An exhibition of hat moulds and drawings by Philip Treacy, described by The Times as “the world’s most famous milliner”, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 5 April. Unlikely Sculpture: Hatforms by Philip Treacy reveals the process by which Treacy’s extravagant and beautiful hats are imagined and made. It comprises a collection of preparatory solid wooden blocks or moulds, which are individually carved and are used as a base on which the fabric and other materials are formed. A series of drawings is also included. These are being displayed alongside a spectacular video of his recent successful couture show in Paris. The exhibition is sponsored by Panasonic Ireland Ltd.

Philip Treacy is known throughout the world as the most famous hat designer of the age. In a recent poll, he was amongst the ten most recognised fashion designers in the world. His work is clearly part of the fashion world, but his ‘unlikely’ sculptures also cross the boundary into visual art. This project is the first time that the sculptural qualities of these forms will have been explored in Ireland. This project has been organised in association with fig-1 in London, where it was presented in February 2000 during London Fashion Week.

Born in Galway in 1967, Treacy first studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and while a student he started to work with established designers such as Rifat Ozbek, John Galliano and Victor Edelstein. He graduated in 1990 with a First Class Honours Degree with distinction. At the same time he was discovered by the contributing editor of Vogue Isabella Blow, who commissioned the first of many hats for her wedding. Their friendship flourished and Isabella became his champion through the fashion world.

Treacy opened his studio in Belgravia, London, in 1991 and in 1993 presented the first of his annual catwalk shows at London Fashion Week. In 1997 and 1999, his collections were also shown in New York. The millinery collection was extended in 1997 to a range of handbags, scarves, gloves and hairpieces. Treacy has won the British Accessory Designer of the Year Award five times. His designs are exhibited at the Design Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and museums worldwide. An exhibition of his work was shown at the Palazzo Pitti, Florence, for the Biennale di Firenze in 1997.

Treacy works in collaboration with many leading couturiers Karl Lagerfield, Mark Bohan, Helmut Lang, Valentino, Versace, Thierry Mugler, Anna Molinari, Antony Price, Viktor and Rolf and Alexander McQueen. He has designed for the Royal Ballet, films and theatre productions.

Unlikely Sculpture continues at IMMA until 10 June.

Admission is free.

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

Closed: Mondays
Friday 13 April

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

9 March 2001

An exhibition showcasing the work of six leading younger generation international artists opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 8 March. Vantage Point features paintings by Michael Raedecker (the Netherlands/UK) and Daniel Richter (Germany), and mixed media installations, sculptures and environments by Ernesto Neto (Brazil), Rob Pruitt (USA), Ugo Rondinone (Switzerland/USA) and Yinka Shonibare (UK/Nigeria). The exhibition is part of an ongoing strand of programming, which introduces to Ireland for the first time, the work of non-Irish artists who are gaining increasing recognition in the international art world. The 2001 show includes work informed by everyday life and addresses current issues, from ecology and technology to popular culture and globalisation.

Ernesto Neto (b 1964, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) creates sensuous worlds for the viewer to enter and experience. He uses a white translucent lycra fabric, similar to a semi-permeable membrane, in his scultpures and installations which he fills with materials as varied as pungent spices, Amazonian pigments, lead pellets and styrofoam balls. The fabric is then shaped into different forms, such as ovaloids with umbilicial cords, configurations evoking tropical forests and environments one can enter and touch and smell. Since 1988 Neto has exhibited in 29 solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions worldwide. Forthcoming solo exhibitions in 2001 include KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Rob Pruitt (b 1963, Washington, DC) is best known for his off-beat conceptual works often involving a do-it-yourself approach to art while at the same time poking fun at artworld personalities and trends. His 1999 show ‘101 Art ideas You Can Do Yourself’ comprised 101 instructions for creating an artwork, presented in recipe-book form, and also Pruitt’s own execution of 35 of the ideas. ‘No 28 Make a Painting with Make-up’ pictures a puppy made of mascara and blusher, while ‘No 40 Get Plastic Surgery’ is a poster of the much-altered artist Jocelyne Wilderstern. Pruitt began his career in the early
1990s as part of the collaborative duo Pruitt and Early. Since then he has participated in more than 50 group shows and has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, London, Venice, Cologne, Lausanne, Switzerland; Nevers, France; and Knokke, Belgium. He lives and works in New York.

