Fifteen paintings from an important body of works recently donated to the Irish Museum of Modern Art by Sligo businessman Vincent Ferguson and his wife Noeleen have just gone on exhibition at the museum. The donation, which includes paintings by Brian Bourke, Brian Maguire, Edward Maguire, Elizabeth Magill and Michael Mulcahy, comprises 35 works, all by Irish artists or artists who have been closely associated with this country, and represents most of the dominant strands in Irish painting of the 1980s. The donation will be formally received on behalf of the State by the Minister of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Michael D Higgins, TD, at 1.00pm on Wednesday 16 April.

Former owners of the Hendrik’s Gallery, Vincent and Noeleen Ferguson did not limit their collection to the domestic scale usually associated with privately owned art in Ireland. Thus large-scale pieces, such as Patrick Hall’s Faust series and Anne Madden’s Night Paths triptych, rub shoulders with a life-size portrait of Patrick Collins by Edward Maguire. The Fergusons’ interest in gestural painting is clearly evident in the work of David Crone, Michael Cullen and Basil Blackshaw, while a more political attitude is revealed in Brian Maguire’s Divis Flats and Liffey Suicide.

The collection is mainly figurative rather than abstract, with an emphasis on landscape. Stephen McKenna’s Irish Coast contrasts the small struggling human figures on the quay with the heroic clash of water and rock which surrounds them, but nature is subjected to a more rigorous formal aesthetic in Clement McAleer’s Seafront At Night.
Brian Bourke presents an altogether different mood in the exuberantly coloured Cardet, France, while Barrie Cooke’s Night Lake Orange interprets the Brazilian rain forest which inspired it in glowing abstract paintwork.

Landscape is not the only genre which appeals to the Fergusons. History in the form of Brendan the Navigator combines with the artist’s personal experience in The Navigator by Michael Mulcahy. An early Felim Egan, Venus III, reminds us of his figurative roots while anticipating the abstraction of his later work. While the donation strongly represents the expressionist, figurative tradition in Irish art, a younger generation of artists is also represented by Elizabeth Magill’s Red, Yellow and Blue Cars and Kathy Prendergast’s Body Map drawings. The Prendergast drawings are not included in the current exhibition as they were shown in the museum’s recent Figuration show.

The Vincent and Noeleen Ferguson Donation:

1. Basil Blackshaw
Trees at Cogry
Female Nude 1982

2. Brian Bourke
Cardet, France

3. Barrie Cooke
Nude in an Armchair
Electric Elk
Still(Woman of the Burren)
Double Knot
Night Lake Orange(Rain Forest)

4. David Crone
Window View
Untitled
Untitled

5. Michael Cullen
Monkey painting
(not correct title)

6. Felim Egan
Untitled
(early mythological work)

7. Patrick Hall
Cry of Faust
(set of 4 paintings)

8. Clement McAleer
Glass House
Sea-Front at Night

9. Elizabeth Magill
Red, Yellow & Blue Cars

10. Brian Maguire
Divis Flats
Liffey Suicide

11. Edward Maguire
Portrait of Paddy Collins

12. Stephen McKenna
The Irish Coast

13. Anne Madden
Night Paths (Triptych)

14. Michael Mulcahy
The Navigator

15. Kathy Prendergast
11 Body Maps

The first Nissan Art Project, a major new competition to create art in the public domain, has been awarded to Irish-born artist Frances Hegarty and British installation artist Andrew Stones. Their collaborative work was selected from 90 entries for the £40,000 project and involves presenting extracts of Molly Bloom’s monologue from Joyce’s Ulysses in neon, in selected locations in Dublin City Centre. The decision of the international jury was announced on Wednesday 26 March at the Irish Museum of Modern Art by Gerard O’Toole, Executive Chairman of Nissan Ireland, sponsors of the project.

The nine neon texts, entitled For Dublin, will be realised in July. Each sign will be placed in a prominent site in the public domain; which will counterpoint and add resonance to the location. The artwork proceeds from the idea that in Molly Bloom’s seemingly intuitive stream of words – no less than in the activities of the male characters in Ulysses – we can find a ‘map’ of the city, presented in terms of a humorous and ironic appraisal of its daily life. The work renders the fictitious Molly’s words in the bold, seductive medium of neon, a form more often associated with the upfront declarations of modern advertising.

