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

The first exhibition in Ireland of the work of the distinguished Russian installation artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 20 November. The Children’s Hospital, which will see the Museum’s East Wing transformed into a children’s hospital ward, is the latest in a number of installations in leading international museums in which the artists have translated their experience of Soviet life into a sardonic, but often beguiling, metaphor for the human condition.

Using the existing gallery structure of eight rooms, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov will create individual wards, each with a hospital bed, chair and night table. In each room there will also be a mechanical model theatre telling an enchanting series of stories through words, music and the movement of puppets. In one room we hear the tale of Fifi the cat and the mice who live in a suitcase, in another the adventures of the Brazilian ballet-master Bigo and the famous ballerina Jolle who could execute 45 pirouettes “while never changing the happy expression on her face”. The stories, however, have no real ending and trail of enigmatically, reflecting the uncertain world in which they are set.

The artists see the absence of an occupant in each bed as creating space for the imagination of the visitor. “The visitor can sit in the chair next to each bed and watch the show. Perhaps these shows were created by the head doctor in the hospital in order to make the children’s time there a little bit nicer and easier, to distract them from their illness. Let the viewer believe that this really happened, let him believe in this ‘visual legend’. But even without this legend, the soft music, silence, tranquility, the simplicity of the architecture and the beautiful landscapes behind the windows of these rooms, all create an atmosphere which even for a ‘grown-up’ visitor will be good and ‘therapeutic’, will be just what he needs.”

Born in the USSR in 1933, Ilya Kabakov is one of the most compelling and influential artists to have emerged from the former Soviet Union. Since his arrival in the West in 1987 he has become a leading figure in installation art and art in public spaces. His practice combines drawings, paperworks, paintings and found objects in complex installations reflecting the social, historical and political forces which have shaped his life and work. These include his boyhood during Stalin’s regime, his obligatory career as a children’s book illustrator in the official Artists’ Union, his involvement in Moscow’s active underground avant-garde of artists and writers, and his more recent travels in the international art circuit. In all of his work Kabakov sees himself as essentially a “visual archaeologist” of people’s experience. He has built installations in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Kunsthalle, Bern; the Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Kunstalle, Cologne; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt; the Venice Biennale; and Documenta IX in Kassel.

Since 1990 Kabakov has worked closely with his wife, Emilia Kabakov. They live in New York City, but travel extensively following the itinerary of their installations.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov : The Children’s Hospital continues until 11 April 1999.

An exhibition of paintings and drawings by the British-born painter Hughie O’Donoghue opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 23 October. Hughie O’Donoghue: Corp spans 15 years of the artist’s practice, from 1984 to 1998, and is the first exhibition on this scale in Ireland since he moved to live in Kilkenny in 1996.

Hughie O’Donoghue: Corp, selected in close collaboration with the artist, comprises 25 works over 15 years portraying the human body, a key element in O’Donoghue’s work. The relationship between the languages of painting and drawing, which is also central to his practice, is also explored through the selection of the works. O’Donoghue has worked with large-scale drawings throughout his career and the exhibition includes a recent 7-metre-long charcoal and graphite drawing Crossing the Rapido.

Hughie O’Donoghue’s practice comes out of a deep understanding of the tradition of painting. Subject matter is developed through the painting process, with a figure often becoming a suggested presence in the finished work. He frequently works on a monumental scale, recalling the religious painting of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, though his work verges on abstraction. Since moving to Ireland, O’Donoghue has made a body of work in response to his family history which he has been researching through diaries, letters and photographs, with reference in particular to his father’s experiences in the Second World War. The exhibition will include several examples of these recent paintings and drawings.

Born in Manchester in 1953, Hughie O’Donoghue has been exhibiting his work in international solo and group exhibitions since 1982, and has gained a reputation as one of the leading painters of his generation. His paintings are included in important public collections including the National Gallery, London; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and the Arts Council of England. O’Donoghue was resident on the Artist’s Work Programme at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1996, when he worked on a particular series of paintings and also lead public masterclasses in drawing. He has spent the last 12 years working on a series of paintings entitled Via Crucis – a contemporary interpretation of the Passion. He exhibited a selection of these works at the Haus der Kunst, Munich in 1997. An exhibition of the series, which has been donated to the OPW, will be shown at the RHA Gallagher Gallery in January 1999, during the run of Corp at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

A fully-illustrated catalogue with an essay by the artist, will acompany the exhibition.

Hughie O’Donoghue: Corp is on show from Friday 23 October 1998 to 4 March 1999.

An exhibition bringing together some 20 works dealing with the Irish Famine of 1845-48 opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 24 September. Representations of the Famine is drawn from the relatively small body of visual depictions of the subject and highlights the often inaccurate nature of these representations, the reasons for this and ongoing sensitivities about dealing with the Famine in visual art.

Representations of the Famine includes a small number of paintings from the 19th and early 20th century and also pieces, in a variety of media, by contemporary artists who have taken the Famine as a key subject. These are shown alongside a body of new work by women from Voices from the Tower, a community arts development project based in Knocknaheeny, Cork. The exhibition was developed as part of the Museum’s National Programme and has already been shown in Belfast, Cobh, Castlebar and Derry.

Representations of the Famine explores the ways in which artists have dealt with the Famine in their work and the particular problems which that subject brought with it – the difficulty of recounting the full horror of the event while showing respect for its victims and the political sensitivity of representing Irish hardship in a colonial context. Daniel McDonald’s The Discovery of the Potato Blight is one of only a handful of responses by visual artists who lived through the disaster. McDonald overcame difficulties and resistances which prevented many other Irish artists from addressing the subject.

Henry Jones Thaddeus and Lady Elizabeth Butler are much better known as painters of picturesque Breton fishermen or calls to arms than for the spectacular but rare eviction pictures shown here, while Daniel McLise’s watercolour for the monumental painting The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife can be read as an overtly political commentary on Anglo-Irish relations in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Erskine Nicol’s paintings and the graphic illustrations from Punch magazine demonstrate the official disregard of the authorities and the unsympathetic climate in contexts to which many of the survivors fled.

Commenting on the exhibition Catherine Marshall, Senior Curator of the Museum’s Collection, said: “The historical works were exceptional in their time. For well over a century the horror of the event and the guilt of the survivors meant that the Famine was rarely represented visually. Only now is it possible to claim the dead as ours, to suffer with them as Geraldine O’Reilly does in Register and Emigrants Letter, to mourn for them as Alanna O’Kelly does in Sanctuary Wasteland and the women from Voices from the Tower in A Famine Cry. The somewhat strained relationship between art and the Famine is an indication of the importance of bringing a particular selection of works together, both in terms of remembering the Famine and its history, and understanding a change in the role of the visual artist.”

Representations of the Famine continues until 11 January.