Michael Raedecker’s (b. 1963, Amsterdam) deserted landscapes and sparse interiors are at once familiar and unsettling. They depict marginal places – arid plains or valleys, barren woods, lone buildings smothered in thick blankets of snow or half-glimpsed through a gloomy twilight and forlorn interiors. Avoiding any kind of explicit narrative, Raedecker creates evocative images which have a dream-like, cinematic quality. He employs unusual techniques to create his paintings. In addition to paint, applied to canvas in thin washes and thick impasto, he uses thread, embroidery, sequins and textile matter attached to the canvas, skilfully blurring the distinctions between fine art and craft. Raedecker studied fashion from 1985 to 1990, before deciding to study painting, firstly in Amsterdam and in 1996-97 at Goldsmiths College, London. He was shortlisted for the 2000 Turner Prize. He lives and works in London.

Daniel Richter (b. 1962, Euton, Germany) is primarily interested in paintings that “try to place themselves between representation and abstraction”. Indeed, the seemingly abstract form of many of his works is built upon figurative layers drawn by the artist beforehand, resulting in a powerful and startling interplay between abstract and figurative devices. As soon as the viewer concentrates on any one pictorial element – perhaps based on a political subject, from street violence to the Berlin Wall – the motif is overtaken by a labyrinthine complexity familiar from Richter’s earlier wholly abstract work. Richter has shown in solo and group shows throughout Germany and in Los Angeles, London, New York and Bologna, Italy. He lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg.

Ugo Rondinone’s (b. 1964, Brunner, Switzerland) installations are so multifaceted and the media so diverse that his solo exhibitions, and even individual works, have been likened to groups shows. These range from large dizzying target paintings to handwritten texts, outdoor sculpture and complex video and sound works. Rondinone’s work has been described as addressing the tension between total abandonment and activity. Many of his installations include self portraits, perhaps in the form of a figure, lost in its own world, slumped against the gallery wall. This clown-like figure, seen in a variety of forms, is the one recurring motif in Rondinone’s work, appearing sometimes as a gigantic image in interactive video installations where the sound of laughter is triggered by passing visitors. Since 1985 Rondinone has shown in many solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe and more recently in the USA and Israel. He lives and works in New York.

The central themes of Yinka Shonibare’s (b 1962, London) work are colonialism and post colonialism, Britishness and Africanness. Although born in England, he was educated in Nigeria returning to London at 17 to study art. This background has been pivotal to his art. “A lot of the things I do have something to do with crossing boundaries. I look at British high culture, especially in art, and re-interpret it. I like to take things from British aristocracy and ‘ethnicise’ them.” There is also a preoccupation in Shonibare’s art with subverting themes of class and social placement. ‘Diary Of A Victorian Dandy’, for example, examines the way contemporary artists respond to or react against 19th-century ways of looking at life and art. In it the artist plays on the British taste for costume drama and nostalgia taking on the central role of the dandy in a series of sumptuous, staged pictures, unsurping the role of the well-dress fop, who should be white but in Shonibare’s world is black. Shonibare has exhibited extensively in group and solo exhibitions since 1989. Recent solo exhibitions include Dressing Down, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (and tour) 1999/2000, and Effective Defective Creative, Science Museum, London.

Vantage Point continues until 7 May.

Admission is free.

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

Closed: Mondays
Friday 13 April

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

26 February 2001

An exhibition of works by one of the key figures of American Conceptual Art opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 28 February. Dennis Oppenheim: Land and Body comprises 16 Land and Body works from the 1960s and ’70s including video and three-dimensional installations, mechanised sculptures and large photo and text pieces, which document key works. A video programme of 65 other works provides an essential context for the exhibition within Oppenheim’s overall oeuvre. The exhibition is the most extensive showing of the artist’s work in Ireland to date.

