An exhibition of some 70 prints by the distinguished Irish-born printmaker Tim Mara (1948-1997) opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 7 April. Mirror Man : Prints by Tim Mara marks a generous donation by Tim Mara’s family of eight of the artist’s prints to the Museum. The exhibition has been selected by Mara’s friend, the painter Albert Irvin.

Mirror Man : Prints by Tim Mara celebrates Mara as an exceptional printmaker and teacher, and includes a representative selection of works from 1971 to 1997. His output included traditional printmaking techniques such as screenprinting and etching, as well as more unusual methods such as heat-transfer xerox on canvas and hand-painted, construction collages and assemblages.

Tim Mara was born in Dublin in 1948. His family moved to England in 1953, where he was educated at St. Joseph’s College, London, Wolverhampton Art College (1970-73) and the Royal College of Art, London, where he attained his Masters Degree. He taught as part-time lecturer in printmaking at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and Brighton Polytechnic before taking up the full-time post of Principal Lecturer in Printmaking at Chelsea School of Art (1980-90). He was appointed Professor of Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in 1990, and was Head of the School of Fine Art between 1993 and 1995. The University of Wolverhampton awarded him a posthumous honorary doctorate in 1997. Mara exhibited widely taking part in over 80 group shows in the UK and more than 50 international exhibitions. His work is in several public and private collections worldwide.

In a guide to the exhibition his fellow printmaker, artist and friend Chris Plowman says: “It is fitting that Tim Mara’s family and the Irish Museum of Modern Art have worked together to pay tribute to him with this exhibition. The selection of works is a celebration of his life and art, and demonstrates his unwavering commitment to the medium of printmaking. This is rare in contemporary practice and Mara added a profoundly intellectual dimension to the process he used.”
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A number of prints in the exhibition are for sale with all proceeds going to the Tim Mara Trust Fund, set up in 1998 to support innovation and excellence in printmaking in the form of annual awards to students of the discipline.

A fully-illustrated colour catalogue Tim Mara: the Complete Prints, with an essay by Christopher Fraying, Rector of the Royal College of Art, London, published by the College in 1998, accompanies the exhibition (price £10.00); an exhibition guide is also available (price £1.00)

Mirror Man: Prints by Tim Mara continues until 21 June

Admission is free.

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun & Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Closed Monday, Friday 21 April

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

3 April 2000

A series of new climate-controlled galleries, which will regularly house exhibitions from important collections worldwide, will open to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 30 March 2000. The galleries, which will add 320 square metres to the Museum’s exhibition area, are located in the former Deputy Master’s House, beside the Formal Garden in the north-east corner of the Royal Hospital site.

The exhibition programme for the New Galleries will focus on special collections, sometimes drawn from the Museum’s own Collection but also from public and private collections throughout the world. The inaugural exhibitions are:

– Picasso: Working on Paper (30 March – 9 July 2000), drawn from the Musée Picasso in Paris, the Picasso family and selected museums and concentrating particularly on Picasso’s use of newspaper as a material in collages, as a ground and as a source of subject matter throughout his life.

– the first showing of The Barry Joule Archive: Works on Paper attributed to Francis Bacon (30 March – 27 August 2000), highlighting the artist’s awareness of and involvement with popular culture and mass media.

The exhibitions are presented in association with The Irish Times.

The exhibitions in the New Galleries are designed to represent points of origins in the works of major 20th-century artists and art movements in the context of the Museum’s dynamic ongoing exhibitions of contemporary work and its innovative access programmes. There was, arguably, no more original artist in that century than Picasso (1881-1973), whose practice covered almost all important developments in art throughout the 20th century. This showing of 120 works on paper and archive material, some of which are being seen for the first time, will enable the public to get a sense of the mind of the artist at work, from the early 1900s up to the late 1960s. His use of
. . .
newspaper as a ground, as subject matter and as a material in collages, will provide a unique opportunity to explore this important but little-known aspect of Picasso’s work. The exhibition is curated by Anne Baldassari of the Musée Picasso.

There is a direct correspondence in subject matter to the parallel exhibition: a recently revealed series of works on paper and worked-over photographic material attributed to Francis Bacon from the Barry Joule Archive. In this case the view that Bacon (1909-92) did not draw or prepare before ‘attacking’ the canvas, which the artist also projected, is challenged by this imagery, indicating the need for a re-reading of critical discussion around Bacon’s work in general.

