A major exhibition of the work of William Scott (1913-1989), one of the most influential British artists of the 1950s and ‘60s, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 22 July. William Scott: Paintings and Drawings, is the most comprehensive showing of Scott’s work in Europe for many years and is the only showing of this exhibition, which includes some 90 works drawn from public and private collections as well as from those held by the Scott family. It shows aspects of the artist’s practice from the early figurative paintings of the 1930s through his abstract works to his return to a more realistic figuration in the late 1970s and ‘80s. It examines, in particular, the relationship between his paintings and drawings and includes many previously unseen works.

William Scott: Paintings and Drawings includes many of the works for which Scott is most widely known and through which he contributed to several movements and shifts in British and international painting. Orange and Red 1957 and Nile Valley: Red and White 1962 recall the floating shapes and gestural surfaces of the American Abstract Expressionists such at Rothko and de Kooning. These artists had an enormous influence on British painting of the 1950s and ‘60s and Scott played a central role in this relationship. The exhibition also demonstrates the extent to which Scott, nonetheless, remained a strong but self-effacing individualist, more especially in his extraordinary ability to straddle the divide between figuration and abstraction which dominated painting of the time. The exhibition presents his drawings as he himself thought of them – parallel to, and not preparations for, his paintings. It includes a number of works not previously exhibited, among them the Private Suite series of drawings, which have human sexuality as their subject.

These unseen works, expressing less familiar dimensions of Scott’s mind and art, provides a valuable opportunity for a re-reading of his complete oeuvre.

Declan McGonagle, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, sees this as “a key function of a public institution creating retrospective exhibitions – to unfix existing perceptions and present all possible options so that the work can be experienced afresh, in the present. In this case it was the artist who regularly unpicked form and meaning in his work and the exhibition takes its cue from his practice. As a result the ‘real’ William Scott may be seen to be broader, fuller and more creatively untidy than hitherto appreciated.”

William Scott was born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1913, to Scottish and Irish parents. He spent his youth in his father’s home town of Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, where he studied painting with Kathleen Bridle, before moving on to the Belfast College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools in London. He taught at Pont-Aven, Brittany, until the outbreak of World War II, during which he served in the Royal Engineers.

Afterwards he was appointed senior painting lecturer at the Bath Academy of Art where he attracted practising artists to join him, including Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost and Adrian Heath. He was a frequent visitor to St Ives and from 1954 he exhibited in New York, forging significant links with American Expressionists. He exhibited widely during his career, including the 1958 Venice Biennale, the Kunsthalle Zurich (1963) and the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York, (1975). He had a retrospective at the Tate in 1972 and in 1986 at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, touring to the Guinness Hopstore, Dublin, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He died in 1989 at Coleford near Bath.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication William Scott: Paintings and Drawings published by Merrell Holberton in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It includes texts by Mike Tooby, Curator, Tate Gallery St Ives, focussing on the content and context of his work beyond the terms of formalism, and by the critic and writer Simon Morley, who looks afresh at Scott’s work outside the framework of modernist theory. Colour illustrations of almost 100 works, biographical details, artists’s statements and contemporary reviews are also included. Price Stg £19.95.

Mike Tooby will give a lecture on Scott’s work on Wednesday 22 July at 11.30am at the Museum. The lecture is supported by the British Council. Admission is free.

The exhibition is supported by Oxford Exhibition Services.

William Scott: Paintings and Drawings continues until 1 November 1998.

The most extensive exhibition of works yet shown from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s own Collection opens to the public on Thursday 25 June. A Collection in the Making is an important milestone in the Museum’s development. It marks a significant and permanent increase in the space devoted to the Collection to almost half of the total gallery space, signalling the ever-increasing interest in this area of the Museum’s work and the extent of its development. The exhibition will be officially opened by Ms Síle de Valera, TD, Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, at 6.00pm on Wednesday 24 June. The first fully-illustrated reference catalogue of works owned by the Museum will be launched at the opening.

A Collection in the Making comprises individual works and groups of works by some 50 artists. Covering all aspects of the Collection as it has developed to date, it seeks not only to present a wide cross-section of the Museum’s works, but also to make the processes behind the growth and development of the Collection visible to a wider public. It includes a number of recent acquisitions, such as a characteristic graffiti work by Jean Michel Basquiat, created in collaboration with Lee Jaffe; One Way of Containing Air, a stunning experiment in new materials by Maud Cotter made from delicate strips of plaster and corrugated cardboard, and a 1997 painting by Paul Mosse using psychedelic colours, sawdust, nails and other materials to create a new abstract comment on the landscape. More familiar works are also being shown, from Turf Stacks in the Bog c 1920 by Paul Henry, widely regarded as the founding father of Irish landscape painting, to Smoke Rising 1989, an exploration of the psyche and life of modern man by British artists Gilbert and George.

The Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art comprises approximately 580 works by 20th-century and contemporary Irish and non-Irish artists. It has been developed by purchase and donations, as well as by the commissioning of new works. The Museum’s acquisition policy, like its temporary exhibition and access programmes, reflects the shifting cultural context of the late 20th century. The Museum purchases the work of living artists, but accepts loans and donations of more historical art objects with a particular emphasis on work from the 1940s onwards – a benchmark decade in the visual arts in Ireland.

Commenting on the exhibition the Museum’s Director Declan McGonagle, said: “The Collection has reached a stage of development where we can create displays and themed exhibitions on an ongoing basis which will allow the public to explore art of today in the context of art of the past. People will also have the chance to see the Collection grow and develop further as we acquire new works. These new displays will create greater access to the Collection and also assist the National Programme in its work of dispersing the assets, skills and resources of the Museum throughout the country.”

The fully-illustrated, reference catalogue will list all works in the Museum’s permanent Collection of modern art, and will carry an introductory essay by the Director, Declan McGonagle. The Madden-Arnholz Collection of Old Master Prints, which is unique in Ireland, will be listed but not illustrated.

The distinguished international curator Rudi Fuchs will also speak at the opening.

A Collection in the Making will continue to show in rotating displays in the First and Ground Floor West Wing Galleries.

The winner of the 1998 Glen Dimplex Artists Award is Belfast-born sculptor Siobhán Hapaska. The first recipient of the new award for a sustained contribution to the visual arts in Ireland is the distinguished Irish painter Louis le Brocquy. The awards, sponsored by the Irish-based company Glen Dimplex in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, were presented this evening (Thursday 11 June) by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, at a dinner at the Museum.

The £15,000 Glen Dimplex Artists Award is designed to mark a significant level of achievement or development in the work and practice of exhibiting artists. The 1998 award was open to Irish artists who had exhibited in Ireland or elsewhere from 1 October 1996 to 31 December 1997 and to non-Irish artists who had exhibited in Ireland in the same period. Siobhán Hapaska was nominated for solo exhibitions at the Entwistle Gallery, London; the Oriel Gallery, Cardiff, the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, and for her participation in the Plastik exhibition in Stuttgart and in Documenta X. The sustained contribution award is a non-monetary award being made for the first time this year. The recipient Louis le Brocquy is one of Ireland’s best-known artists, with a distinguished career stretching over 50 years. He was presented with a specially commissioned award, made by silversmith Cara Murphy.

Siobhán Hapaska has received considerable international attention in recent years with exhibitions in London, New York, Chicago and Stuttgart. Her sculptures defy easy categorisation, 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. Their titles – To, Here, Stray – imply movement between places and times.
Born in Belfast in 1963, Hapaska studied in London at Middlesex Polytechnic and Goldsmiths’ College. She now lives and works in London.

The other artists shortlisted for the 1998 award were German installation artist Hans Peter Kuhn, American multi-media artists MacDermott and MacGough, Dublin-born sculptor Janet Mullarney and Belfast sound and installation artist Philip Napier. All of the shortlisted artists have been paid a fee of £1,000.

Louis le Brocquy was born in Dublin in 1916. A self-taught artist, he left the family business in 1938 to embark on a career as 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 Ireland and France. In 1996-97 he had a major retrospective exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Commenting on the awards Declan McGonagle, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Chair of the jury panel, said: “The panel members were agreed that nominations for the 1998 Glen Dimplex Artists Award were stronger than ever, and the exhibition of shortlisted artists was particularly powerful and popular as a result, but that Hapaska deserved the award for her uncompromising and innovative combination of materials and ideas in a post-modern period.”

Lochlann Quinn, Deputy Chairman of Glen Dimplex, said that as a company employing 6,000 people in Ireland, the UK, France, Germany and Canada, Glen Dimplex was especially pleased with the international dimension of the award and the obvious commitment to excellence and innovation on the part of all the artists involved. It was particularly fitting that the new award celebrated the achievements and contribution of Louis le Brocquy, one of Ireland’s best-loved artists.

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award was first made in 1994 when the winner was multi-media artist Alanna O’Kelly. Subsequent winners were video and photographic artist Willie Doherty (1995), American installation artist and sculptor Janine Antoni (1996) and photographic artist Paul Seawright (1997).

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: Exhibitions, Irish Museum of Modern Art

The Glen Dimplex Artists Award exhibition continues on show until 5 July.