Dennis Oppenheim: Land and Body features many of the revolutionary ideas which Oppenheim, and a small group of other young artists, introduced to the art world of the 1960s and ’70s. A time of great social and political change in the USA and beyond. Chief among these for Oppenheim was his rejection of the conventional gallery space by locating artworks in the real world of the landscape – be it urban or rural. Other defining principles included reconnecting something by radically altering its scale, using quasi-scientific methods for the creation of art and making the work’s configuration or duration subject to climatic or other natural forces. ‘Landslide’, 1968, involved arranging angled boards around a slope of the Long Island Expressway or, as Oppenheim charaterised it, “activating” a pre-existing landscape. For ‘Gallery Transplant’, 1969, Oppenheim marked out the exact dimensions of a gallery in the snow, which then disappeared with the arrival of spring.

In 1970 Oppenheim described his attitude to traditional art spaces: “To me a piece of sculpture inside a room is a disruption of interior space. It’s a protrusion, an unnecessary addition to what could be a sufficient space in itself…At the point I began to think very seriously about place, the physical terrain. And this led me to question the confines of the gallery space and to start working mostly in an outdoor context but still referring back to the gallery site and taking some stimulus from that outside again.”
The exhibition illustrates the extraordinary cohesive development and diversity of Oppenheim’s work, more especially the transition from Land to Body art in the early 1970s. This period saw the artist’s focus of interest move from the macrocosm to microcosm, from the earth to the body and its endangerment and to the body as a means of accessing the mind. In ‘Reading Position for Second Degree Burn’, 1970, Oppenheim lay in the sun for five hours bare-chested except for an open book on his chest. He described the piece as having its roots “in a notion of colour change. I allowed myself to be painted, my skin became pigment.”

The show also includes Oppenheim’s “surrogate performers” – the mechanical puppets which represented the artist’s attempted withdrawl from the use of his own body as an endangered art material. ‘In Theme for a Major Hit’, 1974, a two-foot-high puppet is seen prepeatedly performing strange, contorted movements. The Oppenheim face on the puppet suggest that the artist, despite the myth of autonomy, is constantly manipulated by external forces.

Born in Electric City, Washington, in 1938, Dennis Oppenheim lived in Honolulu and California before moving to New York in 1966, where he continues to live and work. He executed his first earthwork in 1967 and had his first one-person show in New York in 1968 followed by showings in Paris, Bern and Finsterwolde, the Netherlands, in 1969, and at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1972. Since then he has created Earth works and Body works and also monumental fireworks, throughout Europe and North America. In recent years he has had one-person shows in Washington, Mexico City, Venice, Geneva and Barcelona and participated in group shows at the Whitney Museum, New York, the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Admission is free.

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun & Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Closed: Mondays, Friday 13 April

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

12 February 2001

A new installation directed by Neil Jordan and based on Samuel Beckett’s play for theatre, ‘Not I’, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 1 February.

‘Not I’ features an actress seated on stage with just the mouth spotlit. The mouth then delivers a long monologue, a constant stream of consciousness. Evasion is the principle theme as highlighted by Beckett’s explicit note to the text in which the mouth’s chief endeavour throughout the play is its vehement refusal to relinquish the third person. The mouth undergoes a desperate struggle to avoid saying “I” marked by four moments of crisis in which the monologue becomes a dialogic question and answer with an inner voice not heard by the audience.

The installation at IMMA comprises six monitors set out in a circle. The viewer is invited to enter the circle and to experience the delivery of the text from six different angles. This is made possible by the unusual process used in making the original film – in six seperate 13-minute takes with multiple cameras. The film is produced by Blue Angel Films.

Commenting on his reasons for realising the piece in this medium Neil Jordan said: “Having completed the film, I realised I was in a unique situation. I had a series of records of the same event, the same performance, from different angles, each of which had their own integrity. What was unique about them is that they were each complete. Normally in film, one breaks a performance, down to various component parts, each piece of which is shot from its appropriate angle, so the film only exists as a composite of all the different shots. In the case of ‘Not I’, each angle was also the complete version. If I could pull them all into sync and present each angle simultaneously to the viewer, the multiplicity with which cinema presents the world would be accessible to the viewer in a unique manner.”