The exhibition, comprising 100 works, will be the first showing anywhere of this material. The use of news and sports images, as well as art images and the annotation of books, demonstrates not only Bacon’s knowledge of art of the period (late 1950s and early ‘60s) and of art history in general but also his awareness of and involvement with popular culture and the mass media. This exhibition precedes the Hugh Lane Gallery’s major exhibition of Francis Bacon’s paintings, opening in June 2000, which will feature key works spanning Bacon’s entire career and will celebrate the Hugh Lane Gallery’s acquisition of his studio and its contents. These two exhibitions will provide an unprecedented opportunity to assess a fuller representation of this important post-War artist.

Commenting on the exhibitions, the Museum’s Director, Declan McGonagle said:
“Bacon was an artist in the world; so too was Picasso. Neither can be consigned to history, and any new reading of their work creates implications for contemporary artists. While the paths of both artists are quite distinct there is a linkage in their visualisations of ideas. Both exhibitions represent a transformation of the ordinary and the commonplace into the extraordinary, revealing something of each artist’s thinking and decision-making process. Presenting this material
in the Museum’s New Galleries, as one century ends and another
. . .
begins, will give people new insights into the minds of two crucially
important artists who have explored the nature and meaning of human experience in the 20th century. The Museum is particularly grateful to the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Ms Síle de Valera, TD, for the support which has allowed this new dimension in provision to be realised.”

The Deputy Master’s House, which contains the New Galleries, dates to 1763 and acted as lodgings for the Deputy Masters, or surgeons, to the Hospital and their families. The restoration of the Deputy Master’s House and the creation of the New Galleries cost £2.2 million, made up of European Union Structural Funds and exchequer funding allocated by the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands with resoruces for the Office of Public Works. Shay Cleary Architects carried out the conversion of the interior of the building to high-quality gallery spaces, including a new entrance court and an entirely new basement gallery. OPW Architectural Services was responsible for the conservation of the external fabric of the building. The project provides a new function for the existing building within the overall site, and juxtaposes new and historic elements in the spirit of the earlier adaptation of the main Museum building, which allows the past and the present to coexist.

Under the Percent for Art Scheme, the Office of Public Works has commissioned a permanent public artwork for the New Galleries building, Flow, by Irish-born artist Jim Buckley, involves the introduction into two trees, adjacent to the building, of a coherent system of light lines using side emitting fibre optics to punctuate the architecture and landscape. The impact of the light will change with the time of day and year, and with prevailing weather conditions, giving an elusive, intriguing quality to the work.

The Picasso exhibition is accompanied by a 190-page catalogue, with 200 colour images and a substantial essay by Anne Baldassari, published by Merrell Publishers, London (price £19.95). The Bally Joule Archive is
. . .
accompanied by a 96-page publication, with 60 colour images, an essay by Dr David Alan Mellor and contributions by Barry Joule and the artist Richard Hamilton, published by IMMA (price £17.95).

Admission: £3.00, concessions £1.50, under-18s free. Admission free on Saturdays.

Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun & Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
Closed Mondays, 21 April

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

1 March 2000

An exhibition showcasing further displays from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection has just gone on show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Art Without Precedent: Nine Artists from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Collection, focuses specifically on works by artists whose work practices are seen to embrace leading issues relating to Outsider Art. Although from widely diverging backgrounds, the artists all share a lack of formal art training, a powerful creative imagination and a fascination with the spiritual and mythological world. All share an ability to focus single-mindly on their own inner vision, uninhibited by the weight of art history or training.

The exhibition comprises works by Carlo (Italy), Henry Darger (US), Madge Gill (Britain), ‘J.B’ Murry (US), Michael Nedjer (France), Carl Peploe (Britain), Oswald Tschirtner (Austria), Ben Wilson (Britain), and Anna Zemankova (Czechoslovakia). Of these only Ben Wilson received a basic introduction to formal art education and that is not reflected in his work. Madge Gill and ‘J.B’ Murry disclaim any personal responsibility for their work, and refer to the spirit that works through them. Artists such as Carlo and Tschirtner were, or still are, working from within psychiatric hospitals. This selection also highlights the international nature of the collection.