Commenting on the project Gerard O’Toole said “Nissan Ireland is delighted with the response to this unique project and has enjoyed immensely working in collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the distinguished panel of both national and international judges. Entries were received from the arts community around the world, reflecting the huge interest in this imaginative project.”

Declan McGonagle, Director of the museum and Chair of the jury panel highlighted the range of submissions from which the work For Dublin by Hegarty and Stones was selected. “The work plays with the idea of the city space, the idea of Dublin and its buildings, the conventions of advertising and psychological fragments from a key character in Ulysses, whose words are already in the public domain. It makes the sort of engaging and challenging statement which was needed for the first project on this scale to be undertaken by the museum with the support of Nissan Ireland,” he said.

Frances Hegarty was born in Teelin, Co Donegal, later emigrating to Scotland, and then to England. Her recent video installations Turas (Journey), Gold, and Voice-Over have all been shown in Ireland – in Belfast, Derry and Dublin. Her work has also been included in a number of large survey shows, including From Beyond the Pale and Distant Relations at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and recently in L’Imaginaire Irlandais in Paris, and has been widely covered by Irish press and television. Frances Hegarty recently completed and installed the large public art work Point of View in one of the pier 4A walkways at Heathrow Airport, under the auspices of the Public Art Development Trust. She is currently Professor of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

Andrew Stones was born in Sheffield, England. Throughout the late 1980s and early 90s he exhibited widely within the international video circuit, producing large-scale installations such as Class, Geiger, and The Conditions. His single-tape video works include A History of Disaster with Marvels for Channel 4 television. Andrew Stones is currently researching a project/publication for Dublin city with the Project Arts Centre. He has acted as technical supervisor in the installation of all Frances Hegarty’s major projects in Ireland, and is currently Practising Fine Art Research Fellow at the Manchester Metropolitan University.

The Nissan Art Project, created and organised in association with the Irish Musuem of Modern Art, is one of the largest visual art sponsorships in this country. It is intended to give artists working in any medium an opportunity to extend their practise to make a new temporary work for the public domain. This is defined as any space or process to which the general public has ready unmediated access. The project is open to Irish artists working in Ireland or overseas and to non-Irish artists who have a defined involvement with Ireland.

The members of the jury are Sandra Percival, Director of the Public Art Development Trust, London, a leading authority on public art; the distinguished Japanese curator and critic Fumio Nanjo; Dr Ciaran Benson, Chair of the Arts Council; Jim Barrett, Dublin City Architect and Brenda McParland, Curator of Exhibitions at the museum. The panel is chaired by Declan McGonagle, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

The first solo exhibition in Ireland of the work of Joseph Kosuth, one of the founders of Conceptual art, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 13 March. The exhibition, entitled Guests and Foreigners, Rules and Meanings (James Joyce, Pola, Roma, Trieste, Paris, Zurich, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dublin, County Wicklow, Connemara), includes a large scale installation which utilises the writings and history of two important 20th-century figures; James Joyce and Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. This installation, one of his most ambitious to date, will counterpoint 14 seminal works (from 1965 to 1997) which established Kosuth as one of the pivotal figures in Conceptual art.

Joseph Kosuth’s work played a key role in the redefinition of art which took place in the 1960s and ‘70s, which questioned traditional art forms and practices and the assumptions surrounding them. The questions asked then are still contested as a new generation comes under their influence, and Kosuth is at the centre of these debates. For Kosuth the meaning of art, as expressed in language, is more important than its appearance, the concept more important than the object. Through a variety of means, from dictionary definitions to advertising billboards, he presents abstracted information to the viewer. This information simultaneously explains itself and broadens the perceptions of artistic practice as it reveals the mechanisms which produce meaning.

Kosuth describes the process used in works such as One and Three Chairs 1965, one of the key works in the exhibition: “I used common, functional objects – such as a chair – and to the left of the object would be a full-scale photograph of it and to the right of the object would be a photostat of a definition of the object from the dictionary. Everything you saw when you looked at the object had to be the same that you saw in the photograph, so each time the work was exhibited the new installation necessitated a new photograph. I like the fact that the work itself was something other than simply what you saw. By changing the location, the object, and still having it remain the same work was very interesting. It meant you could have an art work which was that idea of an art work, and its formal components weren’t important … The expression was in the idea, not the form – the forms were only a device in the service of the idea.”

