PROTEST! is a major retrospective of the work of acclaimed British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942-1994), marking 25 years since his death, presented at IMMA, Dublin in partnership with Manchester Art Gallery.

IMMA is delighted to present PROTEST!, a major retrospective of the work of one of the most influential figures in 20^th century British culture, Derek Jarman. While addressing Jarman’s important contribution to film, this exhibition will focus on his wider practice as a painter, writer, set-designer, gardener and political activist. This is the first time that these diverse strands of his practice have been brought together in over 20 years, since the important exhibition at the Barbican, London, in 1996.

PROTEST! captures Jarman’s engagement with both art and society, as well as his contemporary concerns with political protest and personal freedoms arising from the AIDS crisis. Major bodies of work, from the 1960s to the 1990s, have been gathered together; many of which have never been seen in public before. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue will provide a comprehensive examination of Jarman’s work, with over 150 works in diverse media, dating from 1958 – 1993.

Derek Jarman studied at the Slade School of Art, London in the early 60s, and was part of a group of young painters, including Patrick Procter and David Hockney, who embodied a changing mood in British art. His early career focused entirely on painting, and from 1960 onwards he produced a variety of self-portraits and figure studies with diverse influences and constantly evolving outcomes. Often auto-biographical, his work across varied media reflected how his own life experience spoke to wider social and political contexts. Included in this exhibition are early paintings showing Jarman’s rapid stylistic evolution such as Self Portrait (1959), Trick (1964) and Landscape with Marble Mountain (1967). More than 80 early works have been identified from the period 1958 to 1970, and some 30 of these are previously unknown and have been catalogued, conserved and documented for this exhibition.

In 1967 Jarman was included in Tate Young Contemporaries; in the inaugural exhibition at the Lisson Gallery and the 5th Biennale des Jeunes, Paris; a remarkable record of achievement for a painter in his mid-twenties. Alongside painting he began to produce set designs for opera and ballet which fused his personal style of painting with the scale and three-dimensionality needed for the theatre. Sometimes called ‘The Andy Warhol of London’, as early as 1967 Jarman was hired to produce design sets such as Jazz Calendar by Frederick Ashton at the Royal Ballet; and in 1971 the set for Ken Russell’s The Devils. The exhibition includes many original designs by Jarman; photographs of the realised sets and a group of seven costumes designed by Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell. While collaboration was at the heart of Jarman’s practice it also highlights his status as an incubator of young talent. Figures such as Tilda Swinton, Toyah Wilcox, Joanna Hogg, Sean Bean and John Maybury had their first opportunities under Jarman’s direction.

Throughout his career Jarman retained a deep interest in history and the art of the past. In 1976 he produced his first full length feature film Sebastiane, a queer telling of the story of the martyrdom of St Sebastian. Against the backdrop of Thatcherism and a socially conservative Britain, Jarman’s work made queer lives and history visible; a provocation to the dominant hierarchies. His films Sebastiane (1976) and Jubilee (1978) were broadcast on Channel 4 in the early 80s to a very broad audience. This led to a conservative backlash from figures such as Mary Whitehouse and Winston Churchill who appealed to the Arts Minister to have funding withdrawn. Jarman responded by becoming ever-more frank and un-apologetic about his subject matter, and from the late 80s, put queer lives at the centre of his practice through figures such as Caravaggio, Edward II and Wittgenstein.

Caravaggio’s life and art were a source of inspiration for their fusion of passion, beauty and violence. Over a period of more than ten years Jarman made paintings using techniques borrowed from the Renaissance master. Making a feature film on Caravaggio’s life became an obsession. This research led to the creation of volumes of sketchbooks, storyboards, and paintings which will be included in this retrospective. Following the release of the film Caravaggio in 1986, he received recognition by the Tate Gallery when he was included as a nominee for the Turner Prize that year.

At the end of 1986 Jarman was diagnosed as HIV-positive. AIDS was then a fatal, non-treatable disease which the tabloid press described as a plague. This diagnosis transformed Jarman’s practice and led to a new kind of activism as he worked to raise awareness of AIDS. He was one of the only public figures to ‘come out’ with the disease, an extraordinary act of courage in the social and political climate of the time. This is expressed in his paintings such as Queer (1992) [Manchester Art Gallery Collection], from his expansive series of ‘Slogan Paintings’. These monumental works, from the early 1990s, incorporating phrases related to government policy, tabloid hysteria and public fear of the AIDS crisis, are included in the exhibition and remain powerful comments on the socio-political climate of the time.