The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection was established in 1981 by the British writer, film-maker and gallery director, Victor Musgrave, and his companion, Monika Kinley. The Collection was to have formed the nucleus of a proposed public museum of outsider art. When that was not possible the Collection was offered to the Irish Museum of Modern Art – its first public home. Since Victor Musgrave’s death in 1984, Monika Kinley has continued the work of forming a representative collection to be made available to the public. The first Irish exhibition of work from the Outsider Art Collection, Art Unsolved, was held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1998. Since then, works by Outsiders have been represented in all displays of the Museum’s own Collection. It was recently announced
. . .
that the collection of 750 works by some 70 artists is now on indefinate loan to the Museum. The exhibition continues until 17 May.

Admission is free.

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

14 February 2000

The inauguration of a series of new climate-controlled galleries with exhibitions of works by Picasso and Francis Bacon, the largest presentation in Europe to date of the work of the distinguished American painter Leon Golub, an exhibition from a major donation of graphics and prints from North, South and Central America and the development of further international links by the Museum’s Education and Community Department are all part of an exciting and wide-ranging programme for 2000 announced today (Tuesday 25 January) by the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Plans for the coming year also include an exhibition of Land and Body Art works by the leading American Conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim, displays from two important private collections recently given on long-term loan to the Museum, and a research project on the subject of older people as adult learners.

Commenting on the programme for the coming year, the Museum’s Director Declan McGonagle said:
Year 2000 will see a major new initiative at the Museum when the New Galleries open with important but little seen works by Picasso and Francis Bacon. This new state-of-the-art provision will allow the Museum present bodies of fragile historical 20th century artworks, which would otherwise not be shown here, and begins the completion phase of the development of buildings on this site as components of the Museum. The Museum will continue to juxtapose the work of younger innovative artists with work by established figures both from the Irish and non-Irish context, across a wide range of media including installation, sculpture, photography and painting. “
Displays from the Collections will enable people to experience the growing body of artists held by the Museum, and the award winning Education and Community programmes will give people increasing access opportunities. Year 2000 will be a year of consolidation of existing strands of programming and major new development in the overall structure.

. . .
Exhibitions
In the most significant development at the Museum since its inauguration in
1991, a series of new climate-controlled galleries, which will house exhibitions
from important collections worldwide, opens to the public in the Deputy Master’s House on the Museum site on 30 March with two major international exhibitions. Picasso: Working on Paper (30 March – 9 July), curated by Anne Baldassari of the Musée Picasso in Paris, comprises works drawn from the Musée Picasso, the Picasso family and selected museums and concentrates on Picasso’s use of newspaper as a ground, as a source of subject matter and as a material in collages over a long period. The Barry Joule Archive: Works on Paper attributed to Francis Bacon (30 March – 27 August) is the first showing of this body of work highlighting Bacon’s awareness of and involvement with popular culture and mass media. Works by leading American Conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim (21 July – January 2001) and paintings and drawings by Irish artist Colin Middleton from the George and Maura McClelland Collection (8 September – February 2001) will be shown in the New Galleries later in the year.

The strand of programming concentrating on the work of younger international artists continues with exhibitions by the Danish-born installation artist Olafur Eliasson (until 30 April) and the Belfast-born photographic artist Hannah Starkey (17 May – 27 August). A retrospective of the work of the American painter Leon Golub can be seen from 5 July to 15 October, while seminal works by Irish artists over the past 50 years will be shown in an exhibition selected by writers and curators Bruce Arnold, Dorothy Walker, Oliver Dowling, Medb Ruane and Caoimhin MacGiolla Leith. An exhibition of prints by Irish-born artist Tim Mara, marking a donation of a selection of his work to the Museum, can be seen from 7 April to 21 June.

Works by the five artists shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex Artists Award will be exhibited from 20 April to 18 June, with the award being made towards the end of that period. Following the success of the 1999 project, Dorothy Cross’s Ghost Ship, the Nissan Art Project for the Millennium will be selected in March and realised between September and December.

. . .
Shamiana: Mughal Textiles (26 October – February 2001) comprises some 20 textile panels inspired largely by the magnificent collection of Mughal painting held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The exhibition is part of a collaborative project between the Museum’s Education and Community Department and the V & A.

The Collection
The Museum’s rapidly growing Collection will continue to be shown throughout the First Floor West Galleries and the Gordon Lambert Galleries in
2000. The current Lifescapes exhibition continues until 7 April and Half Dust … until 5 June. The Maire and Maurice Foley Loan (16 June – 1 October), comprising works by artists active in Ireland in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, will be shown to coincide with the first showing at the Museum of Shane Cullen’s Fragmens Sur Les Institutions Republicanes IV, recreating messages smuggled out of prisons in Northern Ireland.

