The first one-person exhibition in Ireland of the work of the Los Angeles-based artist Peter Shelton opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 13 March. godspipes, a new monumental sculptural piece based on the human body, is also Shelton’s first solo museum show in Europe. Five years in the making, it comprises 193 translucent fibreglass and lead pipes resembling limbs, torsos and joints.

Peter Shelton is well known internationally for his iron, steel and fibreglass sculptures, which often replicate abstracted parts of the human body as well as elements of architecture. In fact, Shelton sees his body works as being an examination of human architecture – bones, intestines and blood vessels. An eager student of anatomy and biology at high school, Shelton spent some time as a pre-med student at Pomona College, Claremont, California, before transferring to the art department. His adopted home of Los Angeles provides another key to his work. “Here in LA without a strong cultural matrix, artists often look to their own body, their own immediate physical and sensuous environment to give them cues and forms for their work.” His experiences at art college at Pomona and UCLA were a further important influence. “After spending all this time in college when there was such a contempt for making things – this was during the first round of Conceptualism – I became very interested in making objects. I was interested in the idea of sculpture that could be pushed to the point where it could be physically challenging.”

Peter Shelton was born in Troy, Ohio, in 1951 and grew up in Tempe, Arizona. He graduated from Pomona College in 1973 and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from UCLA in 1979, where he had his first solo exhibition in the Wight Gallery in the same year. Since then his work has been shown widely throughout the US from a retrospective at the LA County Museum of Art to the Whitney Museum in New York and in Rome, Bologna, Paris and at the 1984 Venice Biennale. His most recent installation sixtyslippers, in which a field of 60 steel discs were suspended just above the floor was shown at the LA Louver Gallery in California. He is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards,including the National Endowment for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship in 1980, ‘82 and ‘84 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1989.

In addition he has recently been commissioned by the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust to create blackelephanthouse for the Henry Moore studio at Dean Clough, in Halifax where visitors may currently view work in progress and the installation will be on show as part of Art Transpennine 98 from 23 May – 16 August 1998.
A joint publication by the Trust and the Museum with an essay by US scholar and writer Christopher Knight, will accompany the exhibition.

godspipes is on show 13 March – 14 June 1998.

The names of six artists shortlisted for the £15,000 Glen Dimplex Artists Award 1998, organised in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, were announced today (Monday 16 February) by the jury panel. They are sculptor Siobhán Hapaska, installation artist Hans Peter Kuhn, multi-media artists MacDermott and MacGough, sculptor Janet Mullarney and sound and installation artist Philip Napier. The organisers and sponsors also announced a new non-monetary award for an artist who has made “a sustained contribution to the visual arts in Ireland”, which will be made for the first time this year.

Siobhán Hapaska’s sculptures defy easy catagorisation, deliberately avoiding a recognisable signature, style or preferred material. They are characterised rather by an interplay of disparate forces – technology and nature, the mechanical and the human, the past and the future. Her perfectly finished works have a rootless, timeless quality. Hapaska has described her sculptures as “lost”, objects which don’t know where they have come from or where they are going, with titles – To, Here, Stray – which imply movement between places and times. Hapaska is nominated for the Award for solo exhibitions at the Entwistle Gallery, London; the Oriel Gallery, Cardiff, and the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, and for her participation in the Plastik exhibition in Stuttgart and in Documenta X. Born in Belfast in 1963, she now lives and works in London.

Hans Peter Kuhn is an installation artist working mainly with light and sound. His works connect architecture, light and objects with aural events emphasising their different and separate tempi – the light steady and unchanging, the sound fast and moving. By influencing his audiences’ perception of time he seeks to “create an opportunity for them to relax for a while and simply hear and see”. Kuhn has created both indoor and outdoor installations including two spectacular large-scale works in Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, and The Pier in New York, both in 1996. He is nominated for Blue, a light and sound installation at the former Klondyke gasworks in Belfast, commissioned by the Ormeau Baths Gallery for Belfast Festival at Queens. Born in Kiel, Germany, in 1952, he now lives and works in Berlin.

