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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kiki Smith: Convergence continues until 15 February 1998.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pursuit of Painting continues until 2 November.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dorothy Cross (b. Cork 1956) is represented by a selection of photographic and sculptural works from 1996-1997 including Kiss, a silver cast of two mouths kissing, and a new work in her snake series Albino Python, which has been completed for this exhibition. Cross’s work has attracted considerable international attention in recent years. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Paris, Madrid and throughout the United Kingdom and has works in a number of prestigious public and private collections. In 1993 she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. Dorothy Cross was first nominated for the Glen Dimplex Artists Award in 1995. She is nominated on this occasion for her exhibition even which was seen at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and the Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Wales. Dorothy Cross lives and works in Dublin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The exhibition continues until 13 July.

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.