Neil Jordan’s film career began with the role of creative consultant on John Boorman’s ‘Excalibur’ in 1981, about which he made a documentary extitled ‘The Making of Excalibur – Myth in Movie’. Since then he has made twelve films: ‘Angel'(1982), ‘Company of Wolves'(1984), ‘Mona Lisa'(1986), ‘The Crying Game'(1992) for which he won a Oscar for best screenplay, ‘Interview with the Vampire'(1994), ‘Michael Collins'(1995), which was awarded a Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival, ‘The Butcher Boy'(1996), for which he won a Silver Bear for Direction at the Berlin Film Festival, ‘In Dreams'(1999) and ‘The End of the Affair'(1999) for which he won the BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay.

This special showing marks the donation of the piece to the Museum by Neil Jordan and coincides with the Beckett on Film Festival at the IFC, where the film version of all 19 of Samuel Beckett’s plays, including ‘Not I’, will be premiered from 2 to 8 February.

‘Not I’ continues at IMMA until 14 February.

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

Closed: Mondays
Friday 13 April

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 6129999

26 January 2001

Gordon Lambert Collection goes on show at IMMA

An exhibition of some 55 works by leading Irish and international artists, drawn from the Gordon Lambert Trust Collection, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday 22 January 2002. Although works from the Gordon Lambert Collection have been widely seen as part of other Collection shows at IMMA, Profile of a Collection is only the second exhibition drawn exclusively from his Collection since the donation of the works to the State in 1992.

The exhibition highlights a number of the Collection’s special characteristics. The unusually high representation of non-Irish artists, for a collection begun in 1954, can be seen in a tapestry by Josef Albers, an op-art work by Carlos Cruz-Diez, a conceptual piece by Shusaku Arakawa and prints by Picasso, Braque, Miró and others.

Many works have been added to the gift since 1992, including those by young and emerging artists, such as Mark Francis and Corban Walker, and by more established figures including Howard Hodgkin and Sean Scully. For this exhibition some of these new additions to the collection are being shown alongside familiar favourites.

Profile of a Collection spans Gordon Lambert’s 48 years as one of Ireland’s leading collectors from his first acquisition Pont du Carousel (1954) by Barbara Warren to Millennium Eye by Howard Hodgkin from 2000. It also all0ws the public an opportunity to trace the fascinating development of a unique private collection built up with obvious dedication and enjoyment over almost half a century.

An accountant by profession and former Managing Director of Jacob’s Biscuits Ireland, Gordon Lambert has been a committed member, often a leading one, of almost every organisation established to improve the status of the visual arts in Ireland. He has been a senator in the Oireachtas, a member of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, a member of the various ROSC exhibition committees and served on the board of the National Gallery and the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery. Recognised internationally for his advocacy of contemporary art, he was invited to join the International Council of MoMA in New York, and served as a juror for the prestigious Art Festival at Cagnes-sur-Mer. However, Gordon Lambert always saw his most important task as the establishment of a
. . .
museum for modern and contemporary art in Ireland. When that vision was finally realised in 1991 Gordon Lambert marked the event by donating much of his private collection to the Museum and through his Trust he has continued to acquire and donate art to IMMA ever since. Gordon Lambert served on the first two boards of the Irish Museum of Modern Art from 1990 to 2000 and was awarded the Business 2Arts Millennium Award in 2000.

Commenting on the exhibition and the importance of the Gordon Lambert Collection to the Museum, Catherine Marshall, Head of the Collection, said: “Gordon Lambert’s Collection is that rare thing – a truly cosmopolition Collection with a perfect balance of local and international artworks. The fact that it was given unconditionally to the people of Ireland through the Museum is an indication of this man’s generosity and his confidence in another generation. Now, nearly fifty years after the Collection was begun it remains refreshingly modern and progressive.”

