Dimplex in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, were presented this evening (Friday 25 May) by the poet and writer Anthony Cronin at a dinner at the Museum.

The £15,000 Glen Dimplex Artists Award is designed to mark a significant level of acheivement or development in the work and practice of exhibiting artists. The 2001 award was open to Irish artists who had exhibited in Ireland or elsewhere from 25 November 1999 to 24 November 2000 and to non-Irish artists who had exhibited in Ireland in the same period. Matthew Barney was nominated for his film Cremaster 2 shown at Temple Bar Properties, in Meeting House Square, in May 2000. The Sustained Contribution Award is a non-monetary award being made for the third time this year. The recipient, Basil Blackshaw, is one of Ireland’s most distinguished artists with a career stretching back over 50 years. He was presented with a specially-commissioned set of polished candlesticks made by silversmith Séamus Gill from his Freeform Collection.

Described by The New York Times as “the most important American artist of his generation”, Matthew Barney is best known for his CREMASTER series of films. Slow moving and hypnotic, his films manipulate different theatrical and cinematic genre to produce works of great richness and complexity. These visually stunning, yet challenging, works are populated by an extraordinary variety of mythical and real-life figures from satyrs and fairies to the Utah murderer Gary Gilmore. Each CREMASTER instalment is accompanied by sculptures, photographs, drawings, artist’s books and video editions. Barney describes these as different stages or evolutions of the concept – sometimes expanding it, sometimes reducing it to a more concentrated form. A graduate of Yale University, Barney has shown in many leading public and private galleries in America and Europe including the San Francisco MOMA, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Tate, london, and the Kunsthalle, Vienna. Born in San Francisco in 1967, he now lives and works in New York.

The other artists shortlisted for the 2001 award were the British photographic artist Richard Billingham, the Irish painter Elizabeth Magill and the Belfast-based sound and installation artist Susan Philipsz.

Basil Blackshaw is one of Ireland’s most distinguished painters. Born in Belfast in 1932 and educated at Belfast College of Art, his talent was recognised from an early date. Initially acclaimed for his mastery of traditional approaches to painting, Blackshaw has continued to develop as an artist throughout his career, and is now most highly regarded for his very loose gestural application of paint and a very distinctive and subtle use of colour. His paintings of such sports as horse racing and boxing have made him particularly popular but Blackshaw is also a talented portrait painter. A major solo touring exhibition, organised by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, was shown in Belfast, Dublin and the United States between 1995 and 1998.

Commenting on the Awards Brenda McParland, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA and Chair of the jury panel said: “After much animated discussion the panel chose Matthew Barney as the recipient of this year’s Glen Dimplex Artists Award for his vibrant presentation of photographs in the exhibition and in acknowledgement of the originality of his Cremaster series, in which he has created some of the most arresting images of our time.”

Sean O’Driscoll, Chief Executive of Glen Dimplex, said that since its inception eight years ago the Awards have embodied many of the qualities, such as excellence and innovation, which Glen Dimplex sought to foster within its own group. He was particularly pleased that Basil Blackshaw has been chosen for the Sustained Contribution Award in recognition of his work over many years.

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award was first made in 1994 when the winner was multi-media artist Alanna O’Kelly. Subsequent winners were video and photographic artist Willie Doherty (1995), American installation artist and sculptor Janine Antoni (1996), photographic artist Paul Seawright (1997), sculptor and installation artist Siobhan Hapaska (1998), English photographic artist Catherine Yass (1999) and David Philips and Paul Rowley (2000) who work in film, video and photography.

The jury panel for the final selection process was:
Polly Devlin, writer, art collector and Chair of IMMA’s International Council
Gavin Friday, composer and performer
Dr Margaret Downes, Chair, BUPA Ireland, and Director, Bank of Ireland
Fiona O’Malley, Board Member, IMMA
Brenda McParland, Head of Exhibitions, IMMA (Chair of panel)

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award Exhibition continues until 29 October 2001.

A catalogue, with texts by Annie Fletcher and Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, accompanies the exhibition (price £5.00, €6.34).

For further information and colour and black and white images please contact
Philomena Byrne or Monica Cullinane at Tel : +353 1 612 9900,
Fax : +353 1 612 9999

25 May 2001

Sol LeWitt: New Wall Drawings at the Irish Museum of Modern Art

An exhibition of new wall drawings by the leading American Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Sunday 27 May. ‘Sol LeWitt: New Wall Drawings’ is a characteristically vibrant and beautiful series of works, based on an open cube structure conceived in response to a suite of rooms at the Museum. The exhibition is part of an exciting and varied programme being organised by IMMA to mark its tenth anniversary at the end of May.