American artists David MacDermott and Peter MacGough have created a practice based on a fusion of art and life. Their preoccupation with the historical past informs not only the subjects of their paintings and photographs, but also the clothes they wear, the houses in which they live and the dates they inscribe on their art. They have travelled back as far as the French Revolution for one canvas but, in general, prefer to re-incarnate the late 19th or early 20th centuries. There they have explored art and culture, both high and low, ranging from religion and sexual morality to the new industrial age and popular entertainment. MacDermott and MacGough were nominated for their solo exhibition The Conspiracy Paintings at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, and at the Provincial Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, and for another solo show at Galerie Francois Paviot, Paris. David MacDermott was born in Hollywood, California, in 1952 and Peter MacGough in Syracuse, New York, in 1958. They now live and work in Dublin.

Janet Mullarney’s sculptural forms are based on human figures and animals, with each work possessing a strong psychological significance. Inspired by Romanesque and Renaissance art, she uses animal figures as alter egos, with ravens, dogs and cows symbolising emotions which would otherwise be denied expression. The theme of sacrifice and denial, or negation of the self for another, informs much of her work. Mullarney is also interested in exploring the inhibitions and rules which prevent people from achieving their full potential. In 1997 Mullarney spent three months on the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Artists’ Work Programme, during which time she concentrated largely on her paintings. Her recent output has involved the use of paintings and graphic works shown in conjunction with single sculptural pieces. She is currently working on new plans for the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, with architects, designers and a team of other artists. She is nominated for her exhibitions at the Model Art Centre in Sligo 1997 and Limerick City Gallery in 1996. Born in Dublin in 1952, she now divides her time between Ireland and Italy.

Philip Napier’s work has, in the last number of years, concentrated on the use of language and sound and has been shown widely both internationally and within Ireland. His 1995 installation at Pier 4A, Heathrow Airport – a point between Britain and Ireland – used a flawed, hesitant overvoice to explore language as a gateway to a differentiated experience and history. His most recent work, Gauge, shown at the Orchard Gallery, Derry, was conceived against a backdrop of sustained calls for an apology from the British Government for the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972. In this an apology is broadcast over a public address system and measured by a needle on a weighing scales. Phase II of Gauge was realised in a derelict house in the Bogside, overlooking Glenfada Park where most of the shootings took place. He was nominated for Gauge, and for an exhibition at the Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast. Philip Napier was born in Belfast in 1965 where he continues to live and work.

More than 100 nominations were received this year, 25% from non-Irish artists. Commenting on the selection process jury member Thomas Sokolowski, Director of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, said: “Having served on numerous art competition juries over the years, I have come to anticipate such events with some hesitation. The 1998 Glen Dimplex Award jury process was a revelation. The overall sophistication of the artists represented was truly remarkable. I was bouyed up by an entire range of artists whose work was unfamiliar to me, but with which I hope to have much more engagement in the future. I greatly look forward to seeing the exhibition on the gallery walls at the Museum.”

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 award, now in its fifth year, is open to Irish artists who have exhibited in Ireland or elsewhere from 1 October 1996 to 31 October 1997 and to non-Irish artists who have exhibited in Ireland in the same period. The five shortlisted artists will now be invited to show work in an exhibition at the Museum, which opens to the public on 9 April 1998. All five will be paid a fee of £1,000 at this stage. The £15,000 award will be presented to the winning artist at a dinner following the final jury meeting in June. For the first time this year an additional non-monetary award for a sustained contribution by an artist to the visual arts in Ireland will also be made. The winner of this new award will be chosen by the International jury.

The jury panel for the 1998 awards is :
Declan McGonagle, Director, Irish Museum of Modern Art, (Chair)
Thomas Sokolowski, Director, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, USA
Dominique Trucot, Director, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France
Paul M O’Reilly, Curator/Director, Limerick City Gallery of Art
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
Brenda McParland, Senior Curator, Irish Museum of Modern Art

An exhibition of works focusing on the issues underlying violence against women opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 28 November. Once Is Too Much is the result of a two-year community initiative by women and friends of the Family Resource Centre, St Michael’s Estate, Inchicore, in collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition will be officially opened by Ms Mary O’Rourke, TD, Minister for Public Enterprise, on Thursday 27 November at 6.00pm.

Once Is Too Much comprises ten works all inspired by issues of violence against women. They range from a large sculptural centrepiece to video installations and wall hangings. Beauty & the Beast, made in collaboration with Scottish-born artist Rhona Henderson, is a typically powerful piece, which provoked hours of rigorous and challenging discussion within the group. Centred on a large mirrored dining table in the shape of a bomb, it recreates the “tension surrounding meal time as mother and children await the inevitable explosion”. The video installation Open Season, made with Joe Lee, combines audio interviews and images of Dublin streetscapes to explore the pattern of violence in women’s lives.