Profile of a Collection: the Gordon Lambert Trust Collection at IMMA continues until 23 June 2002.
Admission is free.
Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun, Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Closed Mondays
29 March
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]
15 January 2001

An exhibition of some 60 works by the well-known Northern Irish painter Colin Middleton (1910-83) opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 24 January 2001. Colin Middleton: Paintings and Drawings from the McClelland Collection focuses on Middleton’s astonishing output of Surrealist works from the late 1930s and early 1940s. The works form part of the 400-works collection of George and Maura McClelland, Middleton’s good friends and agents. The collection, currently on long-term loan to IMMA, includes a total of 90 of Middleton’s paintings and drawings ranging across his entire oeuvre and dating from 1937 to 1972. The exhibition reveals Middleton’s extraordinary technical skill and range of interests. While these were expressed through a variety of modernist styles they are all pervaded by his fudamentally Surreal vision of the world. Another constant thread is his consistent use of the female archetype in the landscape.

Born in Belfast in 1910, Colin Middleton was probaly the most eclectic Irish painter of the 20th century – moving with ease and conviction through Cubist, Surrealist and Expressionist styles throughout his life. Largely self-taught, his father’s influence as an amateur artist and visits to London and Belgium fuelled his early interest in art. He worked in the family damask business until 1947 when the opportunity to teach art enabled him to give more time to painting. Throughout the rest of his life, frequently made precarious by poverty, Middleton painted images thrown up by his rich imagination. These derived their strength from two main sources – the passion with which Middleton presented them and the artist’s interest in the colourful life of ordinary people – who sold fish, worked the streets and entertained the bus queues.

Middleton received many awards and considerable recognition throughout his career but critical response to his work was always modified by a confused reaction to his numerous stylisic changes. Those changes may have affected Middleton’s commercial success buy they did not alienate the poets, including Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney, who have made a number of references to his work in their poems. George McClelland first met Middleton in the 1960s and began to acquire many of his works. A number of acquisitions in the early 1970s helped fund a visit by Middleton to Australia in 1972. In 1973 McClelland Galleries International showed 27 watercolours based on this trip.

Colin Middletion: Paintings and Drawings from the McClelland Collection continues until 24 June.

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun, Bank Hols. 12 noon – 5.30pm
Closed: Mondays
Friday 13 April

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

12 January 2001

The names of four artists shortlisted for the £15,000 Glen Dimplex Artists Award 2001, orgainsed by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, were announced today (Wednesday 13 December) by the jury panel. They are American film and video artist Matthew Barney, the British photographic artist Richard Billingham, the Irish painter Elizabeth Magill and the Scottish-born sound artist Susan Philipsz.

Described by ‘The New York Times’ as “the most important American artist of his generation”, Matthew Barney is best known for his ‘Cremaster’ film series. Slow moving and hypnotic, his films manipulate different theatrical and cinematic genre to produce works of great richness and complexity. At once biological, psychological and technological, Barney’s films range in subject matter from the plight of a love-lorn queen in turn-of-the-century Budapest to the life story of the Utah murder Gary Gilmore. Each ‘Cremaster’ instalment is accompanied by sculptures, photographs, drawings, artists books and video editions, which serve to embody and define the series as a whole. 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 Centre, Minneapolis, the Tate, London, and the Kunsthalle, Vienna. He is nominated for the award for the ‘Cremaster 2’, shown by Temple Bar Properties, in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin, in May 2000. Born in San Francisco, in 1967, Barney now lives and works in New York.

Richard Billingham’s photographs present an unflinching portrait of his family and the urban environment around his home. He first began taking photographs as a means of getting ideas for his paintings, but later came to the view that they could exist in their own right. The photographs constitute a fascinating portrait of his life – tender, funny and melancholic. Frequent subjects are his father, Ray, whom he describes as a “chronic alchololic” and his mother, Liz, who “hardly drinks but does smoke a lot. She 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 North East of England. He is nominated for his exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, which comprised these later works. The exhibition was originally shown at the IKON Gallery Birmingham. Billingham holds a BA in Fine Art from the University of Sunderland. Since 1994 he has shown in many group exhibitions and in solo shows throughout the UK and Europe and in New York and Los Angeles. Born in Birmingham in 1970, he 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 as a medium. This has taken her through the use of pattern repetition, geometry and the photomechancial. Her most recent body of work is a typically idiosyncratic investigation of the traditions of landscape painting, via a witty parody of the landscapes of the Romantic period. “The spaces I create feel familiar but are more in tune with half visited, non places. Although they appear as landscapes, I relate to them more as some sort of neutral areas,” she says. She is nominated for her participation in the ‘Places in Mind’ exhibtion at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast (October-December 2000). Born in Ontario, Canada in 1959, Magill was brought up in Cushendall, Co Antrim. She know lives and works in London. Magill attended the Belfast College of Art and the Slade School of Art, London. She has participated in more than 30 group shows and has had solo exhibitions in several UK venues and in Dublin, Madrid, Dusseldorf and Saarbrucken, Germany.

