An exhibition of recent work by the celebrated sculptor Louise Bourgeois, a major retrospective of the work of the German photographer Thomas Ruff and an exhibition of lens-based work from the Museum’s Collection are all part of an exciting and wide-ranging programme for 2002 announced today (Tuesday 29 January) by the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Plans for the coming year also include the first showing in this country by the leading American installation artist Ann Hamilton, displays from the Gordon Lambert Collection, the first public showing of an important collection of contemporary British and Irish art and a new strand of workshops exploring the interplay between drama and the visual arts.

Speaking at the launch of the programme at IMMA, the Museum’s Acting Director, Philomena Byrne, said: “As the Museum enters its second decade we are delighted to present a programme for 2002, which builds on the best of the Museum’s existing range of activities and also introduces a number of exciting new developments. The temporary exhibition programme offers visitors an opportunity to enjoy the work of many highly-acclaimed internati0nal artists alongside several lesser known names, while the Collection Department follows its very popular portraiture show of 2001 with further lively and ingenious themed exhibitions exploring abstraction and lens-based art. New developments for 2002 include a shift in the projects strand of exhibitions from overseas to younger generation Irish artists, a greatly increased education input in the National Programme and an important collaboration between the National Theatre and our Education and Community Department, linking the visual and performing arts.”

Exhibitions
The new temporary exhibitions programme includes installations, video and photographic works by the American artist Ann Hamilton (27 March – 14 July), drawings and prints, based on Joyce’s Ulysses, by the distinguished British artist Richard Hamilton (7 June – 15 September) and a major showing of photographs by Thomas Ruff (2 August – 6 October), one of the most acclaimed photographers working today. Later in the year, the Museum presents the first Irish showing by Karen Kiliminik (27 September – 5 January 2003), whose work takes as its source the world of
fairytales, high fashion and pop culture; recent soft sculptures and related drawing by the renowned Louise Bourgeois (18 October – January 2003) and a mid-career retrospective of the work of Willie Doherty (1 November – February 2003), exploring themes of memory and place.

Group shows include the first public exhibition of cutting-edge British and Irish art, from the Rowan Collection (13 February – 2 June), How things turn out (27 February – 26 May), showcasing some of the most exciting work being made in Ireland today, and Beautiful Productions (19 June – 29 September), an exhibition of artists’ editions, curated by the international art magazine Parkett.

Collections
The Collections’ year begins with Profile of a Collection (22 January – 23 June), an exhibition of 55 works from the Gordon Lambert Collection bringing together new additions and familiar favourites. From 9 May to 1 September the focus moves to the many languages of abstraction in No Object, No Subject, No Matter …. The Museum celebrates the donation of a complete set of Louis le Brocquy’s Táin tapestries by Dublin businessman, Brian Timmins, by putting all 20 tapestries on show as a continuation of the Work-in-Focus strand of programming. From 18 September to February 2003, The Unblinking Eye explores other aspects of lens-based art alongside those presented in the Thomas Ruff and Willie Doherty shows.

In addition to the Collection shows at IMMA, Kathy Prendergast’s City Drawings will travel to the Sydney Biennale and an exhibition of Outsider Art from the Musgrave Kinley Collection will be shown at the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester (22 March – 2 June). Proposals for exhibitions in Britain and Belgium are under discussion. Loans to museums and galleries in Ireland include the National Gallery, the Douglas Hyde Gallery, the Crawford Gallery, the Hugh Lane Gallery and the RHA Gallagher Gallery.

Education and Community
The Museum’s extensive range of programmes designed to create and increase access to the visual arts continues to operate on many levels in 2002. These include research projects in association with museums and arts organisations
nationally and internationally, community-based programmes within the local catchment area, primary school projects with the Department of Education and Science and adult education and youth programmes.

The Older Peoples’ Programming links to the Bealtaine Festival with exhibitions and workshops in Blanchardstown, Dublin, and Skibbereen, Co Cork. A special Bealtaine event will take place in April in association with the Irish Film Centre and the National Theatre.