Since 1990 the Family Resource Centre have been working with Women’s Aid on a community development model to address issues of violence against women. For much of this time they have also been engaged, with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in an exploration of the use of culture and the arts as awareness-raising mechanisms. In 1995 the group worked for two weeks with the Canadian artist Rochelle Rubinstein Kaplan, who shares their interest in these issues, during her residency at the Museum as part of its Artists’ Work Programme. A large artwork comprising fabric prints and hand-made books illustrating family violence was created under the generic title Once Is Too Much.

Since then a series of artworks have been developed with a number of artists – Rhona Henderson, Joe Lee and Ailbhe Murphy. A further piece was created with Kaplan on her second visit to the Artists’ Work Programme in 1996. At the core of the entire process has been the self-development and collective awareness of the women involved in relation to the issue of violence.

Rita Fagan, Project Co-ordinator Family Resource Centre describes the making of the exhibition as a “hard process because our subject, violence against women, is painful to deal with. During the period of making our work 30 women have been violently killed in Irish society, 19 in their homes. In some cases children witnessed the violence. We don’t believe art can change the fundamental issue of violence against women and children. However, we do believe it can contribute to debates and discussions which raise awareness about the issue and to the changing of attitudes which could lead to the key issues of prevention, provision, protection and protest.”

Helen O’Donoghue, Senior Curator: Education and Community Programmes at the Irish Museum of Modern Art sees the exhibition as throwing ”a
public light on the plight of too many in contemporary Irish society. The issue is raw, the reality is bleak, but the artworks can act as a metaphor for the lived experience. The exhibition aims to act as a catalyst through which the collective energy of the artists and the 17 women may engage a wider public, to address the issue of violence and join in the statement that Once Is Too Much, invoking action and inciting change.”

A two-day seminar, based on an analysis of the issues underlying violence against women and an exploration of possible responses will be held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 27 and Friday 28 November. The seminar, organised by the Family Resource Centre, is already booked out. Consideration is being given to running a second seminar early in 1998.

Once Is Too Much continues until 27 February 1998.

The first major exhibition in Ireland of the work of Andy Warhol, one of the defining figures of 20th-century art, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 20 November. Andy Warhol: After the Party -Works 1956-1986 is sponsored by ACCBank and comprises some 100 works drawn mainly from the collections of the Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, the most comprehensive single-artist museum in the world. It includes early drawings from the 1950s as well as better-known iconic works from the 1960s and ‘70s, such as the Marilyn, Jackie, Mao and Campbell’s Soup Can paintings. Examples of Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper, Cloud Pillows, disaster paintings and a range of source material are also included; plus a series of angel and cat drawings by Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola. The exhibition will be officially opened by Ms Sile de Valera, TD, Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands at 6.00pm on Wednesday 19 November.

The exhibition explores Warhol’s work at a number of levels, providing an opportunity to see both his apparently uncritical celebration of the mass culture image as a commodity and his simultaneous subversion of that celebration. A constant, though often unacknowledged, refrain of death, culminating in the memento mori images towards the end of his life, is the core theme of the exhibition. The Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Declan McGonagle, says ‘It is interesting how new readings of Warhol’s work and influence are beginning to develop. Warhol was not just a chronicler of consumer culture. It is increasingly clear that, as a late 20th-century artist using contemporary language, media and forms, he was exploring ideas of life and death which have always formed the basis of great art. This exhibition both asks people and gives them the opportunity to look at Warhol differently by representing his total practice as an artist’.

In the context of this full retrospective, the Museum will also present a series of Gun paintings, which were made in 1982-83. The series was shown at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London earlier this year, their first showing as a group in over a decade. In these images, ‘so beautiful, so desirable’; Warhol evokes the appeal of the gun as a commodity and a cinematic prop and draws on American mass culture to create a powerful symbol of life and death. This repetitive, intense exploration of a single image represents a powerful coda to the main exhibition. The Irish Museum of Modern Art is grateful to the d’Offay Gallery for lending the works for this element of the overall project.