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1945, Joseph Kosuth studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art; the School of Visual Arts, New York City and New School for Social Research. He was a founder member of the Art and Language group and contributed to the defining debates of that period in the late 1960s and early ‘70s before leaving in 1975. He has been a prize winner at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and was made Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1993. His collected writings Art after Philosophy and After were published by the M.I.T. Press in 1991. He has lectured widely throughout Europe and North America, and is presently a professor at the Stuttgart Kunstakademie. His work has been shown in countless solo and group exhibitions worldwide and forms part of all the major public collections and many key private collections. He lives in New York City and Ghent, Belgium.

The exhibition can be seen from 13 March to 11 June 1997.

An exhibition of works by a number of young artists from America and Britain working with film and video installation opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 14 February. Scream and Scream Again: Film in Art, organised by the Museum of Modern Art Oxford and shown in collaboration with the Douglas Hyde Gallery, explores the use of film and video in the work of six artists. The museum show includes three specially commissioned installations – one by recent Turner Prize winner, Douglas Gordon, the others by Liisa Roberts and Isaac Julien, with a film piece by Marijke van Warmerdam. The Douglas Hyde Gallery exhibition, which also opens on Friday 14 February shows the work of Tony Oursler and Sadie Benning. The exhibition takes its title from a 1969 British horror film starring Vincent Price and Peter Cushing.

Although diverse in form and content, the work in the exhibition is united in its concern with the power of the project image. It ranges across the entire field of the moving image, from cheap, hand-held videos to Hollywood drama. Douglas Gordon’s Black and White (Babylon) epitomises the new fluidity which has developed between video and film in the work of a new generation of artists. His new commission uses a 1960s stag film of a stripper, dramatically slowed down and projected onto two large screens (one right way up, the other inverted). The inversion and the slow motion breaks the expected reading of the film and allows the spectator to become aware of what Gordon describes as the ‘unconscious’ content of film.

In Trap Door the New York based artist Liisa Roberts projects slow-motion silent 16mm films onto four free-standing screens. The installation creates a sculptural environment through which the viewer is able to move around and select a personal vantage point. Her work explores the perceptions of reality and representaton that we have become used to through the conventional cinema. The British film-maker, Isaac Julien’s new film Trussed is projected in duplicate onto the gallery walls. It identifies and explores the ambiguities of relationships and stereotypes from the position of the black gay male. Images of pleasure and pain alternate in tableaux of erotic, sado-masochistic play and sickness. Dutch artist, Marijke van Warmerdam, now based in New York, represented Holland in 1993 Venice Biennale. She works in 16mm film, creating installations that explore the politics of film and photography, in particular the power of the gaze.

At the Douglas Hyde Gallery Sadie Benning interweaves the 1950s Hollywood film The Bad Seed with footage of herself in various male and female guises, while the impact of commercial cinema and television on our psyche is the subject of System for Dramatic Feedback, a large video installation by Tony Oursler.

Scream and Scream Again is on show at the Museum from 14 February to 16 April and at the Douglas Hyde Gallery from 14 February to 12 April.

A major retrospective exhibition of the work of the distinguished Irish painter Louis le Brocquy opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 16 October. Louis le Brocquy: Paintings 1939-1996, the first retrospective showing of his work in Ireland since 1966, comprises more than 90 paintings, including early works, group portraits, head studies, the procession series and human presences. The exhibition will be officially opened by the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, at 6pm on Tuesday 15 October 1996.

Louis le Brocquy: Paintings 1939-96 provides the first opportunity in 30 years to see an exhibition of le Brocquy’s work on this scale in Dublin and, for those more familiar with the work of the last few decades, to see the foundation paintings of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Bringing together an unprecedented number of early paintings, it explores the clear and rigorous critical path along which le Brocquy’s work has developed over the past 50 years from his early links with artists like Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, who first created and sustained an argument of modernism in Ireland to the later influences of post-war French art. It also demonstrates how this European tradition of painting and the human presence, with its echoes of Celtic and pre-modern influences, became and remain crucial to his practice. The latter has been most tellingly realised in his famous head portraits of writers from Shakespeare through Yeats, Joyce and Beckett to Seamus Heaney, the genesis of which can be seen in his earlier paintings where the figures, although grouped together, appear strangely isolated. This engagement with a contemporary European tradition within older strands of cultural continuity is crucial to an understanding of le Brocquy’s achievement in art.