In the primary school sector, the general access programme caters annually for 80 schools developing classroom-based projects based this year on Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political. Research funded by the Department of Education and Science on the long-term programme with the Breaking the Cycle unit will be completed and published and a new access programme will be developed with further grant-in-aid, extending IMMA’s reach to a broader range of schools.

In addition, teachers will be invited to take part in a new strand of workshop programmes exploring the interplay between drama and visual art in a jointly created collaboration with the National Theatre.

Focus on…… is an ongoing programme which provides an introduction to the Museum for a variety of community groups, including youth and after-school groups, people with learning disabilities, community development groups and members of Ireland’s new communities.

Artists’ Work Programme
The Artists’ Work Programme, the Museum’s studio/residency programme, has hosted more than 120 artists since its inception in 1994. The Work Programme operates in eight studio spaces in renovated coach houses, adjacent to the main Museum building. There are also three self-contained apartments and five spacious bedrooms in the Flanker Building, providing living accommodation for the studios. During 2002 artists from Ireland, the UK, Germany, France, Finland, Latvia, the Czeck Republic, Iceland, Spain, the USA, Canada, Nigeria and Peru will participate in the programme.

The Work Programme is open to artists in all disciplines and of all nationalities. Artists participating in the programme are encouraged to make themselves as available as possible to meet with visitors to the Museum, providing access to
the process of making art and giving the public an additional layer of experience to that available in the Museum’s galleries. A series of slide talks, studio visits, panel discussions and open days are organised around the residencies, all of which are free and open to the public.

The National Programme
The National Programme, is designed to make the Museum’s assets, skills and resources available to centres outside Dublin, through the lending of exhibitions and the development of collaborative projects with other organisations. Exhibitions and other events are devised and organised in partnership with local venues and groups through Ireland, who are encouraged to establish a familiarity and dialogue with the Museum.

The programme for 2002 sees the Museum continue relationships with festivals, such as Iniscealtra in Mountshannon, Co Clare, and establish new collaborations with the Éigse festival, Carlow, and the Sonas Festival in Louisburgh, Co Mayo.

In particular, this year will see the National Programme establish a dynamic educational programme including talks by artists such as Brian Maguire and Maud Cotter and the Head of the Collection at IMMA, Catherine Marshall. In March a selection of work from the Madden-Arnholz Collection will travel to the County Museum in Clonmel, Co Tipperary. The programme will also collaborate with the Education Department in realising various exhibitions such as the Once Is Too Much exhibition at Siamsa in Tralee and the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny. In August the Outsider Fellowship and the National Programme will co-ordinate From the cradle to the grave, an exhibition of work from the Musgrave Kinley Collection at the Catalyst Gallery, Belfast.

For further information and colour and black and white images please contact Monica Cullinane or Juliette Gash at Tel : +353 1 612 9900,
Fax : +353 1 612 9999 email [email protected]
29 January 2002

The Irish Museum of Modern Art is looking determinedly to the future. This was the message from the Museum’s new Chairman, Eoin McGonigal, SC, at the launch by Síle de Valera, TD, Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, of Celebrating a Decade, a new publication to mark the Museum’s tenth anniversary, at IMMA this evening (Thursday 13 December).

Speaking at the launch Mr McGonigal said: “We are all only too painfully aware of the difficulties which have surrounded the Museum in the recent past. However, all of us are now looking determinedly to the future, and to taking the Museum into a second dynamic and successful decade. As we set about the task of seeking a new director, we shall not be inhibited by recent events in seeking out the most dynamic, creative and imaginative candidate for this crucial post in the Irish art world.”