Jarman’s diagnosis coincided with a move to Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, which is over shadowed by the Dungeness nuclear power station. Here he created a unique and highly-regarded garden, the site of his film The Garden (1990) and book Derek Jarman’s Garden (1995). For this exhibition the garden will be the subject of new critical texts which will explore its lasting legacy and its place as a living work of art. The diverse bodies of works that were made there, tar paintings, landscape paintings, assemblages and feature film are represented in the exhibition.

Throughout his life Jarman was a committed diarist and regularly published memoirs that reflected his thoughts on art, life and society, these include Modern Nature (1991) and Dancing Ledge (1984). They offer a clear insight into his working process and the political backdrop to the creation of his work. This practice will be reflected in the exhibition through diaries, sketchbooks and spaces for reflection.

Moving image works from across Jarman’s career will be shown throughout the exhibition, charting the evolution of his filmmaking. Jarman’s achievement in film will be presented in association with the Irish Film Institute (IFI) who will screen a selection of his feature films in their original format during the month of December.

Jarman remains an essential and influential figure in contemporary art. Against the backdrop of Section 28, enacted on 24 May 1988 that stated that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality”, and the AIDS crisis, Jarman made explicitly political art. In his use of installation (including beds), multiple media and religious iconography he prefigured the work of younger artists including Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.

 

PROTEST!, published by Thames and Hudson 2020

IMMA and Thames and Hudson will publish a major new monograph on Derek Jarman to accompany the retrospective, covering Jarman’s artistic development as well as reflecting on his life and legacy. The book will feature contributions from Seán Kissane, Curator, IMMA; Sir Norman Rosenthal; Jonny Bruce, gardener and journalist; Professor Robert Mills, University of London; Jon Savage, music critic and writer; Mary Cremin, Director, VOID; Michael Charlesworth, an authority on landscape and the history of gardens and author of the book Derek Jarman, Critical Lives, and writers Olivia Laing and Philip Hoare.

The exhibition is curated by Seán Kissane, Curator, Exhibitions, IMMA and is assisted by Benjamin Stafford, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, IMMA.

Derek Jarman, PROTEST! is organized by IMMA, Dublin, in partnership with Manchester Art Gallery, and is accompanied by additional projects at VOID, Derry and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.

The exhibition has been developed in close cooperation with the Keith Collins Will Trust, James Mackay and Amanda Wilkinson Gallery.

 

Full Exhibition Partners/Programme

PROTEST!

IMMA, 15 November 2019 – 23 February 2020.

Irish Film Institute, December 2019

The Irish Film Institute will show a selection of Jarman’s feature films in their original format.

VOID, Derry, 15 November 2019 – 18 January 2020

Focusing on Jarman’s Punk works including The Last of England and the GBH series, curated by Mary Cremin, Director, VOID.

 

Touring to

Manchester Art Gallery, 2 April – 31 August 2020

PROTEST! will be re-presented by Fiona Corridan, Curator, Manchester Art Gallery with writer and music journalist Jon Savage.

HOME, from June 2020

HOME will present a film programme and series of events curated by Jason Wood and Rachel Hayward. homemcr.org

John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, Summer 2020

Focusing on Jarman’s Prospect Cottage landscape paintings and his relationship with nature.

– Ends –

 

For further information and images please contact:
Monica Cullinane, [email protected] +353-1-612 9922

 

Additional Notes for Editors

Admission is Free

 

About the artist

Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was an English film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener, political activist and author. He was educated at the University of London and at the Slade School of Art. In 1967 Jarman exhibited in Young Contemporaries, Tate Gallery, London (prizewinner); Edinburgh Open 100, Lisson Gallery, London and Fifth Biennale des Jeunes Artistes, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. Jarman’s first work in the cinema was as a set designer on Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). Selected set designs include Savage Messiah (1972) and The Rake’s Progress (1982), along with numerous designs for stage and ballet. Jarman’s first moving image works were Super 8mm experimental films. His first full-length feature film Sebastiane was released in 1976, followed by, amongst others, Jubilee (1978), Angelic Conversation (1985), Caravaggio (1986), The Garden (1990) and Edward II (1991) and Blue (1993).