The first major exhibition of Outsider art to be seen in Ireland opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Saturday 13 June. Art Unsolved comprises more than 200 works by some 70 artists. Although from widely diverging backgrounds, all share a lack of formal art training, a powerful creative imagination and a fascination with the spiritual and mythological world. The exhibition is drawn from the Outsider Collection, established in London by the late Victor Musgrave and curated by Monika Kinley since 1984. The Collection is on loan to the Museum for a period of two years.

The exhibition is international in scope with works by artists from as far afield as Cyprus, the Czech Republic, the US and Australia. These include enormous drawings by the British artist Madge Gill, who worked compulsively at night, in darkness under the influence of a spiritual force which she called Myrninerest; exquisite sculptures made from pieces of wood collected from river mouths and beaches by the French artist Pascal Verbena, and a dinner and tea service decorated by the Glasgow-born Outsider Scottie Wilson whose works were collected by Picasso, Dubuffet and André Breton. The personal stories behind many of the works are equally compelling. That of Dusan Kusmic is not untypical. Born in the former Yugoslavia, he was brought to Dublin by the Red Cross in 1950. His traumatic experiences as a refugee in a displaced persons camp in Italy and his battles with language difficulties, poverty and social isolation, led him to create works using wallpaper, found objects and even food. For him, as for other Outsiders, the process of making art was a lifeline.

The search for and collection of Outsider art began almost 50 years ago with the French artist Jean Dubuffet, who characterised it as Art Brut (raw art). The precise definition of Outsider art has been the subject of much debate. Victor Musgrave described Outsider artists as “knowing little of cultural history or of the tradition of fine art. They draw their inspiration from within; the rules and taboos which trained artists cannot help being aware of have no meaning for them. They work spontaneously and often with great energy to produce images of remarkable power and freshness.”

The Outsider Collection was established in 1981 by the British writer, film-maker and gallery director Victor Musgrave, following the success of the Outsider Exhibitions, which he initiated and co-curated with Roger Cardinal at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1979. The Collection was to have formed the nucleus of a proposed public museum of Outsider art. At the time of his death in 1984, before his ambitions for the Archive had been fully realised, he expressed the wish that his companion Monika Kinley should continue the work of forming a representative collection to be made available to the public.

This international collection now consists of over 750 works. There is an extensive library and slide collection, and an ever growing volume of unique archival material, all of which will be located at the Irish Museum of Modern Art for the next two years. The Outsider Archive has now achieved charitable status as the Victor Musgrave Outsider Trust.

A book entitled Art Unsolved: The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Collection, with essays by Jon Thompson and Dawn Ades, will be published to coincide with the exhibition.

The Outsider Archive Exhibition continues until 14 October 1998.

The 1998 Nissan Art Project, one of the largest visual arts sponsorships in Ireland, has been awarded to the Irish sculptor Dorothy Cross. The project involves the creation of a ‘ghost ship’ from a decommissioned lightship, which will be anchored in Scotsmans Bay, off the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin. Ghost Ship was selected from a wide variety of proposals from eight countries for the £40,000 award. The decision of the international jury was announced today (Tuesday 26 May) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art by Mr Gerard O’Toole, Executive Chairman of Nissan Ireland, sponsors of the project.

The project 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 Ghost Ship 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. The project will be realised in October/November for a two to three week period.

Dorothy Cross’s fascination with lightships goes back to her childhood: “I grew up in Cork, where The Daunt was moored two miles off the coast. The Ghost Ship refers to the memory of the lightships, whose presence was held dear around the Irish coast. Except for three remaining lightships, the vessels have been replaced by automated satellite buoys. The role of the sea has diminished for the Irish people and the view is inwards towards the cities.” The original red, engineless lightships were moored to the bottom of the sea and were crewed by men for weeks on end. Each had large white letters naming the rocks they marked – Daunt, South Rock, Coningbeg, Kish, Lucifer, Barrels, Codling. Manned until 1974, they have now been decommissioned and replaced by automated, electronic buoys.

Commenting on the winning project Gerard O’Toole, Executive Chairman, Nissan Ireland said: “Once again this initiative has attracted many talented artists with innovative and appealing art projects. Ghost Ship is a gentle reminder of the importance of the lightship through a piece of “art” and it gives me great enthusiasm that this proposal will be realised for public appreciation”.

Declan McGonagle, Director, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Chair of the jury panel, highlighted the growing international interest in the project said:
“Once again, the Nissan Art Project has drawn out a proposal which, though dealing with something familiar, is innovative and challenging, and represents a new way of looking at public art and its role in the environment. Dorothy
Cross’s Ghost Ship will activate the specific physical context of Dublin Bay and also the minds of its viewers. It is also encouraging to see how Irish artists like Dorothy Cross are now acknowledged as full participants in an international art process”

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. Using a variety of means ranging from casting and photography to taxidermy, Cross reinvents objects evoking personal and collective memories beyond their original form. These memories raise questions of love, sexuality, control, religion and death.

