Participation in a carefully devised and sustained art education programme can have a transforming effect on the lives of older people. This is the main finding of a new research project on the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s programme for older people. The research, carried out by Dr Ted Fleming and Anne Gallagher of the Centre for Adult and Community Education, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, found that participation in the programme promoted a sense of well being, offered significant opportunities for adult learning and fostered relationships of equity, trust and friendship both within the group and with Museum staff.

The research found that the non-judgmental and non-competitive atmosphere pervading the programme was particularly conducive to the learning experience. Members of the groups frequently spoke of IMMA as a new home. The programme had not only transformed their own homes into places where they remembered ideas and tried out new roles; it had helped them make IMMA into a new home for themselves, and, in hosting visits by other older people’s groups, for others also. They had been made to feel a valued part of the institution in a positive, affirming and highly motivating way.

The report, entitled “even her nudes were lovely”, and a further publication, “I was born a baby”, based on a project involving four agencies from the Inter-Action Network, will be the focus of a two-day conference on life-long learning, interaction and inclusion in society for all older people which will take place at the Museum on Tuesday 23 and Wednesday 24 May. The two publications will be launched by Dr Michael Woods, TD, Minister for Education and Science, at 5.30pm on Tuesday 23 May at the Museum.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Older People’s Programme, initiated even before the Museum opened in 1991, forms part of its award-winning Education and Community Programme. It has developed through a number

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of strands. National policy work and international programmes have grown through a partnership with the national agency, Age and Opportunity, whose role is to encourage older people to use their skills, to exchange ideas and
to confront issues that concern them. The long-term ongoing work with St Michael’s Parish Active Retirement Art Group, a group of older residents from the nearby area of Inchicore, is at the core of the programme. In 1997, A Sense of Place, an exhibition of ten works by members of the group exploring memories of significant places, was shown at IMMA. To mark the UN International Year of Older Persons in 1999 the group selected and curated an exhibition of works from the Museum’s Collection and also exhibited some 100 of the own works in “… and start to wear purple”.

Commenting on the report Helen O’Donoghue, Head of the Education and Community Programme at IMMA, said: “This publication represents one of IMMA’s key strategies; to disseminate its models of practice to a wider public. It captures both the spirit of exploration and fun experienced by all those who participate in or facilitate the programme and underlines the importance of a museum participating in society through collaborative programmes with other agencies, such as the current project with Inter-Action Network. The research offers the museum sector a framework for developing policy and practice in the future – for engaging with older people, adult education institutions and older people’s orgainisations”

The research project, commissioned by the Museum, was supported by funding from the EU’s Socrates Adult Education Programme and was carried out in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Swedish Museum of Architecture, Stockholm; Form d’Art Contemporain, Luxembourg; Boro fur Kulturvermittlung, Vienna; Museu Municipal de Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal; and the School of Education Studies, University of Surrey, England.

The groups involved in the Inter-Action Network project are St Michael’s Parish Active Retirement Group, Inchicore, and four leading national disability agencies: Hospitaller Order of St John of God, Carmona and Menni Services, St Michael’s House and Stewart’s Hospital.
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Publication of the report was supported by the UN International Year of Older Person 1999. The report, “even her nudes were lovely” is available from the Museum’s bookshop (price £15.00).

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

17 May 2000

An exhibition of some 60 mainly Central and South American prints from the Smurfit: Carton y Papel de Mexico Collection opens to the public at IMMA on 25 May. The exhibition, entitled ‘Homage to Paper’, marks the generous donation of 150 prints from the collection to the Museum by the Jefferson Smurfit Group.
The collection is particularly rich in works by Latin American artists. International in scope, it encompasses a full range of late 20th-century styles and movements from magic realism, conceptualism, and minimalism to cartoon-like political graphics. The exhibition contains works by a number of well known artists, including Wifredo Lam (Cuban), Roberto Matta (Chile), Consuelo Gotay (Puerto Rico), and others less well known outside their counries.
Certain dominant strands emerge – the quest for national identity, fuelled by a history of conquest; political dictatorship and exile and, above all, a belief in the social purpose and responsibility of the artist. The art of countries that still have substantial Indian populations, such as Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Guatemala, is clearly influenced by indigenous elements, which have characterised their cultures since pre-Columbian times.
A colour catalogue, with essay by Dr Rosemarie Mulcahy, accompanies the exhibition (price £7.99).