Louis le Brocquy was born in Dublin in 1916. A self-taught artist, he left the family business in 1938 to become a painter studying on his own at the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, and in Venice and Geneva (then exhibiting the Prado’s collection). In 1947 he moved to London and began a long and successful association with the Gimpel Fils Gallery. He exhibited at Gimpel Fils that year, the first of some 50 international one-person exhibitions. In 1956 he won a major international prize at the Venice Biennale. Two years later he married the painter Anne Madden and has since lived and worked in France and Ireland.

The exhibition continues the series of retrospectives of Irish artists such as Mainie Jellett and Patrick Swift which IMMA has presented since 1991. These have been presented in the context of other retrospectives by key figures in 20th-century art like Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti and Richard Hamilton and form an important part of IMMA’s programme.

A fully-illustrated catalogue, with a substantial essay, interweaving the artists life and work, by Alistair Smith, Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, is being published to coincide with the show.

Louis le Brocquy: Paintings 1939-96 continues until 16 February 1997.

The first one-person exhibition in Ireland of the work of the American sculptor Beverly Semmes opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 2 October. Beverly Semmes: New and Recent Sculpture comprises 10 of Semmes’s characteristically large, dramatic clothing pieces, all created in the last four years, and 10 earlier photoworks of smaller wearable garments.

Beverly Semmes’s monumental sculptures and her smaller fabric creations are a delightful and provocative fusion of personal fantasy and social commentary. They explore the power of clothing and its ability to influence, and even define the self – who we think we are, how we choose to represent ourselves, and how we are seen and defined. The strangely distorted bodices and elongated arms of Semmes’s dresses, with their profusion of colours and fabrics, present rich psychological terrain. Her exaggeration of clothing forms to surreal extremes, result in sculptural creations that reflect a concern, shared by many contemporary artists, with the politics and psychology of identity.

Scarlett, 1994 is a typically striking work, a 71/2 foot long ‘dress’ of scarlet crushed velvet with skirt and arms flowing down the gallery wall and spilling luxuriantly onto the floor. In Green Braided Dress, 1992 the collar and shoulders are of a normal, though greatly enlarged, dress, which is then contorted into three pairs of plaits stretching to the ground. Two new works have been made especially for this exhibition. One, Twister, 1996 is one of the first works in which a kinetic element is introduced. In all of the larger, more recent works the human figure is absent – but made all the more visible by its very invisibility. This ‘presence of absence’ resonates throughout Beverly Semmes’s work with both dramatic and telling effect.

In contrast, the small scale photoworks and film stills each depict a costumed figure, frequently in a landscape with the shapes and textures of their costumes mimicking their surroundings. Figure in the Purple Velvet Bathrobe and Cloud Hat, 1991 depicts a figure standing on a sandy point overlooking the ocean. Her voluminous, purple robe falls in thick folds, like a waterfall or a stream that will lead to the ocean below, while her cloudlike hat is barely distinguishable from the sky.

Born in Washington, DC, Beverly Semmes lives and works in New York City. Solo exhibitions include shows at the Sculpture Centre, New York, ICA, Philadelphia, Camden Arts Centre, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, She has shown in many group exhibitions in the US and in Dusseldorf, London, Nova Scotia and Ontario. Her Four Purple Velvet Bathroles was one of the most memorable works in IMMA’s From Beyond the Pale season in 1994-95.

Beverly Semmes: New and Recent Sculpture continues until 16 February 1997.

A season of exhibitions and artists’ projects exploring the current issues of national identity, immigration and cultural diversity in Europe opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 12 September. The Event Horizon takes as its central theme the belief that the ‘new’ Europe must be built on an amalgam of the old, the new, the past, the present and the future and that, in order to retain its viability, it must incorporate a flexibility and permanent ability to improvise, as the needs and demands of present and future communities and states evolve.

The season, curated by Brussels-based curator Michael Tarantino and organised to coincide with Ireland’s presidency of the EU, also includes a short season of films, selected by Pat Murphy, presented in association with the IFC. The Event Horizon takes its title from an essay by the distinguished film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni dealing with the relationship between landscape and personal identity.

The core exhibition is being shown in two parts – Part I from 12 September to 6 November 1996 and Part II from 21 November 1996 to February 1997 – and brings together works in a wide range of media. Tim Robinson’s View from the Horizon examines the narrative possibilities of landscape through sculpture and maps while film-maker Atom Egoyan addresses the same issues in a video installation based on a sequence from his 1992 film Calendar. Sigalit Landau’s installation deals with the relationship between public and private space and between personal and cultural identity.