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 city centre locations.

The members of the 1998 jury panel are Mary Jane Jacob, an independent curator based in Chicago; Sandra Percival, Director, Public Art Development
Trust, London; Tony Sheehan, Director, Firestation Studios, Dublin; Jim
Barrett, Dublin City Architect; Declan McGonagle, Director, and Brenda McParland, Senior Curator: Exhibitions, Irish Museum of Modern Art.

An exhibition of works created as part of a series of Education and Community programmes organised by the Irish Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with its highly-successful Andy Warhol exhibition opens to the public at the Museum on Saturday 30 May 1998. Wall of Myths includes paintings, prints, collages and drawings selected from works produced by a wide variety of groups, including primary school children, young people, adults and older people. In all, approximately 1,800 people participated in the programmes.

The exhibition illustrates the extraordinary range of creative responses to the theme of identity in Warhol’s work. It includes three-dimensional collages made by teachers exploring internal and external aspects of the self; hand-made books representing children’s thoughts and feelings through poetry, writings and drawings; and paintings and prints investigating colour, pattern and texture. For example, taking Warhol’s Campbells Soup Can prints as their inspiration, St Michael’s Primary School, Ballyfermot, made a series of paintings of their favourite foods, such as Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate, Heinz Spaghetti and Avonmore Milk.

The exhibits are drawn from Andy and Me, a project developed by the Museum, in conjunction with the Department of Education and Science, involving Dublin-based schools participating in the Breaking the Cycle primary schools programme;Warhol to Wallpaper and Paint, Print, Pattern, Pop two classroom-based primary school projects in schools from Dublin, Kildare, Meath, Wicklow, Roscommon, Louth and Limerick; Focus on Warhol involved groups from Sunbeam House, Bray; the Drugs Task Force, Rialto; the Fatima After Schools Programme; the Active Retirement Association, Inchicore Art Group; and St Vincent’s Trust, Henrietta Street. The groups worked with artists Sally Douglas, Cliona Harmey, Úna Keeley, John Langan, Niamh Lawlor, Sandra Meehan, Liz McMahon, Kierán McNulty and Margaret Morrison.

Commenting on the background to the exhibition Helen O’Donoghue, Senior Curator: Education and Community, said: “Art is profoundly important for the full growth of the individual because it deals visually with ideas, feelings and experiences. By giving people access to a broad range of art materials and experience, with artists and art works of excellence, a programme such as this one, focussed on Warhol, seeks to create an atmosphere of genuine exploration of artistic and aesthetic expression, creative thinking and making.”

The exhibition continues until 20 September.

The first solo exhibition in Ireland of the work of the leading New York-based, Irish artist and illustrator Brian Cronin opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 1 April. Brian Cronin: Fat Face with Fork comprises some 300 works and ranges from commercial drawings, commissioned by such prestigious publications as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and Time, to personal pieces exploring subconscious manifestations of the human condition. Cronin sees this interrelation between his commercial and personal work and the progression of ideas from one body of drawings to the other as key features of his work. “A specific commissioned illustration involves a chain of ideas, which in turn can be taken to a new level of form and meaning in my personal work.”

A characteristic example of this process is Fat Face with Fork, from which the exhibition takes it name. This work started out as a commission for Newsweek, but never appeared as another news story (Mother Teresa’s death) was breaking. “Blowing up this small editorial drawing, redrawing it in sections, cropping and overlapping the images and pasting them together, as in a billboard poster, gives it a new meaning. The inflation of scale from small editorial illustration to large-scale painting gives the work an horrific, surreal quality suggesting numerous interpretations.” Cronin describes his personal works as being “generated from an overflow of information, giving rise to images that have developed from bits of information broken and disjointed, like a bad connection on a telephone or listening in on part of a conversation. They are more like rumours of ideas than fully developed ideas.”

Born in Dublin in 1958, Brian Cronin studied at the National College of Art, graduating with a BSc in 1981. For some years he worked as a free-lance illustrator, mainly for The Irish Times and In Dublin. In 1985 he moved to New York where his work for a large number of highly-regarded publications has made him one of the most sought-after illustrators in America. His work has been shown in countless exhibitions in New York and in the UK, Italy, Switzerland and Japan and in several cities throughout Ireland.

Brian Cronin: Fat Face with Fork is on show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art from 1 April to 1 June 1998.

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.