An exhibition of works by the five artists shortlisted for the £15,000 Glen Dimplex Artists Award 2000 opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 20 April. As in previous years, the artists –
sculptors Maud Cotter and Petah Coyne, film and photographic artist Clare Langan and film, video and photographic artists David Phillips and Paul Rowley – have been allocated individual spaces 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. 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 at the Museum on Tuesday 30 May.

Maud Cotter is one of Ireland’s most innovative artists, working with such diverse media as steel, glass, perspex, cardboard, wax and latex. The Irish landscape has always been central to Cotter’s concerns together with a focus on the reciprocal relationship between the body and the structures we build around it, as seen in her well-known honeycomb works. She is represented in the exhibition by five sculptures ranging from small, intricate wall-mounted works of glass, textile and wax, such as Filling Empty Space, to a monumental free-standing piece entitled Flesh, the product of her recent preoccupation with delineating and containing space. Born in Wexford in 1954, Cotter now lives and works in Cork.

Petah Coyne is best known for her suspended sculptures, usually made of wax or horsehair, which are characterised by a combination of great mass and extreme fragility. Coyne uses hair in two ways – as large intricate wall drawings and as sculptures in which creatures, such as stuffed birds and Madonnas in prayer, are enveloped. These magical creations reflect two important influences – her Catholic upbringing and her interest in Japanese literature. She has chosen to represent her practice with selected works from her recent Fairy Tales series, including a new work fabricated on site during
. . .
the exhibition. A number of photographs created by the unusual method of moving in the opposite direction to the subject, resulting in part-blurred / part-focused images, will also be shown. Coyne was born in Oklahoma City in 1953. She now lives and works in New York

Clare Langan’s work has evolved through an interweaving of two main sources, personal experience and the resonance of the physical environment. Her colour images are achieved by photographing through a variety of different handmade filters, including plastic tubes and gel. Langan describes her subject matter as “man’s brief fragile existence in the face of the apparently limitless force of nature.” She is represented by two bodies of work. Forty Below, comprising film and photographs shot in Ireland and Iceland, in which the landscape is dominated by the elements as the Ice Age returns and a single figure appears overshadowed by the hostile environment, “where time and place merge and the division between earth and sky become unclear.”. The second work is a new film work entitled Floodlight, which is projected onto the ceiling of the gallery. Langan was born in Dublin in 1967, where she continues to live and work.

American David Phillips and Dublin-born Paul Rowley work as collaborators in film, video and photography. Their installations juxtapose original and appropriated images, utilising a combination of contemporary and historical technologies to focus on time and location within suggested narratives of displacements. Their recent projects have concentrated on exploring perceptions of memory, unravelling the processes through which memories become altered. For this exhibition Rowley and Phillips are presenting three separate but linked video installations Kimpo, Esther and Carbon – 12, which they describe as depicting the “dislocation of the subject within actual and perceived institutional structures … presenting individuals in conflict and dialogue with their environments.” David Phillips was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1970, and moved to San Francisco in 1994; Paul Rowley was born in Dublin in 1971 and is currently based in San Francisco;

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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 2000 award was open to Irish artists who have exhibited in Ireland or elsewhere from 1 January to 22 November 1999 and to non-Irish artists who have exhibited in Ireland in the same period. All shortlisted artists are paid a fee of £1,000. The £15,000 award will be presented to the winning artist at a dinner following the final jury meeting on 30 May. 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 2000 awards is;
Brenda McParland (Chair of panel), Head of Exhibitions, Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Lisa Corrin, Chief Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London.
Aileen MacKeogh, Director, Dun Laoghaire School of Art and Design .
Dr Margaret Downes, Chairman, BUPA Ireland: Director, Bank of Ireland.
Dr Paula Murphy, Lecturer, History of Art Department, UCD.

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award Exhibition continues until 18 June 2000.

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

12 April 2000

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
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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
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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.

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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
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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