Jarman has been the subject of exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, (2017); the Serpentine Art Gallery, London (2008); Tate Britain (2008) and Barbican Art Gallery, London (1996); Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (1994) and ICA, London (1984). His work has been presented at the Walker Art Centre (2009); Kunsthalle Wein, Kunsthalle Zurich (both 2008); the Venice Biennale (1993) and Third Eye Centre (1989), amongst many others. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1986.

Jarman also wrote several books, including the autobiographical Dancing Ledge (1984), two volumes of memoirs, Modern Nature (1992) and At Your Own Risk (1992), and the poetry collection A Finger in the Fishes Mouth (1972). Derek Jarman’s Garden, which documents the creation of his extraordinary garden at Dungeness was published in 1995.

 

Associated Events

Seminar & Preview: Derek Jarman, PROTEST!

Thurs 14 Nov / 2.30 – 5pm / Lecture Room

Join curator Seán Kissane and invited guests for a series of keynote responses that delve into the world of Derek Jarman. Jarman is considered by many as one of the most influential figures in 20th century British culture often described as a true ‘Renaissance man’, who combined a confrontational aesthetic with pure pop culture. Speakers share their diverse encounters spanning the life and work of Jarman, reflecting on his legacy as a renowned and revolutionary film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener, political activist and author. The seminar is followed by the exhibition preview.

Curators Lunchtime Talk Series: Drop In

Fri 6 Dec / 1.15 – 2pm / Meeting Point – IMMA Main Reception

Join curator Benjamin Stafford for an insightful walkthrough

of PROTEST! and hear about the key themes and

artworks featured.

A full talks programme will accompany PROTEST! Please check www.imma.ie for details.

 

About IMMA

IMMA is Ireland’s National Cultural Institution for Contemporary Art. Our diverse and ambitious programme comprises exhibitions, commissions and projects by leading Irish and international artists, as well as a rich engagement and learning programme which together provides audiences of all ages the opportunity to connect with contemporary art and unlock their creativity.

IMMA is home to the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art, started in 1990 and now numbering over 3,500 artworks by Irish and international artists. We make this national resource available through exhibitions at IMMA and other venues nationally and internationally, engagement and learning programmes and digital resources. We are situated in our home at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, one of Ireland’s most historic sites. imma.ie

About Manchester Art Gallery

Manchester Art Gallery is the original useful museum, initiated in 1823 by artists, as an educational institution to ensure that the city and all its people grow with creativity, imagination, health and productivity. The gallery is free and open to all people as a place of civic thinking and public imagination. It promotes art as a means to achieve social change with its origins from the Royal Manchester Institution for the Promotion of Literature, Science and the Arts.  It has been at the centre of city life for nearly 200 years, and has been proudly part of Manchester City Council since 1882. The gallery is for and of the people of Manchester. Through its collections, displays and public programmes it works with all our constituents to ensure creativity, care and consideration infect all aspects of the way we live. This is an art school for everybody and for life. manchesterartgallery.org

About VOID

Void Gallery is a contemporary art space located in Derry-Londonderry, Northern Ireland. With up to 5 exhibitions per year showing the work of established international and Irish artists, Void has created an international reputation for its wide-ranging and challenging exhibition programme. A key element to the gallery is the Engage programme, which places participation, engagement and learning at the heart of Void, making contemporary visual art accessible to visitors of all ages. derryvoid.com

The Prince of Homburg is a solo exhibition of new works by Patrick Staff. Featuring a video installation and series of works in sculpture and print, the work reinterprets 19th century German writer Heinrich Von Kleist’s play The Prince of Homburg.

Opening with a disoriented Prince sleepwalking in royal gardens, the original play, written in 1810, develops by swift degrees into a personal nightmare that questions the limits of state control and individual freedom. While often interpreted as an assertion for the might of authority, many consider Kleist’s work to be a passionate defence of free will. Kleist’s death by joint suicide with his close friend in 1811 contributed to an ongoing fascination with this complex play that continues today.