Sol LeWitt, has spent the past four decades creating artworks that explore the ideas behind the making of visual forms. From his early sculptures – or structures as he prefers to call them – to his wall drawings, LeWitt has transformed these ideas into abstract objects of exquisite beauty and elegance, deliberately introducing elements of change or irrationality into the systems that govern their creation. The new works at IMMA comprise 13 wall drawings, eleven in colour using specific combinations, such as orange and purple, green and blue, blue and red, yellow and grey, and two in black and white only.

Despite its visual splendour, LeWitt’s approach to the creation of his work is surprisingly simple and straightforward. He executed his first wall drawing in 1968, for a group show at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. In a text published two years later he wrote: “I wanted to do a work of art that was as two-dimensional as possible…..It seems more natural to work directly on walls than to make a construction, to work on that, and then put the construction on the wall”. A pioneer of Minimalist and Conceptual art, LeWitt’s delicate balancing act between thought and form, order and disorder, has exerted an enormous influence on artists of subsequent generations. Today his wall drawings, structures and works on paper continue to astonish with their pared-down means and absolute intellectual clarity, resulting in works giving unabashed aesthetic pleasure.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1928, Sol LeWitt studied fine art at the University of Syracuse, and later at the University of Illinois. He was drafted into military service during the Korean War, after which he moved to New York. While continuing his painting practice, he also worked in an architect’s office and later at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He became part of a community of young artists and critics, including Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse and Lucy Lippard that as LeWitt wrote, were looking for a new direction “that would lead away form the pervasive but useless ideas of Abstract Expressionism”. He had his first solo exhibition in 1965 of sculptural works, or “Open Structures”. During the 1960s he wrote two seminal texts that helped to define the Conceptual art movement; ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, 1967. and ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, 1969. His long career has been celebrated through many major exhibitions, including the recent ‘Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective’, organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. LeWitt continues to make temporary installations as well as permanent works, and his works are held in numerous museum collections and private collections worldwide.

A brochure documenting the installation at IMMA is available.

Sol LeWitt: New Wall Drawings continues until December 2001.

Admission is free.

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

Closed: Mondays

For further information and colour and black and white images please contact
Philomena Byrne or Monica Cullinane at Tel : +353 1 612 9900,
Fax : +353 1 612 9999

8 May 2001

Rebecca Horn at the Irish Museum of Modern Art

An exhibition of the work of the renowned German performance artist, sculptor and film maker Rebecca Horn opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Sunday 27 May. Rebecca Horn comprises 15 works, selected personally by the artist for the New Galleries at IMMA, and includes installations, mechanised sculptures and painting machines, as well as Horn’s entire film oeuvre being shown together for the first time. The show is Horn’s first substantial exhibition in Ireland and forms part of an exciting and varied programme being organised by the Museum to mark its tenth anniversary at the end of May. The exhibition is organised in cooperation with the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Stuttgart.

Rebecca Horn explores Horn’s most frequently recurring themes – sexuality, human vulnerability and emotional fragility – and illustrates the richness and complexity of her work. Her early works focus on her body and senses, frequently incorporating performances and elaborate costumes. ‘The Feathered Prison Fan’1978, featured in her film ‘Der Eintanzer’,dates from this period. Made up of an exotic circle of ostrich feathers, it creates a warm, seductive environment in which to nestle only to snatch away these reassuring sensations as the fan snaps shut.

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s Horn began to move away from body-centred art into more narrative work including a greater use of film. She used film initially to document her performances but since then has developed it into a new sphere of work, producing several feature films. The exhibition includes documentation of some 30 well-known performances, among them ‘Unicorn’, 1970; ‘White Body Fan’, 1972, ‘Cockatoo Mask’, 1973, and ‘Berlin Exercises’, 1974/5. Feature films such as ‘La Ferdinanda: Sonata for a Medici Villa’, 1981, and ‘Buster’s Bedroom’, 1990, are also being shown.

The association between sculpture and film, which continues to be a key element of her work, is fully explored in the exhibition in works such as ‘Time Goes By’, 1990, in which 40,000 metres of developed Hollywood film, thermometers, binoculars and copper snakes are presented in a mechanised installation in homage to tragic-comic actor Buster Keaton, whose shoes form the central focus of the installation. ‘Painting Machine’, 1988, represents another aspect of Horn’s work in which ink and champagne are pumped out of two funnels into a spraying device which wildly flings random splashes of the liquid against the wall.

In the past decade Horn’s work has expanded to include installations at various, often historically significant, sites around the world. One of her most celebrated works, ‘Concert for Buchenwald’, 1999, an installation in two parts, was originally located in a castle and old tram depot near the site of the concentration camp in Weimar. In a room lined with compressed ash, symbolising the dead, a small carriage repeatedly crashed into a pile of musical instruments, representing human bodies, while elsewhere a concerto made up of the buzzing of bees and the smashing of a mirror is heard – both elements a response to the horrific events associated with that place. A work from this installation comprising a motorised cello and conductor’s baton, positioned at a window as if conducting the landscape, is included in the exhibition at IMMA.