Other plans include a more focussed look at some of the artists in the
Musgrave-Kinley Outsider Collection (until 17 May) and, from 10 May to September, an exhibition from a major donation of 150 Pan-American prints, recently donated by Canton Y Papel de Mexico, part of the Smurfit Group. Works from the George and Maura McClelland Collection, of Irish and especially Northern Irish, paintings, sculpture and works on paper, recently loaned to the Museum, go on show from 16 September to January 2001.

Education and Community
Over the past nine years, an extensive range of programmes has been developed at the Museum with the intention of creating and increasing access to the visual arts, as well as engagement in their meaning and practice. The 2000 programme continues to operate on many levels – in research projects in association with the Department of Education and Science, with community-based programmes within the local catchment area and with the
general public in a gallery-based initiative through the provision of Explorer 1.

Following the Come to the Edge exhibition, curated by St Michael’s Parish
. . .
Active Retirement Association, Inchicore, the group continues its involvement with the Museum in a transitional research project exploring older people as adult learners, co-funded under the European Socrates programme.

This year the programme develops its international links in Austria, Sweden, Portugal and the UK through a series of seminars on art education in Museums. During the May Festival Bealtaine, co-ordinated by Age & Opportunity, IMMA hosts a seminar to explore key findings of this research in the Irish context.

For the primary school sector, Breaking the Cycle, a research project aimed at combating education disadvantage being carried out in partnership with
the Department of Education and Science, enters its third year, while children
from St Thomas’s Junior School in Jobstown, Tallaght, and from St Lawrence O’Toole’s, Seville Place, Dublin, will be working with artists exploring the Museum’s Collection.

Explorer 1, the interactive programme for family audiences, continues in the Museum’s galleries every Sunday from February to the end of July and
Focus On . . . continues to provide an introduction to the Museum for a variety of community groups, including youth and afterschool groups, people with learning and physical disabilities, women’s and older people’s groups.

Artists’ Work Programme
The Artists’ Work Programme, the Museum’s studio/residency programme, has hosted 85 artists since its inception in 1994. The Work Programme operates in eight studio spaces in renovated coach houses, adjacent to the main Museum building. There are also three self-contained apartments, and five spacious bedrooms in the recently restored Flanker Building, providing living accommodation for the studios. During 2000 artists from Ireland, the UK, South Africa, Japan, New Zealand, Germany, Nigeria, USA, Bangladesh and Finland are participating in the programme.

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

The National Programme
The National Programme is designed to make the Museum’s assets, skills and resources available to centres outside Dublin. Through the lending of exhibitions and individual works, and the development of collaborative projects with other organisations, the National Programme establishes the Museum as inclusive, accessible and national.

During 2000 the National Programme will develop a major cross-border curatorial project involving a number of partner organisations. As part of this process eight women from Co Leitrim will join eight women from Co Fermanagh to explore the collection with a view to making an exhibition which will go on display in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim, and Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, between September and December 2000.

In January 2000 two portfolios of prints from the Weltkunst Collection – Other Men’s Flowers and the London Group Portfolio – go on display in Sligo Art Gallery, while somebodies, a selection of works from the Collection curated by young people from Waterford, Meath, Cavan and Dublin, travels to the Toradh Gallery in Duleek, Co Meath.

Projects in Ballinakill, Co Laois, North Tipperary, Co Wicklow, Kilkenny and at a number of festivals are also planned.

For further information please contact Philomena Byrne or Onagh Carolan at
Tel : +353 1 612 9900, Fax : +353 1 612 9999

25 January 2000

An exhibition of some 22 artworks, selected by eight secondary school students from Waterford, Meath and Dublin, goes on show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday 13 July 1999. The exhibition, entitled somebodies, is being selected and curated from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Collection, by a group of Young Curators who have been working with the Head of the Museum’s Collection, Catherine Marshall over the last 3 years. This is the first time that people of their age have been invited into a national institution to curate an exhibition.

The Young Curators are a group of eight teenagers who have come together using the Museum’s Collection as their primary resource. Drawn from schools in Waterford, Meath and Dublin, the Young Curators developed out of Open Minds, a Waterford-based project which resulted in the exhibition Blah, Blah, Blah, selected from the Allied Irish Banks Collection and shown at the City Hall, Waterford, in 1997. Now, three years later, the group has grown to involve students from Meath and Dublin.