The exhibition comprises works by 15 artists from Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Britain, Egypt, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland, though many are displaced, working outside their homelands. Once the preserve of academic debate, the issues addressed have in recent years become much more visible, in some cases violently, in everyday life. The questions of cultural identity they raise are now part of a far wider agenda.

Michael Tarantino describes the evolution of the season:
As an exhibition, The Event Horizon started with the concept of narratives: how do artists construct them? As the emphasis on narrative was developed through the planning stages of the exhibition, two other themes emerged: landscape and personal identity. The artists invited to participate have all dealt, in one form or another, with the issues of landscape, narrative and cultural identity. Their approaches are, of course, very different. In fact, these differences are another way of ‘unfixing’ the questions under discussion. As an exhibition, The Event Horizon poses these questions, suggests a few responses and leaves the resolutions open to interpretation.

As part of The Event Horizon a special season of films dealing with issues of identity is being organised by the IFC, concentrated on two weekends: 2 and 3 November 1996 and 18 and 19 January 1997. The film programme, which includes films by Antonioni, Jeremy Marre, Helma Sanders Brahms, Emir Kuristicaa, Declan Quinn and Vivienne Dick, Joe Comerford and Bob Quinn, has been selected by film maker Pat Murphy, who curated a highly successful programme in association with IMMA’s From Beyond the Pale season in 1994-95. In addition, two films Atlantean by Bob Quinn and Folding Landscapes by Tim Robinson, will be shown at IMMA.

A further aspect of the season is Nomadism Now and Then, a slide/tape presentation prepared by Pavee Point based on the lives and culture of travelling people in Ireland and eastern Europe.

A fully-illustrated magazine-style publication, incorporating installation imagery of the new work by the participating artists, will be published in January 1997 documenting the entire season.

The Event Horizon Part I will be on show from 12 September to 6 November 1996 and Part II from 20 November 1996 to February 1997.

Helena Almeida
Born in Portugal, 1936. Almeida’s work concerns the relationship between painting, photography and performance. At IMMA, she will exhibit a recent work, consisting of twenty photographs, in which the development of a gesture within a photographic series is explored.

Anna-Eva Bergman (see Part I)

Philippe Chavent
Born in France, Chavent is the chef and owner of the Lyon restaurant, La Tour Rose. Known for his inventive combinations of diverse products and preparations, he will create a special project for the opening of Part II of The Event Horizon, which examines the narrative properties of dining.

Atom Egoyan (see Part I)

Seamus Farrell
Born in 1965 (to Irish parents). Lives and works in Paris. Farrell has consistently created works in which he examines the influence of architecture and history on our lives, asking the viewer to approach actively the representation of a particular site of activity. His project for IMMA concerns the way in which an event (in this case, one staged in Paris this past summer) may be documented in many different ways and still remain elusive.

Ann-Veronica Janssens
Born in 1956 in Folkstone (to Belgian parents). Lives and works in Brussels. Janssens’ work explores the relationship that various artistic media (sculpture, photography, film, sound and light installations) can have with determining our experience of space. She will create a site-specific environment for the second half of The Event Horizon.

Michelangelo Pistoletto
Born in Biela, Italy in 1933. Lives and works in Turin. One of the foremost contributors to the movement known as Arte Povera, Pistoletto will work with Philippe Chavent to create a work which examines the theatrical possibilities of the ritual of dining.

Sam Taylor-Wood (see Part I)

Jean-Pierre Temmerman
Born in Zaire, in 1957 to Belgian parents. Lives and works in Antwerp. Temmerman’s work is frequently concerned with cinema, dreams and travel. He works with light projections, found objects, jigsaw puzzles, photographs, etc. His photoworks include a series of images related to the beginnings of photography and the cinema. Four of these photographs will be shown at IMMA.

Mitja Tusek
Born in Slovenia in 1961, Tusek has lived and worked in Switzerland and Belgium. His paintings, which are usually accumulations of beeswax mixed with pigment, are investigations into the relationship between figuration and abstraction, often times through the subject of a landscape.

Anna-Eva Bergman
Born in Stockholm (of Norwegian parents) in 1909. Died in 1987. Bergman spent most of her creative life in France, with her husband, Hans Hartung. Her paintings, often based on landscapes, were investigations into the nature of abstraction: how a fragment can be transformed, with the aid of the viewer, into a complete image. Examples from two of her series; Tombeaux (Tombs) and Horizons will be shown at IMMA.