Born in Pittsburg in 1928 to East European parents, Andy Warhol moved to New York in 1949, where he became one of American’s leading commercial artists. By the early 1960s he had turned his attention to the field of fine art and was exhibiting his Pop paintings and sculpture – including Heinz Boxes, Marilyns and Campbell’s Soup Cans – in New York and Los Angeles. At this time he was already making images about death and disaster, which remain among his most critically-acclaimed series. Despite a near fatal shooting in 1968, Warhol continued to be enormously prolific. During the 1970s and ‘80s though widely known for his celebrity portraits, he also made some of his most ambitious and greatest paintings during this period, including Skull 1976, After the Party 1979, and Last Supper, made in the year of his death 1986.

Over the course of a 30-year-long career, Andy Warhol transformed contemporary art. The power of his work comes from its concentration on fundamental human themes – the beauty and glamour of youth and fame, material culture and the passing of time, and the presence of death. Employing mass-production techniques, Warhol challenged preconceived notions about the nature of art and erased traditional distinctions between fine art and popular culture.

On Friday 21 November Mark Francis, Chief Curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, will discuss the work of Andy Warhol, his influence and the issues surrounding the setting up of the Warhol Musuem, in conversation with Declan McGonagle, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, at 1.00pm at the Walton Theatre, Trinity College Dublin. The talk is presented in association with the History of Art Department, TCD. Booking is essential – please contact the Irish Musuem of Modern Art at tel: 01-612 9900;
fax: 01-612 9999.

Andy Warhol: After the Party – 1958-1986 continues at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until 22 March 1998.

The first major solo exhibition in Ireland of the work of Kiki Smith, one of America’s leading contemporary artists, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 24 October. Kiki Smith: Convergence ranges over ten years of Smith’s work from 1988 and reflects her main concerns in terms of subject matter and use of colour and materials. It features a number of her characteristic sculptures based on the human body, a number of more recent drawings from 1996 and 1997, and mixed-media works using materials such as glass, crystal and neon, which mark a shift in focus from the human to animal forms and the natural world.

Kiki Smith is best known for her works based on the female body which she presents in stark, often provocative terms – its flesh, blood, secretion and excretions suggesting fundamental questions of life and death. As an artist Smith gives birth to adult forms still grimy with the process of delivery. Indeed, a paradox of her works is that one cannot tell if they are coming into existence or passing out of it through decay and disintegration. Both formally and psychologically, these sculptures break with traditional notions of the depiction of the human figure in art.

Using the physical body as her starting point, Smith explores the wider female condition in works suggesting pain, humiliation and subservience. There are also allusions to religious rituals and beliefs, which reflect her Catholic upbringing. The artist has selected works for this exhibition by using the device of colour for individual rooms at the museum – red, yellow, blue, green, brown and silver – colours which have been a strong force in her work.

Kiki Smith was born in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1954. She moved to the United States as a child and in 1976 moved to New York where she now lives and works. In 1979-80 she began to work with the body using Gray’s Anatomy as a reference. She had her first solo exhibition Life Wants to Live
at The Kitchen in New York in 1982. Since then she has exhibited to considerable critical acclaim in solo and group shows worldwide. Smith’s sculpture was included in From Beyond the Pale at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1994.

Kiki Smith will give an Artists Talk on Friday 24 October at the Walton Theatre, Trinity College, at 1pm. Pre-booking is essential. There will also be a Gallery Talk by Kiki Smith and Brenda McParland, Curator: Head of Exhibitions on Friday 24 October at 3.30pm, when they will walk through the exhibition and discuss the works. Admission to all talks is free.

A fully illustrated catalogue of works in the exhibition and notes by the artist will accompany the exhibition.

Kiki Smith: Convergence continues until 15 February 1998.

An exhibition of figurative art from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s own Collection is now open to the public at IMMA. IMMA Collection: Figuration comprises 12 works ranging from two Picasso etchings dating from 1933 to Abigail O’Brien’s 1995 installation The Last Supper. The exhibition represents some of the ways in which modern artists have continued to portray the human form despite the 20th-century’s pre-occupation with abstraction. The body is seen in movement or at rest, as part of a narrative, as a vehicle for contemplation or in relation to art and culture. A wide range of media and techniques is also presented from drawing to print, casting to carving and from painting and photography to mixed media installation.

Aristide Mailliol’s Nude acts as a bridge between the tradition of academic life-drawing of a (usually female) subject as a preparation for a piece of sculpture and the more analytical and critical look at the same tradition in Picasso’s prints from the Vollard Suite. In these etchings a triangular relationship between the artist, the female model and art history is presented with dazzling and sardonic economy.

