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

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