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

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