The Acting Director of the Museum, Philomena Byrne, stressed the fact that throughout the past year the business of the Museum has proceeded very much as usual, with no diminution whatsoever in its service to the public. In fact, in several respects it had, she said, been a particularly good year for the Museum at an operational level with:

· the widely-praised tenth anniversary programme and celebrations,
· the Marking the Territory performance event and Shirin Neshat exhibition, which were such critical and popular successes,
· major improvements in visitor facilities, such as the new café and bookshop,
· the continued expansion of the Collection, with such notable donations as Barry Flanagan’s Drummer,
· an increase of almost 70% in primary school projects, despite the foot and mouth crisis and
· an overall programme which had seen visitor numbers rise to their highest level since the Warhol exhibition in 1998.

Celebrating a Decade documents the three principal programming strands of the Museum – Exhibitions, Collection and Education and Community – over the past ten years. It also includes essays from external commentators – Aidan Dunne, art critic, The Irish Times, and the artist, teacher and writer, Siun Hanrahan – with perspectives on each of the Boards of the Museum from their respective Chairmen.

The report is jointly sponsored by the Ireland-America Arts Exchange Foundation and the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands. The Department’s involvement is one of a number of initiatives to mark 50 years of Government support for the arts, dating back to the first arts legislation, which allowed for the establishment of the Arts Council and the funding of museums, galleries and other arts institutions.

Celebrating a Decade is available from the Museum bookshop (price €20.95, £16.50).

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 December 2001

An exhibition of works drawn primarily from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s own Collection, which has recently completed a successful two-year tour of the USA and Canada, opens to the public at IMMA on Wednesday 14 November. ‘Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political’ examines the repositioning of Irish identity in the 1990s as reflected in the work of 13 leading artists. The 44 works mirror the profound changes in Ireland’s political economic and cultural life in a decade which raised questions about traditional identities and the relationships between male and female, urban and rural, North and South, history and the present.

‘Irish Art Now’, organised by Independent Curators International, New York, in collaboration with IMMA, is curated by the Museum’s former Director, Declan McGonagle. It brings together younger as well as more established artists and includes works by Dorothy Cross, Willie Doherty, Mark Francis, Ciarán Lennon, Alice Maher, Caroline McCarthy, Fionnuala Ní Chiosáin, Abigail O’Brien, Maurice O’Connell, Alanna O’Kelly, Kathy Prendergast, Billy Quinn, and Paul Seawright. Using painting, photography, sculpture, video and installation the artists explore subjects ranging from the personal and poetic to the political.

The commonly held perception of Irish art as poetically engaged with the misty, boggy landscape of the west of Ireland, is wittily questioned by Caroline McCarthy in ‘Greetings’, a video piece in which the artist attempts, unsuccessfully, to find a place in this landscape. In Kathy Prendergast’s ‘Love Object’, ‘Secret Kiss’ and ‘Prayer Gloves’ the lasting and enduring qualities of love and human aspirations cause the fusion of the person and the object, a process that is mirrored by the act of knitting by which the work was created. Alice Maher combines nature and art in ‘Berry Dress’ and ‘Staircase of Thorns’ to present images that are simultaneously alluring and frightening, while the fairytale element in these works is taken up again in her remarkable hair drawing Coma Berencies.

Commenting on the exhibition, Catherine Marshall, Head of IMMA’s Collection said: “The thirteen artists assembled in this group exhibition have one overriding thing in common. They are all sophisticated art practitioners in a world that is constantly changing. They are not merely aware of that changing landscape but ready to contribute to the changes themselves, not just in Ireland but in a wider world. Their art is a vehicle for direct engagement with the world, ultimately a political position.”

Since September 1999 the exhibition has toured to the McMullen Museum, Boston; the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, St Johns; Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and the Chicago Cultural Center.

A 96-page, full-colour catalogue, published by Merrell Holberton features an in-depth discussion of these artists’ work by curator Declan McGonagle as well as a general portrait of contemporary Ireland by cultural critic Fintan O’Toole (price £19.95, €25.33).

Irish Art Now continues until 7 March 2002.

Admission is free.
Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun, Bank Hols 12 noon – 5.30pm
27 – 29 Dec

Closed:Monday
24 – 26, 31 Dec

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]

2 November 2001

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