Kathy Prendergast’s Body Maps continue the tradition of drawing but to very different effect. In these the female body is equated to a fertile country, mapped for more effective control and colonisation, a more subjective commentary on the gender relationship presented in Picasso’s prints. Questions about existence itself are raised by Antony Gormley in Sick, a weighty leaden figure cast from the artist’s own body, simultaneously evoking inner, mental space while challenging physical space and the law of gravity.

The Last Supper by Abigail O’Brien features the human form in a series of cibachrome photographs of different moments in a wedding ritual. The body is also indirectly but powerfully implied in the real chair and table setting – all that remains after the celebration ends. The all female presence in the photographs offers a striking contrast to Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Last Supper.

Commenting on the exhibition, Catherine Marshall, Curator of IMMA’s Collection said, “Figuration, like the recent Literary Themes show one of a series of thematic exhibitions from the Collection, draws on a variety of artistic ideas and processes which the Collection offers and includes pieces from the Gordon Lambert and the O’Malley Collections. As with Literary Themes the exhibition will be shown at different venues around the country when it finishes at IMMA.”

IMMA Collection: Figuration continues at IMMA until 12 January 1997.

An exhibition showcasing work by six leading young international artists opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 23 July. Projects: by Ceal Floyer, Ellen Gallagher, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gillian Wearing and Yukinori Yanagi presents some of today’s most prominent younger generation artists, all exhibiting for the first time in Ireland. The artists’ practices encompass painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and video. Working with the museums’ curators each artist has addressed the individual exhibition spaces, the resulting works range from a wall drawing by Yukinori Yanagi to a radio-telescope sculpture for the courtyard by Paul Ramirez Jonas.

Ceal Floyer’s (b 1968, Karachi, Pakistan) work uses a variety of media, and an understated sense of humour, to undermine the viewer’s expectations. In Carousel (1996) visual and aural perceptions are subtly thrown into question. On approaching the space the visitor hears the familiar repetitive sound of a slide projector. However what we see in the space is a record playing the sound. Floyer has exhibited widely throughout the United Kingdom and in Portugal, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany, and at the Venice and Istanbul Biennales. She has recently had solo shows in New York, London and Italy. She lives and works in London.

Ellen Gallagher’s (b 1965, Rhode Island, USA) paintings and drawings are from a recent body of work completed over the past year. Four paintings have come directly from the artist’s studio and have not been exhibited before. Gallagher uses a complex minimalist style to create large, grid-like surfaces on which linear or cartoon forms represent recognisable images such as eyes, ears and mouths. By these means she questions the nature of painting and explores issues of language and cultural identity, including her own African-American / Irish-American heritage. Gallagher’s work wasrepresented in the Whitney Biennial in 1995 and in Inside the Visible at the ICA, Boston, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1996-97. She had two solo shows in New York and London in 1996. She lives and works in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Paul Ramirez Jonas (b 1965, California, raised in Honduras) is passionately involved in the ‘stuff of invention’. He makes sculpture which involves re-making objects, events and experiments largely from the history of science and technology but also remaining firmly connected to his own identity and position as an artist working today. His work frequently deals with the work of male heroes drawing parallels between romantic notions of the artist as outsider and the lone explorer. In His Truth is Marching On (1993), bottles containing different amounts of water hang in a circle, illustrating a scientific demonstration of pitch. Viewers are invited to unlock the work by striking each bottle in turn to produce the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Ramirez Jonas lives and works in New York. He has had several international solo and group exhibitions including Postmasters Gallery, New York, and White Cube / Jay Jopling, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans (b 1970, Reimsheid, Germany) positions himself between the worlds of fine art photography and photojournalism, showing his work through galleries, magazines and books. He uses the possibilities and limitations of all these platforms, fully accepting and exploiting the differences of meaning they give to his photographs. His work embraces all genres of photography – still life, landscape, fashion, portrait and documentation – not as a means to explore the formal history of photography but as a structure through which to reflect his plurality of vision. Tillmans’ photographs openly acknowledge the relationship between photographer and subject. In fact the one unifying feature of his work, from friends to clothing to landscape, is an engagement with the subject at that moment. For this exhibition he has created an installation from all areas of his work, with each image functioning in its own right but ultimately as part of a whole. Tillmans has recently had a solo exhibition at Chisenhall Gallery, London. Since the late 1980s his work has appeared in many arts and fashion magazines.