The concept of the exhibition was developed and refined through regular meetings at both the Garter Lane Arts Centre in Waterford and at the Museum at which art works were selected, venues agreed and problems of space, hanging, lighting and catalogue design discussed. Catherine Marshall, Head of the Collection, said :
“Despite the pressure of Leaving Certificate and other examinations, they have been an enthusiastic, inventive and hard-working group. Most inspiring of all – they have been astonishingly clear-headed and business-like in arriving at group decisions, sensible in their allocation of work-loads, in short, a model for older and more experienced professionals.”

Among the artists the group have chosen are Janine Antoni, Robert Ballagh, Dorothy Cross, John Kindness, Nigel Rolfe and Kathy Prendergast. One of the curators, Barry Gavin of Waterford said :
“The reason I chose the pieces I did is because they all stood out from the others in different ways. I didn’t pick them for any artistic reason really. I just like them, and that’s what I’d like to see in an exhibition of art, pictures that are selected because the curators liked them, not for any feat of artistic achievement, which, though skillful, can be horribly boring”.
The project is jointly supported by the Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford, and the Museum. An illustrated catalogue with texts by The Young Curators, will accompany the exhibition.

somebodies will continue at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until 26 September after which it will travel to Garter Lane Arts Centre in Waterford and Cavan County Museum.

Admission is free.

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

For further information and colour and black and white images please contact Philomena Byrne or Rowena Neville, Tel : +353-1-612 9900
Fax : +353-1-612 9999

24 June 1999

An exhibition of paintings by the highly regarded Scottish painter Callum Innes opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 23 June. Innes, the winner of the prestigious NatWest Art Prize in 1998, will show a specially selected body of new and recent works, including paintings from his Exposed and Resonance series alongside a number of watercolours. The exhibition is part of an ongoing strand of programming at the Museum which aims to bring important new international art to Ireland, as well as responding to new developments in art in Ireland.

Callum Innes is internationally recognised as having made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary abstract painting. He claims a desire to reconnect with an audience that he sees as alienated by the theoretical debates that have surrounded painting in the latter half of the 20th century. Working largely in monochrome, his process is one of subtraction – applying and then removing paint from the surface of the canvas to produce works with an enigmatic, meditative quality.

Writer Marco Livingstone has described Innes’ work as “unusually quiet by contemporary standards, in need of an intimate, one-to-one examination by the viewer …. Photographs of his paintings convey almost nothing of their subtleties of surface and technique the fine tuning of their colour and material substance or their luscious sensuousness.” On his own estimate, he destroys as much as three-quarters of his output, the price of his own exacting standards. An almost imperceptible flaw in one section of a canvas can, for him, ruin a painting whose surface is otherwise immaculately achieved. The works in the exhibition have been selected for the ground floor rooms of the museum – a perfect setting for that ‘intimate examination by the viewer’.

Callum Innes was born in Edinburgh in 1961, where he continues to live and work. In addition to the £26,000 NatWest Art Prize in 1998, he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and the Jerwood Prize in 1995. He has exhibited widely internationally, throughout Europe and in America. In 1998 alone he had solo exhibitions in London, Zurich, Paris and New York and most recently at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and Kunsthalle Berne, Switzerland.

Callum Innes continues at IMMA until 12 September 1999.

There will be an illustrated catalogue to accompany the exhibition including essays by Marco Livingstone and Bernard Fibicher.

Admission is free.

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

For further information or colour images please contact Philomena Byrne or Rowena
Neville at Tel : +353 1 612 9900, Fax : +353 1 612 9999

2 June 1999

An exhibition of works by the four artists shortlisted for the £15,000 Glen Dimplex Artists Award 1999 opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 28 May. As in previous years, the artists — text, sound and video artist Orla Barry, sculptor and installation artist Susan MacWilliam, photographic artists Hiroshi Sugimoto and Catherine Yass — have been allocated individual spaces at the Museum in which to represent their practice. The exhibition brings together a number of new works, not previously exhibited in Ireland, and some earlier pieces closely related to the work for which the artists were nominated. It will also be the first time that any of the shortlisted artists have exhibited at IMMA. The presentation of the award, which is sponsored by the Irish-based company Glen Dimplex, in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, will be made by the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Síle de Valera, TD, at the Museum on Wednesday 14 July 1999.