In their new body of work, Staff reconfigures the play to focus on the symbol of the exhausted, sleepwalking figure as political dissident. Presented across IMMA’s galleries as a video installation with accompanying sculptural and print works, the exhibition considers cycles of violence, desire and repression that are embedded in contemporary cultural and political crises. Through a range of mediums, Staff explores dream-like transgressions of law and order and the fraught spaces where queer desires manifest.

Through an unconventional narrative structure, Staff’s video cuts together a narration of Kleist’s play with interviews, conversation, found footage, hand painted animation and song. In a series of fragmented ‘daytime’ sequences, a range of artists, writers and performers reflect on contemporary queer and trans identity and its proximity to desire and violence. Intercut with flashes of the sun and sky, city streets and text, subjects include Sarah Schulman, Che Gossett, Macy Rodman and Debra Soshoux. Each of these segments is punctuated by ‘night-time’ diversions, narrated by writer Johanna Hedva in the dual role of both narrator and Prince. Loosely following the structure of Kleist’s play, the sleepwalking Prince struggles with his somnambulant habits, and the invasion of the unconscious mind into flesh and bone. In half-remembered dream images, the narrative unfolds through flashes of nocturnal gardens, high visibility reflective clothing, neon signs and a lugubrious ballad.

Throughout the gallery spaces Staff has installed a sculpture resembling the type of decorative, defensive architecture that surrounds many colonial and royal properties. Protruding from the walls of the gallery above head height, objects, lights, fabrics and furniture are impaled and discarded on its teeth. Also on display are a series of new, large scale hand-processed photogram prints, collecting images and objects from The Prince of Homburg that have been developed in complete darkness. Through flashes of coloured light, items such as a lost glove, knives, blades and chains reveal themselves.

Through a varied, interdisciplinary and often collaborative practice comprising video installation, performance, text and sculpture, Staff considers ideas of discipline, dissent, labour and the queer body. This new work is the product of several years’ research and is Staff’s most ambitious and large-scale project to date, bringing together languages of film and live performance with sculptural and photographic works to explore the how history, technology, capitalism and the law have fundamentally transformed the social constitution of our bodies today.

Two new texts by Isabel Waidner and Johanna Hedva for part of the exhibition in the galleries and are available for audiences to take away. These texts were commissioned by DCA as part of their publishing programme.

The Prince of Homburg is curated by Rachael Gilbourne, Assistant Curator: Exhibitions – Projects & Partnerships, IMMA, in collaboration with Eoin Dara, Head of Exhibitions, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland. The work is co-commissioned by IMMA and DCA. Supported by Arts Council England, Elephant Trust, UK, and Commonwealth & Council Gallery, USA. Video work produced by Spike Island, UK. Special thanks to producer Ali Roche and Humber Street Gallery, UK.

The exhibition was presented at DCA, Scotland, from 22 June – 1 September 2019.

Preview: Friday 20 September, 6 – 8.30pm

About the artist

Patrick Staff (b.1987, Bognor Regis, England) is based in London, UK and Los Angeles, USA. Their work combines video installation, performance and publishing. They have exhibited extensively, gaining significant recognition and awards for their work, which is held in private and public collections internationally.

Staff received their BA in Fine Art and Contemporary Critical Studies from Goldsmiths University of London in 2009. They completed the LUX Associate Artists Programme and studied Contemporary Dance at The Place in London, in 2011.

Their work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2017); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London (2015); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); Tate Liverpool, England (2014); Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2012); Tate Modern, London (2012); and Whitstable Biennale, Whitstable, England (2012), among others. Staff’s film work Weed Killer was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Opening on Saturday 27 July, IMMA presents She bites her tender mind a solo exhibition by legendary multi-disciplinary artist Kim Gordon. With a career spanning more than three decades, Gordon is one of the most prolific and ground-breaking artists working today. Synonymous with the iconic band she co-founded in 1981, Sonic Youth, her work crosses boundaries between visual art, music, fashion, film, writing and performance, and insists on radical experimentation within every field.