Gillian Wearing (b 1963, Birmingham, UK) works primarily in video and photography delving into the collective subconscious, revealing through gentle and sympathetic means the fears, anxieties, hopes and moral viewpoints of her subjects and, through them, those of the spectator. The subjects for her work come largely from her immediate surroundings in London. One work in the exhibition, the video piece Homage to the Woman with a Bandaged Face (1995) is based on a chance encounter on the Walworth Road. In the accompanying text, Wearing describes her desire to emulate the woman who had such an effect on her and to pass this onto the public through this “act of homage”. Her video records the reactions of the passers by who became the unsuspecting subjects of the work. Wearing uses choreographed actors, herself and the public as subjects for her work and the three works in the exhibition cover all these approaches. Wearing has exhibited widely in Europe and the UK and will have a solo show in New York later this year. She has recently been nominated for the 1997 Turner Prize. Wearing lives and works in London.

Yukinori Yanagi’s (b 1959, Fukuoka, Japan) practice is heavily influenced by his reaction to the “ghettos of Japanese art education, Japanese modern art and the Japanese art system.” Yanagi was one of the first Japanese artists to confront the political, economic and social systems of contemporary Japan through this work. These concerns have found expression in a number of works concerned with boundaries. His best-known works have been based on tracing the wanderings of a single ant released within a steel frame, which show the centre of the surface lightly criss-crossed while the edges were heavily marked showing the persistent efforts of the ant to escape or at least comprehend the boundaries. Yanagi has created a new Wandering Position work for the exhibition, which includes a video of the making of the drawing.

Projects can be seen at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until 12 October 1997.

A major exhibition of 20th-century European painting, including the work of both Modern Masters and contemporary artists, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 26 June. The Pursuit of Painting has been selected by the distinguished British-born painter Stephen McKenna and is based on works by 26 artists, born between 1867 and 1952, who have been his “cultural mentors over many years.”

The exhibition comprises more than 70 paintings and includes works by some of the most important and influential artists of the 20th century. Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) and Francis Picabia (1879-1953) represent the new and revolutionary art which developed in the first 20 years of the century. Fernand Léger (1881-1955), André Derain (1880-1953) and Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) all returned to or re-emphasised the traditional classical values of painting: the study of the Old Masters and the perfection of their craft.

A later generation, including Bruno Goller (b. 1901), Jean Hélion (1904-1987) and Balthus (b. 1908) who went their own and decisive ways, is also included. Hélion moved quickly through a variety of contemporary influences, including abstraction, eventually arriving at a new figurative style which was flexible enough to contain his wide interests and philosophy. Goller found the motifs for his paintings in his immediate domestic environment: the woman, the cat, the hat, the decorative cloth, the household utensil. Balthus’s refusal to follow the prescribed paths was the result of an awareness of how limited they were in comparison to the achievements of the past. The exhibition also includes works by several Irish artists – Jack B Yeats, Sean Scully, Felim Egan, Richard Gorman and Ciarán Lennon – whom McKenna sees as connected to the tradition he is exploring.

Stephen McKenna was invited to select the exhibition following a lecture given by him at the time of his own retrospective exhibition at the Irish Musuem of Modern Art in 1993. In that lecture he explored the influence of a classical tradition of painting which was central to European culture, a principle which has had a strong influence on his own practice. Commenting on the importance of the exhibition for the museum’s overall programme Director Declan McGonagle said: “If art is contested rather than consensual it is important that such a strong polemic in support of a classical approach to painting is presented to a wide public. Stephen McKenna has pursued these ideas in his own work, which has been seen regularly in Ireland, and is well placed to represent the argument for a classical tradition as expressed in the work of 20th-century painters, acknowledged masters and contemporary artists alike.”

By definition, the exhibition represents a particular point of view articulated through a choice of particular paintings. Stephen McKenna describes his aim as being: “To bring together paintings which exemplify the central purpose of painting: to make reality visible by presenting objects, figures and spaces on a canvas. The works range from the figurative to the abstract, the working procedures from the analysis of form to poetic intuition … The primary common ground among the artists is the obvious fact that they are all painters; that they have taken a deliberate decision to accept the art of painting as it is, without attempting to transform or distort it into another branch of the ‘visual arts’, or to reduce it to a primarily illustrative or iconographic role in the service of political or sociological concerns.”