Orla Barry’s work combines the autobiographical with the fictitious in deliberately disjointed narratives in diary, audio and photographic forms. In the exhibition she will represent the complexity of her practice with a number of works in which photography, video and audio tapes, slide projection and books are used. They include ‘A Tear for a Glass of Water’, her 1998 video work in which a young woman acts out the role of storyteller in a seemingly absurd narrative involving dramatic theatrical gestures and frequent changes of props, and Findlinge, 11 large photoworks of sea rocks made over the last two years. Born in Wexford in 1969, Barry now lives and works in Brussels.

Susan MacWilliam’s work presents “images of the theatrical, the seductive and the macabre”. Using a variety of materials and techniques to play with texture and scale, it deals with illusion and artifice and is strongly influenced by the visual language of stage, cinema and television. She will be represented by a video work ‘The Last Person’, which is based on the trial of Helen Duncan, a medium from Portsmouth, who was the last person to be prosecuted under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735. In it we see images of the artist posing as a medium, as excerpts of the court reports of the trial are read. A series of black and white stereoscopic images of spirits and ectoplasm sculptures will also be shown. MacWilliam was born in Belfast in 1969, where she continues to live and work.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s black and white photographs deal with fundamental realities such as light and time, the sea and the sky, while also exploring how time is captured on film. His impeccable 20 x 24 inch prints are produced using a 19th-century big-box camera to create images of extraordinary luminosity and detail, which are at once crystal clear and strangely ambiguous. He will show a selection of works including two triptychs from his seascapes series, which document the horizon at different points around the world. All other detail is eliminated from the pictures – the only variables being time and place. Also on show will be a selection from his most recent series of icons of 20th-century architecture such as Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France and Frank Lloyd-Wright’s Sturges House in Brentwood, California. Born in Tokyo in 1948, Sugimoto now lives and works in New York and Tokyo.

Photographic artist Catherine Yass is best known for her vividly coloured photographic transparencies displayed on lightboxes, which she uses to explore the architecture and life of public spaces and buildings. Her work also aims to highlight what she describes as “the constant tension between the cameras controlling vision and its paradoxical failure to see”. For the exhibition Yass is showing two sets of works which explore contained male spaces, comprising images of male public toilets in London and male capsule hotels in Tokyo. They are both spaces that the artist, as a woman, is excluded from and which, therefore, hold a forbidden fascination; yet for men they are designed to be totally inclusive. This dichotomy is echoed by the double processing technique that Yass uses to create multi-layered images, making the run-down, grubby spaces appear at once seductive and repellent.

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 in the work and practice of exhibiting artists. The 1999 award, was open to Irish artists who have exhibited in Ireland or elsewhere from January to December 1998 and to non-Irish artists who have exhibited in Ireland in the same period.

The award was first made in 1994. This year, for the second time, an additional non-monetary award for a sustained contribution by an artist to the visual arts in Ireland will also be made. The recepient in 1998 was Louis le Brocquy.

The jury panel for the 1999 awards is :
Brenda McParland, Head of Exhibitions, Irish Museum of Modern Art, (Chair of panel)
Andrew Nairne, Director, Dundee Contemporary Arts
Catherine de Zegher, formerly Director, Kanaal Art Foundation, Belgium, now Director of The Drawing Centre, New York
Hugh Mulholland, Director, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast
Dr Margaret Downes, Chairman, BUPA Ireland; Director, Bank of Ireland
Dr Paula Murphy, Lecturer, History of Art Department, UCD; Board Member, Irish Museum of Modern Art

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

18 May 1999

A major exhibition of multiples, or works produced in editions, by the legendary German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-86) opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 5 May. Joseph Beuys Multiples, drawn primarily from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, will be the largest exhibition of Beuys’ work seen in Ireland. It is also one of the most important showings of his multiples ever organised and includes many of his best known and most influential works.

For Beuys his multiples represented a vehicle for communication – a means of disseminating his ideas across time and space. From 1965 to 1985, he produced almost 600 multiples in a variety of media, including graphic works, found objects, photographs, audio tapes and films. Each one encapsulates a specific moment in Beuys’ life or work: an idea, a performance, a lecture, an exhibition. As a group they provide a near complete picture of his richly diverse output, inspired by his belief in the unity of art and life and his desire to communicate his ideas for social change. In 1970, Beuys was asked why he chose to make multiples, he responded, “It’s a matter of two intersecting things. Naturally, I search for a suitable quality in an object, which permits multiplication …. But actually, it’s more important to speak of distribution, of reaching a larger number of people.”