Born in 1944, Rebecca Horn has had her work exhibited in many leading museums and galleries in Europe and America. The winner of a US Carnegie Prize in 1988, she has two rooms dedicated to her work at Tate Modern. In 1994 a major survey exhibition was shown at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; and the Tate Gallery and Serpentine Gallery, London. Horn has been included in many major international group exhibitions, such as Sculptur Project, Munster, 1997 and 1999, and Documenta, Kassel, 1986 and ROSC ’88, Dublin. She lives and in Paris and Berlin and travels extensively.

Variations of this exhibition have toured to Santiago de Compostella, Spain, and Nimes, France, before being shown at IMMA, and will travel to Budapest, South America and Japan afterwards. The artist has made new selections of works for each venue in response to their spaces and architecture.

A substantial fully-illustrated catalogue published by Institut für Auslands- beziehungen e.V (IFA) with texts by Carl Haenlein, Sergio Edelsztein, Martin Mosebach, Doris von Drathen and Rebecca Horn is available (price £19.95).

The exhibition is supported by the Goethe Institut, Dublin, Guinness Ireland Group and the Morrison Hotel.

Rebecca Horn continues in the New Galleries and Lecture Room until 19 August.

Admission is free.

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm

Sun, Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm

Closed: Mondays

For further information and colour and black and white images please contact
Philomena Byrne or Monica Cullinane at Tel : +353 1 612 9900,
Fax : +353 1 612 9999

4 May 2001

Glen Dimplex Artists Award Exhibition opens at the Irish Museum of Modern Art

An exhibition of works by the four artists shortlisted for the £15,000 ‘Glen Dimplex Artists Awards 2001’ opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 18 May. As in previous years, the artists – American film maker and sculptor Matthew Barney, British photographic artist Richard Billingham, Irish painter Elizabeth Magill and Belfast-based sound and installation artist Susan Philipsz – have been allocated individual spaces in which to represent their practice. Each presents a selection of new and recent works, ranging from painting and photography to film, video and sound pieces, some of which are being shown in Ireland for the first time. The presentation of the award, which is sponsored by the Irish-based company Glen Dimplex in assocation with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, will be made at a dinner at the Museum on Friday 25 May. The exhibition and dinner form part of a series of events taking place at the end of May to celebrate the Museum’s tenth anniversary.

Matthew Barney is best known for his ‘CREMASTER’ series of slow moving and hypnotic films, which manipulate different theatrical and cinematic genre to produce works of great richness and complexity. These visually stunning, yet challenging, works are populated by an extraordinary variety of mythical and real-life figures from satyrs and fairies to the Utah murderer Gary Gilmore. Each ‘CREMASTER’ instalment is accompanied by sculptures, photographs, drawings, artist’s books and video editions. Barney describes these as different stages or evolutions of the concept – sometimes expanding it, sometimes reducing it to a more concentrated form. Barney is represented in the exhibtion by photographic prints from all of his CREMASTER films, including ‘CREMASTER 1: Goodyear Chorus’, 1999, ‘CREMASTER 5: Elvålås’, 1997, and ‘CREMASTER 2: The Drone’s March’, 1999. Born in San Francisco in 1967, he now lives and works in New York.

Richard Billingham’s photographs present an intimate and compelling portrait of his famiy and the urban environment around his home. His early works chart the day-to-day existence of two figures in particular – his father, Ray, whom he describes as a “chronic alcoholic”, and his mother, Liz, who “hardly drinks but does smoke a lot” and “likes pets and things that are decorative.” Billingham has recently completed a number of video works and a series of urban landscapes taken around his home in the English West Midlands. The exhibition comprises a wide cross section of Billingham’s work including such well-known photographic works as ‘Flying Cat’, 1995, in which Ray is seen to throw the family pet across a dishevelled room, and the video ‘Liz Smoking’, 1998, whose succinct title tells us everything we need to know about the work’s bleak narrative. Born in Birmingham in 1970, Billingham now lives and works in Stourbridge, West Midlands.

Elizabeth Magill is a painter of great versatility and inventiveness, whose work has always drawn on a wide range of visual sources. While she has often integrated photographic materials and processes into her painting, her primary concern has always been an exploration of painting itself through the use of pattern repetition, geometry and the photomechanical. Her most recent body of work investigates the traditions of landscape painting, creating fictional landscapes that refer to the art and historical paradigm of the Romantic period while questioning our notions of landscape. Magill likes to think of her rendering of landscape as the creating of non-places – half imagined, vaguely located, yet strangely familiar. Works in her show include several new paintings from the artist’s studio and recent works such as ‘Fota Park’, 2001, and ‘Close’, 2000. Born in Ontario, Canada, in 1959, Magill was brought up in Cushendall, Co Antrim. She now lives and works in London.