A fully-illustrated catalogue (produced in association with Lund Humphries Publishers, London), with a substantial text by Stephen McKenna exploring some of the ideas provoked by the process of selecting the exhibition, accompanies the exhibition. Price £18.95, with a special exhibition price of £15.00.

The Pursuit of Painting continues until 2 November.

The winner of the 1997 Glen Dimplex Artists Award is photographic artist Paul Seawright. The £15,000 award, sponsored by the Irish-based company Glen Dimplex in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, was presented this evening (Monday 26 May) by Dr Ciarán Benson, Chairperson of the Arts Council, at a dinner at the museum.

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award is designed to mark a significant level of achievement or development in the work and practice of exhibiting artists. The 1996 award was open to Irish artists who had exhibited in Ireland or elsewhere from 1 October 1995 to 31 October 1996 and to non-Irish artists who had exhibited in Ireland in the same period. Paul Seawright was nominated for his exhibition Police Force. Based on unprecedented access to the RUC’s operations over a prolonged period the exhibition takes a look ‘behind the scenes’. Avoiding the narrative description of hard news reportage or documentary photography, it explores the material conditions and psychological spaces of police sub-culture. The exhibition was shown at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, in 1995 and was toured to Europe and the USA by the Gallery of Photography, Dublin, in 1996-97.

Paul Seawright’s photoworks emerge as a series of fragmentary images. His camera moves furtively inspecting areas normally unseen or unnoticed, distorting and reshaping the familiar. Since 1988 his work, offering a different more intimate reading of the politics and culture of Northern Ireland, has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the USA and Europe. Born in Belfast in 1965, Paul Seawright lives and works in Newport, Wales.
Commenting on Seawright’s work Declan McGonagle, Director of the museum and Chair of the jury panel, said: “Paul Seawright’s photographs are extremely powerful representations of the effects of the conflict in the north. They represent a world inside and outside the barricaded environment of police stations and pubs, where normal social activity becomes abnormal. Seawright’s photographs combine the language of traditional art and hard contemporary reality.”

The other artists shortlisted for the 1997 award were sculptors Stephen Craig and Dorothy Cross, painter Willie McKeown, multi-media artist Maurice O’Connell, and Phelan/McLoughlin, who work in a variety of media. All six shortlisted artists are paid a fee of £1,000. Lochlann Quinn, Deputy Chairman of Glen Dimplex, said that as a leading manufacturing company employing 6,000 people worldwide, Glen Dimplex was very pleased to be associated with six young artists whose work had achieved recognition in the highly competitive world of international contemporary art.

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award was first made in 1994 when the winner was multi-media artist Alanna O’Kelly. The 1995 winner was video and photographic artist Willie Doherty and the winner in 1996 was the American installation artist and sculptor Janine Antoni.

The jury for the 1997 award was Declan McGonagle, Director, Irish Museum of Modern Art (Chair of jury); Chris Dercon, Director, Boymons-Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; Dr Margaret Downes, Chairman, BUPA Ireland, and Director, Bank of Ireland; Aidan Dunne, Art Critic, The Sunday Tribune; Chrissie Illes, Head of Exhibitions, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Gillian Bowler, former Chair of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Brenda McParland, Curator : Head of Exhibitions, Irish Museum of Modern Art.

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award Exhibition continues at the museum until 13 July.

An exhibition of work by the six artists shortlisted for the 1997 Glen Dimplex Artists Award opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 2 May. As in previous years, the six artists – sculptors Stephen Craig and Dorothy Cross, painter Willie McKeown, multi-media artist Maurice O’Connell, Phelan/McLoughlin, who work in a variety of media, and photographer Paul Seawright – have been allocated individual spaces at the museum in which to represent their practice. The exhibition includes several new works being shown for the first time, alongside a number of works for which the artists were nominated. The presentation of the £15,000 award, sponsored by Irish-based company Glen Dimplex, will be made by Dr Ciarán Benson, Chairman of the Arts Council, at the museum on Monday 26 May.

Stephen Craig (b. Larne, Co Antrim 1960) presents a body of architectural sculptures, in varying scales, some of which have been created specifically for the exhibition. His work combines sculpture and architecture and frequently other media such as film, video and photography. The forging together of these different media to create a single coherent statement is an important aspect of his practice, as is its relationship to the surrounding environment. He is nominated for a solo exhibition at Förderkoje Art Cologne and for two group shows in Dormstadt and Frankfurt, Germany. He has had a number of other solo shows in Germany and has shown in group exhibitions in Germany, the Netherlands and Australia. Stephen Craig lives and works in Hamburg.