Some 300 works are being shown at IMMA. They comprise a large number of works incorporating felt (Beuys’ signature material evoking images of protection and warmth), as well as containers, printed matter, postcards and videos and include many of Beuys’ most famous works, such as Sled (1969), Felt Suit (1970) and Rose for Direct Democracy (1973). Works are arranged thematically based on key ideas explored by Beuys, such as nature, healing, communication and political activism.

Born in Krefeld, northwestern Germany in 1921, Joseph Beuys originally planned a career in medicine but in 1940 joined the airforce as a combat pilot. He was seriously injured on several occasions and ended the war in a British prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, experiences which were to influence,
at least obliquely, much of his subsequent work. Following the war he graduated from the Dusseldorf Academy of Art, where he became a professor in 1961, a post from which he was dismissed in 1971 for insisting that admission be open to all who wished to apply.

During the 1960s Dusseldorf developed into an important centre for contemporary art and particularly for a group of artists, the Fluxus group, who promoted a new fluidity between individual art forms and between the arts and everyday life. Their ideas were a catalyst for Beuys’ performances or “actions” and his conviction that art could play a wider role in society. As the decades advanced, Beuys commitment to political reform increased and he became involved in the founding of several activist movements, including the Free International University and the Green Party. His reputation in the international art world grew, particularly after a 1979 retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. He lived the last years of his life at a hectic pace, participating in dozens of exhibitions and travelling widely on behalf of his organisations. He died in 1986 in Düsseldorf.

Joseph Beuys Multiples is drawn largely from the Alfred and Marie Greisinger Collection, purchased by the Walker in 1992, supplemented by objects, documentary photographs and other materials from public and private collections. It is curated by Joan Rothfuss, a Walker Associate. The exhibition is organised by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Major support for Joseph Beuys Multiples has been provided by Ceridian Corporation and DataCard Corporation in honour of Hans Graf von der Goltz. Additional support has been provided by the Rudolf Steiner Foundation. This exhibition is part of the Walker Art Center’s “New Definitions/New Audiences” initiative, a museum-wide project to engage visitors in a re-examination of 20th-century art is made possible by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund.

The exhibition is also travelling to the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha; the Barbican Art Gallery, London; the San Jose Museum of Art and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida.

A programme of lectures and talks is being organised to coincide with the exhibition. On Wednesday 5 May at 11.30am the noted authority on Beuys Professor Richard Demarco presents a lecture entitled Journeying with Beuys in the Celtic World 1970-1986. On the same day at 1.00pm Joan Rothfuss of the Walker Center will give a guided tour of the exhibition. Booking essential for both events.

A talk by artist Nigel Rolfe takes place at 3.00pm on Sunday 9 May and at 3.00pm on Sunday 16 May a lecture by art historian and critic Dorothy Walker on Beuys in Ireland. A catalogue raisonné of multiples and prints, edited by Jörg Schellmann with texts by Jörg Schellman, Bernd Klüser, Dierk Stemmler, Peter Nisbet, Joan Rothfuss, James Cuno and Kathy Halbreich, is available. Price £76.20.

The exhibition is jointly sponsored by Bank Gesellschaft Berlin (Ireland) plc,
B. Braun Medical Ltd, Deutsche Bank/DB Ireland plc, Montgomery Oppenheim, Oppenheim International Finance, Rheinhyps Bank Europe plc and SGZ-Bank Ireland plc.

Joseph Beuys Multliples continues until 19 September 1999.

Admission is free.

14 April 1999

An exhibition of some 60 artworks created by a group of older people from the Inchicore area of Dublin, who have been engaged in a long-term collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, opens to the public at the Museum on Thursday 11 March. ‘… and start to wear purple’, the first in a series of events being staged by the Museum as part of 1999 UN International Year of Older Persons, traces the development of the Museum’s programme with St Michael’s Parish Group, Inchicore. The exhibition aims to demonstrate and celebrate older people’s creativity and their engagement with contemporary visual art through the Museum. It will also provide a review of IMMA’s activities in this area, based on eight years of local, national and international programmes developed with older people. The exhibition will be officially opened by Louise Richardson, Director of the International Year of Older Persons, at 6.30pm on Wednesday 10 March.