Marie-Jose Burki
Born in Switzerland, 1961. Lives and works in Brussels. Burki’s most recent video installations have been concerned with the ways in which anthropomorphic interpretation may be used to construct narratives. Her installation, Translations, is also an Orwellian comment on the nature of constructing identities.

Atom Egoyan
Born in Cairo (to Armenian parents) in 1960. Lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Egoyan is known for his films which examine the influence that media has on our day-to-day lives: Family Viewing (1990), The Adjuster (1992), Exotica (1994). For The Event Horizon, he has created a video installation based on a sequence from Calendar (1992), a film based on the combined themes of cultural identity, landscape and narrative.

Immersion (Colin Newman / Malka Spigel)
Newman was born in England, Spigel in Israel. They now live and work in London. Newman has recorded with the band, Wire, Spigel with Minimal Compact. Together, they formed their own record label, Swim, in 1994. For IMMA, they will create a sound installation, using original and found material, which examines the ways in which music may work against narrative.

Sigalit Landau
Born in 1967 in Jerusalem. Landau’s work deals with the relationship between public and private space, between personal and cultural identity. She will exhibit works in the gallery spaces as well as in a shipping container that is positioned outside the museum reception area. The latter space functions as a site for showing artwork, while retaining its utilitarian characteristics. For the artist, it may be seen as a living space as well.

Nusret Pasic
Born in 1951 in Sarajevo, Pasic’s work Sarajevo Library: History of the World, combines painting and sculpture with found objects, such as burnt books, in order to create a sobering comment on how we treat and debase knowledge and history.

Tim Robinson
Born in England in 1935, Robinson studied mathematics in Cambridge. He later worked as a visual artist, under the name of Timothy Drever, first in Vienna and later in London. In 1972, he went to live on the Aran Islands and began writing and making maps. He now lives in Roundstone, Connemara, where he and his wife run the Folding Landscapes studio, which publishes his maps and related writings on the west of Ireland. His work View from the Horizon, examines the narrative possibilities of landscape through a combination of sculpture and text.

Sam Taylor-Wood
Born in London in 1967, Sam Taylor-Wood has participated in many exhibitions in Europe and the United States, including a solo show currently on view at the Chisenhale Gallery in London and the group exhibition, Manifesta I (Rotterdam, Summer 1996). She will be showing two works Five Revolutionary Seconds # 2 (1996) and Knackered (1996). The former, through the use of a large panoramic photograph and a sound installation, presents a fractured narrative. The latter, a film of a woman mouthing the words from the aria sung by a castrato, presents an equally disjointed activity.

An exhibition of new large-scale photoworks by London-born artist Hannah Collins opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Saturday 20 July. Hannah Collins: A Worldwide Case of Homesickness, Collins’s first one-person show in Ireland, comprises 12 large black and white photoworks made in response to a number of visits to Eastern Europe. Six of the works have been produced especially for the IMMA show. The exhibition will also include small-scale colour images and the texts of diary entries made by the artist while in Poland and Byelorussia.

Hannah Collins has been interested in Eastern Europe for some time and, when images from Eastern Europe began to appear in the press after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she decided she would travel there to make work. “I made four trips to different places which have quite different sets of references, both historic and contemporary. I deal with different subject matter in the work, but the inter-relationships are very strong between them.” The work continues Collins’s long-standing interest in the space occupied by those who exist on the margins or borders of society. “ I am interested in the in-between countries of Eastern Europe, whose status is dubious. The situation is complex, I can’t actually get a grasp on it. I enter it and allow it to have its own world. My work is about finding the site and allowing it to be.”

Space and scale are important considerations in Collins’s work – the space created by the piece, the space it occupies physically and how it relates to the space in which it hangs. The human figure is deliberately absent in much of her work. “The human figure would fix the overall scale of the image and would fix your relationship with the image. I want one to be able to move into the image.”

Born in London in 1956, Hannah Collins studied at the Slade School of Art in London, followed by a Fulbright Scholarship to the USA. Her work has been shown in many one-person and group exhibitions worldwide and is included in notable public and private collections including the Weltkunst Collection of Contemporary British Art, on loan to IMMA for a period of ten years. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1993. She lives and works in Barcelona.

Hannah Collins: A Worldwide Case of Homesickness continues at IMMA until 6 October and leads into The Event Horizon, IMMA’s season of exhibitions, films and projects exploring European identity opening on 12 September. A publication including photographs taken by the artist and texts from the diary entries in the exhibition is being published to coincide with the exhibition. Price £3.00.