Dorothy Cross (b. Cork 1956) is represented by a selection of photographic and sculptural works from 1996-1997 including Kiss, a silver cast of two mouths kissing, and a new work in her snake series Albino Python, which has been completed for this exhibition. Cross’s work has attracted considerable international attention in recent years. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York, 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. Dorothy Cross was first nominated for the Glen Dimplex Artists Award in 1995. She is nominated on this occasion for her exhibition even which was seen at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and the Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Wales. Dorothy Cross lives and works in Dublin.

Willie McKeown (b. Co Tyrone 1962) has chosen to exhibit two new paintings which have been made in response to the very specific nature of the rooms at the museum. McKeown’s work emerges from a desire to echo a sense of unconditional openess, expansion and inclusion. It avoids illustration and narrative conventions and removes the hand of the artist as a signature of authority or value, while creating stunningly beautiful visual abstract effects. He is nominated for his exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery in 1996, which represented a major step forward in his practice. He has also shown in group shows at the Kerlin and in Belfast and Glasgow. Willie McKeown lives and works in Dublin.

Maurice O’Connell (b. Dublin 1966) is represented by a body of works made in 1996. The actual artworks were both site and time
specific when originally executed and so by-products are all that remain
of them. These works were mainly concerned with the artist engaging with the public and resulted in private conversations or dialogues in public spaces. Throughout the period of the exhibition O’Connell will use his space as a work space for conversations. During the exhibition a new conversation will be developed, which will become the first of a series entitled sounds like silence. O’Connell’s work since 1992 includes projects and residencies in Ireland, Britain, France, the Netherlands and the USA. He is nominated for a number of projects in 1995-1996 including EV+A in Limerick, and installations at the Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, and CCA, Glasgow. Maurice O’Connell lives and works in Dublin.

Phelan/McLoughlin (Garrett Phelan and Mark McLoughlin both
b. Dublin 1965) are represented by their installation Time is, Time was, Time is past. The first part of the artwork was a morse-code transmission of these words from Collins Barracks by a soldier of the 2nd Field Signal Company of the Irish Army during April of 1996. This part of the work is represented in both documentation and recorded format in the second part of the installation, which consists of photography, sound, radio transmission and light. The installation for which they were shortlisted, was first exhibited at le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France in 1996 as part of L’Imaginaire Irlandais. Phelan/ McLoughlin’s work presents in a historical sequence, curated projects of technology-based artforms and contextualises them within the framework of public service broadcasting systems. As a result of their research and discoveries concerning these projects, Phelan/McLoughlin have responded by creating their own artworks using a variety of media. Both artists live and work in Dublin.

Paul Seawright (b. Belfast 1965) is showing a selection of works from his series Police Force. This work is based on his unprecedented access to the RUC’s operations over a prolonged period and takes a look behind the scenes, avoiding the narrative description of hard news reportage or documentary photography, to explore the material conditions and psychological spaces of police sub-culture. He is also showing a selection from a new body of work started in 1996. Since 1988 his work, offering a more intimate reading of the politics and culture of Northern Ireland has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the USA and Europe. He is shortlisted for his exhibit Police Force at the Photographer’s Gallery, London, which was toured by the Gallery of Photography, Dublin. He lives and works in Newport, Wales.

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award, now in its fourth year, is designed to mark a significant level of achievement or development in the work and practice of exhibiting artists. The 1997 award was open to Irish artists who had exhibited in Ireland and elsewhere from 1 October 1995 to 31 October 1996 and to non-Irish artists who have exhibited in Ireland in the same period. All six shortlisted artists will be paid a fee of £1,000. The £15,000 award will be presented to the winning artist at a dinner at the museum following the final jury meeting on 26 May.

The jury for the 1997 award is:-
Declan McGonagle, Director, Irish Museum of Modern Art, (Chair of jury)
Chris Dercon, Director, Boymons-Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam
Dr. Margret Downes, Chairman, BUPA Ireland, Director, Bank of Ireland
Aidan Dunne, Art Critic, The Sunday Tribune
Chrissie Illes, Head of Exhibitions, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.
Gillian Bowler, former Chair of Irish Museum of Modern Art
Brenda McParland, Curator : Head of Exhibitions, Irish Museum of Modern Art

The exhibition continues until 13 July.