The exhibition takes its title from the poem Warning by Jenny Joseph, which begins with the line “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple” and ends: “but maybe I ought to practice a little now? / So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised / When suddenly I am old and start to wear purple.” Key works include Ribbons of Life 1993, which features the personal histories of ten women from the group, and A Sense of Place 1996, where the group addresses the importance of memories and experiences of significant places in each of their lives. During the exhibition, members of the St Michael’s Group will be available to discuss the artworks on show with the general public and with invited older people’s groups from Dublin and around the country. On Friday 7 May Helen O’Donoghue, Head of Education and Community Programmes at the Museum, will give a curator’s talk on the exhibition.

Concurrently with organising the exhibiting, in October 1998 the group embarked on an investigation of the Museum’s Collection, a project that will lead to their curating an exhibition from the Collection in Autumn 1999. The aim of this project is to develop a structure to support the group in the curating process and to identify key elements of the Museum’s programme as resources for lifelong learning. This process includes a series of practical workshops exploring selected artworks from the Collection; working with artists from the Museum’s artists team, to make work in response to their chosen artworks, and meeting with a number of Collection artists to discuss their work and regular sessions with Museum staff.

Commenting on the group’s involvement with the programme, Teresa Egan, a member of the group, who has been visiting the Museum since 1991, says;
“We are all convinced that the programme is of great benefit to us. We derive immense pleasure and satisfaction from taking part and are deeply indebted to IMMA, for giving us the means to expand our knowledge of shape, texture, colour and form and the ability to design and create, even when only using scraps and waste, because in our twilight years, that is what we would be, ie scraps and waste, if it were not for those bodies who know and care enough to untrap the artistic qualities which everyone possesses, but few get a chance to unfurl.”

The Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Education and Community Department has worked with a core group from St Michael’s Parish Group since it opened in 1991. The programme is broadly based and experimental, comprising visits to exhibitions, meetings with exhibiting artists and working with artists in the studios. Practical workshops are a core element of the programme and participants work through a range of materials, processes and techniques to explore themes, concepts and ideas.

A special exhibition guide, with a text by Helen O’Donoghue, accompanies the exhibition.

‘.. and start to wear purple’ continues until 16 May.

1 March 1999

‘Ghost Ship’, sculptor Dorothy Cross’s winning entry for the current Nissan Art Project for art in the public domain, will be realised in Scotsman’s Bay, Dun Laoghaire, in February 1999. The project, which involves the creation of a ‘ghost ship’ from a decommissioned lightship, was originally scheduled for October/November 1998. However, the unique and challenging nature of the project involving innovative technical processes as well as environmental issues, entailing negotiations with marine experts and authorities, has pushed the timing back to early 1999.

Ghost Ship is a personal homage by Dorothy Cross to the many lightships which once marked dangerous reefs around the Irish coast, but have now all but disappeared. The ship, generously loaned by the Irish Scouting Association, will be covered in luminous paint and at nightfall illuminated to glow and fade, evoking the poignancy of the disappeared lightships and the artist’s childhood memories, linked to her father’s love of the sea. Cross sees it as honouring “the memory of the lightships, whose presence was held dear around the Irish coast. The role of the sea has diminished for the Irish people and the view is inwards towards the cities.”

Commenting on the progress of the project Declan McGonagle, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which is curating the project, said: “This extraordinary project by one of Ireland’s best contemporary artists has thrown up considerable technical and environmental issues. I am glad to say we have been able to address these in preparation for Ghost Ship to appear early next year; particularly as the project, when announced, caught the imagination of commentators and public alike to an unusual degree.”

Gerard O’Toole, Executive Chairman, Nissan Ireland, said:”the Nissan Art Project has enabled us to become involved with some of the most creative visual arts concepts found in Ireland. Ghost Ship is exemplary of this culture and it has inspired unprecedented interest from both home and abroad. We look forward to its realisation next year.”

The Nissan Art Project, created and organised in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is intended to give artists working in any medium an opportunity to extend their practice to make a new temporary work for the public domain. This is defined as any space or process in the Dublin area to which the general public has ready unmediated access. The project was first realised in 1997 with ‘For Dublin’ by Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones, which presented neon texts from Molly Bloom’s ‘Ulysses’ monologue in nine related city cente locations.

Born in Cork in 1956, Dorothy Cross’s work has attracted considerable international attention in recent years. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Madrid and throughout the United Kingdom and has works in a number of prestigious public and private collections. In 1993 she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale and was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex Artists Award in 1995 and 1997.

3 December 1998