Susan Philipsz’ work deals with the spatial properties of sound and with the relationships between sound and architecture. She is interested primarily in the emotive and psychological properties of sound, and how it can be used as a device to alter individual consciousness. 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 theit 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, where the pauses between the songs are just as important as the singing itself. “My sound pieces are an attempt to lure the listener out of the present, to catapult them from the ‘here and now’ into a more private and personal state of mind”, she says. Philipsz is shorlisted for four sound works – ‘The Internationale’, ‘It Means Nothing to Me’, ‘The Dead’ and ‘Reminds Me Baby of You’. Philipsz holds an MA in Fine Art from the University of Ulster. She has participated in many group shows worldwide, including Manifesta 3, and exhibitions in Derry, Walsal, Amsterdam and Chicago. Born in Glasgow in 1965, she lives and works in Belfast and is currently on a PSI scholarship in New York.

One hundred and ten nominations were received this year, 36 from overseas. Commenting on the shortlist panel member Polly Devlin, the writer and art collector, said: “We were all greatly impressed at the richness and diversity of the submissions and these qualities are also reflected in the shortlist, with each artist’s work being not only so entirely different but created by such diverse means. These artists and their work are already lodged in the mind of the gallery going public, yet each has created work which is at once new, surprising and familiar – the shock of the familiar made completely new”. Fellow panel member Jonathan Watkins, Director of the IKON Gallery, Birmingham, said: “The 2001 shortlist was arrived at in the most obvious and democratic way. They were all neck and neck and clearly ahead of the rest. The artists short-listed had such different strengths, working across a wide range of media, styles and propositions. So far they are equally impressive to the panel. Our next step, deciding who will win, is obviously going to be very difficult.”

The Glen Dimplez 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 of 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 four shortlisted artists will now be invited to show work on exhibition at the Museum, which opens to the public in May 2001. All four will be paid a fee of £1,000 at this stage. The £15,000 award will be presented to the winning artist at a dinner following the final jury meeting later in the year. The award was first made in 1994. Since 1998 an additional non-monetary award for a substained contribution by an Irish artist to the visual arts in Ireland has also been made.

The jury panel for the 2001 award is:
Polly Devlin, writer, art collector and Chair of IMMA’s International Council.
Jonathan Watkins, Director, IKON Gallery, Birmingham.
Mark Francis, Director, Fig. 1, London.
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).

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

Shifting Ground at the Irish Museum of Modern Art

A major exhibition examining aspects of Irish art of the last 50 years through the eyes of five noted critics and commentators opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 10 November. Shifting Ground: Selected Works of Irish Art 1950-2000 has been selected by Bruce Arnold, Dorothy Walker, Oliver Dowling, Medb Ruane and Caoimhín MacGiolla Léith, each of whom were invited to apply their own criteria to identifying key works in each of the five decades. The exhibition comprises over 60 paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, multi-media and installation works by some of Ireland’s best-known artists including Jack B Yeats, Patrick Hennessy, William Scott, Barrie Cooke, Robert Ballagh, Felim Egan, Brian Maguire, Dorothy Cross, James Coleman, Willie Doherty, Siobhán Hapaska and many others. Shifting Ground is presented in association with The Irish Times.