Susan Philipsz’ work deals with the spatial properties of sound and with the relationships between sound and architecture. She is interested primarily in what she describes as “the emotive and psychological properties of sound”, and how it can be used as a device to alter a subjective response to memory and site. She has used sound, and more recently song, as a medium in public spaces to interject through the ambient noises of the everyday. Using her own voice, she attempts to trigger an awareness in the listener – to temporarily alter their perception of themselves in a particular place and time. In the past she has tested her work in a number of modern public buildings where their neutral backdrops have provided an ideal setting for exploring the communal effect her work has on a public audience. Her more recent work has sought to sustain the listeners attention over longer periods of time, with the pauses between the songs being as important as the singing itself. Philipsz is represented in the exhibition by a selection of recent works, including one of her most powerful recent works – a recording of the artist singing ‘The Internationale’, which she has presented in a number of locations, including in Ljubljana, Slovenia, during Manifesta 3 in 2000.

The’Glen Dimplex Artists Award’, sponsored by the Irish-based company Glen Dimplex in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is designed to mark a significant level of achievement or development in the work and practice of exhibiting artists. The 2001 award was open to Irish artists who have exhibited in Ireland or elsewhere from 25 November 1999 to 24 November 2000 and to non-Irish artists who have exhibited in Ireland in the same period. The award was first made in 1994. Since 1998 an additional non-monetary award for a sustained contribution by an Irish artist to the visual arts in Ireland has also been made.

The jury panel for the final selection process is:
Polly Devlin, writer, art collector and Chair of IMMA’s International Council
Gavin Friday, composer and performer
Dr Margaret Downes, Chair, BUPA Ireland, and Director, Bank of Ireland
Fiona O’Malley, Board Member, IMMA
Brenda McParland, Head of Exhibitions, IMMA (Chair of panel)

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award Exhibition continues until 29 October 2001.

A catalogue, with texts by Annie Fletcher and Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, accompanies the exhibition (price £5.00).

Admission is free.

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

Closed: Mondays

For further information and colour and black and white images please contact Philomena Byrne or Monica Cullinane at Tel : +353 1 612 9900,
Fax : +353 1 612 9999

30 April 2001

Education and Community Programme Highlighted at IMMA

An exhibition celebrating ten years of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s award-winning Education and Community Programme opens to the public on Friday 27 April. ‘Points of Entry’ documents some of the many initiatives – ranging from an exhibition exploring violence against women to the very popular Explorer family project – by which people of all ages have been encouraged to access and enjoy the, often challenging, area of contemporary visual culture. The exhibition forms part of a rich and varied programme of events being organised by IMMA to mark its tenth anniversary in May this year.

‘Points of Entry’ features project work and working processes developed with older people from St Michael’s Parish Art Group and with a cross section of age groups from the Family Resource Centre, St Michael’s Estate, Inchicore: also work with youth leaders and children from three local parishes. These experimental projects inform the broader access programme, an example of which is ‘Focus On …’, which creates a point of entry for new groups of children, young people, people with disabilities and older people nationally and has been running for five years. IMMA’s innovative work in the field of museum education is illustrated by the ‘Breaking the Cycle’ initiative, a research project aimed at combating education disadvantage carried out in partnership with the Department of Education and Science, and the annual Primary Schools Programme which creates classroom-based programmes linked to Museum visits.

Photographic, video and written documentation from all projects and programmes is presented alongside a selection of work created in workshops by members of the older people’s group, by members of the Family Resource Centre and by children from St Thomas’s Junior School in Tallaght.

Commenting on the Museum’s work in this area over the past ten years, Helen O’Donoghue, Head of the Education and Community Department said: “The Museum’s philosophy is based on the belief that people are capable of engaging with the most challenging aspects of contemporary visual culture and of creating meaning as a result of this engagement that has resonance in their own lives. We work on the underlying principle that access to visual art is a right for all sectors of society. The programme aims to create opportunities for engagement with visual art in the galleries in the encounter with artworks, in the studios through dialogue with artists and by making and exhibiting artworks that have personal meaning for participants on programmes.”

‘Point of Entry’ continues until 9 September.

Admission is free.

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

Closed: Mondays

For further information and colour and black and white images please contact Philomena Byrne or Monica Cullinane at Tel : +353 1 612 9900,
Fax : +353 1 612 9999

19 April 2001