The overall intention of Shifting Ground is to present, in the millennium year, a speculative rather than a definitive survey of Irish art, and to articulate the shifting ground of the Irish context within which art was made and seen during the second half of the 20th century. It is hoped that the exhibition will also create a debate about the artists and works selected and serve to place today’s confident Irish art practice in the context of art activity in the post-war period.

The question of identity has been an important consideration in the choice of artists. The exhibition includes works by artists such as Sean Scully and Michael Craig Martin who, although born in Ireland, lived and worked mainly or entirely abroad and by artists like Stephen McKenna who, while born outside Ireland, developed aspects of their practice within and made a significant contribution to Irish art of the period.

Commenting on the exhibition IMMA’s Director, Declan McGonagle, said:
“Shifting Ground presents an opportunity for people to see how recent contemporary Irish art, which is gaining increasing international attention, relates to Irish art of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition brings together key works of this period and presents various readings of Irish art in order to generate debate and discussion, challenging the idea of a single authoritative viewpoint.”

The selectors are all respected commentators who have had a varied involvement in the Irish art context over the past 50 years – Bruce Arnold and Dorothy Walker as art critics and writers, Oliver Dowling, formerly as a gallery owner and currently as Visual Arts Officer of the Art Council, Medb Ruane as critic and Caoimhín MacGiolla Léith as a writer and critic.

On Friday 24 November at 12noon Declan McGonagle, Director, IMMA, chairs a discussion with the selectors in the Lecture Room, National Museum of Ireland – Collins Barracks. Admission is free, booking essential.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication, with essays by the selectors, looking at Irish art in the period 1950 to 2000. Price £9.95.

Shifting Ground continues until 18 February 2000.

Admission is free.

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun, Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
and 27-30 December

Closed Mondays
23 – 26 December

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

26 October 2000

Shamiana : Mughal Textiles at the Irish Museum of Modern Art

An exhibition of some 20 textile panels inspired largely by the magnificent collection of Mughal paintings held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 27 October. The works in Shamiana: Mughal Textiles, which is organised by the Museum’s Education and Community Department, were created by groups of mainly Asian women and children, primarily in the United Kingdom but also in a number of other countries, as part of an arts education project developed by the V&A in 1997. One panel The Dance of Life, 1993, is the work of Irish and East Asian women who worked with artist Wendy Cowan at the West Tallaght Womens’ Textile Group. Drawing on the Mughal miniatures in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, the women explored the social restructuring of their lives in contemporary Ireland.

The Shamiana panels, exhibited at the V&A in a Mughal ceremonial tent (or Shamiana) depict narrative scenes relating to home, refuge and dispossession. Most of the participants in the core UK groups shared the common experience of immigration, usually from South Asia but also from the Middle East and North Africa. The women were particularly concerned with their own, and their children’s, alienation from their root culture. A growing generational and cultural gap with their children spurred many to becoming involved as a means of addressing their sense of isolation and loneliness.

Many of the panels reflect both the superb skills traditionally seen in the depiction of familiar South Asian celebratory themes and the social importance of embroidery in these communities. However, for many of the younger participants both the process and the outcomes were new. The Shamiana project is part of a long tradition of innovative education work at the V&A, who are currently partners with the Irish Museum of Modern Art in a Socrates-funded European transitional project exploring museums’ education practice.

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Commenting on the project, Helen O’Donoghue, Head of the Education and Community Department at IMMA, said: “This international project, which included Irish and Indian women living in Ireland in 1993, is an opportunity to explore the outcomes of a unique project initiated by Shireen Akbar at the V&A. It is particularly relevant in present day Ireland to show these textiles, which deal with cultural diversity and immigration and the role that museums can play in facilitating integration and understanding of the lives of people with different backgrounds and perspectives. The project will act as a springboard for a new collaboration between the IMMA and the Chester Beatty Library and aims to open up both the Museum and the CBL Galleries to new communities living in Ireland.”

During the exhibition, IMMA is organising an intensive education and community programme, in association with the Chester Beatty Library, focusing on developing social diversity in Ireland.

Shamiana: Mughal Textiles continues until 18 February 2001.

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun & Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Closed Mondays
23 – 26 December

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

13 October 2000