She bites her tender mind features a series of new works including recent and previously unseen paintings, drawings, and ceramic sculptures, alongside a glitter installation and an immersive video projection.As part of the programme of events for the exhibition, on Saturday 27 July, An Evening with Kim Gordon takes centre stage in the beautiful surroundings of the IMMA Courtyard, which promises to be an intimate and unmissable event. The evening features live performances by Body/Head, an experimental electric guitar duo composed of Kim Gordon and Bill Nace; poet Elaine Kahn; and guitarist Heather Leigh. Tickets will go on sale on Wednesday 19 June at 9am. Those attending can view the exhibition prior to the performance. Food and drinks will be available to purchase on the night. Tickets €25.00 + BF at https://imma.ie/whats-on/performance-an-evening-with-kim-gordon/

The exhibition She bites her tender mind is a poetic response by the artist to the atmosphere and architecture of IMMA’s Courtyard Galleries. For Gordon, this series of four interconnecting rooms, each with its classical detailing, mouldings, mantles and fireplaces, ‘feels like a home of sorts’. A seasoned traveller, Gordon has drawn upon the domestic sensibility of these galleries as an analogy for contemporary urban lodgings, such as Airbnb or Homestay. There can be a certain dislocation and alienation within these faux homes away from home. Gordon wonders about the experience of morphing one’s own reality with these idealised, commercialised lifestyles. At IMMA, she suggests an imagined scenario where the galleries have become her own branded urban lodgings, decorated with lyrical gestures, with one of the new drawings on display taken from Gordon’s Airbnb Series.

The new and recent paintings in the exhibition also contain references to the prolific ancient Greek poet Sappho. Renowned as a symbol of desire and love between women, Sappho’s work continues to influence writers and artists today. The exhibition itself, together with one of the featured new works, takes its title from one of the poet’s word fragments ‘She bites her tender mind’. Several of these paintings see Gordon continuing her research about the body in a feminist reconsideration, where she uses materials such as metallic ink, interference pigments and tracing papers in gestural works. Gordon describes her uniquely visceral approach to creating this exhibition and the effect of her imagined scenario, “I wanted to feel Sappho and make physical manifestations about her in sort of a daydreaming meditation; to make myself into her. Similarly, I try to locate or imagine myself within an Airbnb… Waking up in a strange place to strange art as decoration”.

Alongside these new and recent works, other pieces within the exhibition draw from various series Gordon has produced since 2008. These include the ongoing Noise Painting series, depicting the names of experimental and noise groups; the From The Boyfriend series that use denim mini-skirts as paint surfaces turned on their sides and presented as minimalist art; and word paintings that refer to ‘hashtag culture’. The word paintings here also serve as a comment on other artworks around them.

An insistence on dismantling the hierarchical sanctity of the object has become a through line in Gordon’s practice, and in previous work, canvases were treated with direct application of paints, resins, glitters and fiberglass, as well as physical manipulation. Performing a painting becomes its own medium, as finished works are crumpled, overturned and flung. Fixed between states of decomposition and recomposition, battle scars from past performances become gestural abstraction via mischievous punk irreverence.

ENDS –

For further information and images please contact

Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] T: +353 (0)1 6129922

Patrice Mollloy E: [email protected] T:+353 (0)1 6129920

 

Image caption: Kim Gordon / Proposal For a Dance, 2008 – 2010 / DVD, TRT: 12 minute / Dimensions variable / @ the artist / Image courtesy, 303 Gallery, New York

 

Additional Notes for Editors

EXHIBITION

Kim Gordon, She bites her tender mind
27 July – 10 November 2019

Admission is free

About the artist

Kim Gordon studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and has continued to work as an artist since. Her first solo exhibition presented under the name ‘Design Office’ took place at New York’s White Columns in 1981. For the past thirty years Gordon has worked consistently across disciplines and across distinct cultural fields: art, design, writing, fashion (XGirl), music (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head), and film/video (both as actress and director).

Gordon’s artworks include the ongoing ‘Noise Painting’ series, depicting the names of experimental and noise groups; a series of paintings depicting the names of contemporary galleries and gallery owners; works from the untitled ‘From The Boyfriend’ series – Rorschach-like images painted on used denim skirts; ‘Twitter Paintings’ sourced from the Twitter streams of ‘GIRLS’ producer Jenni Konner, critic Jerry Saltz, and artist Richard Prince among others; and her ‘Wreath Paintings’, which employ the decorative folk forms as stencils to produce vertiginous colour abstractions. An insistence on dismantling the hierarchical sanctity of the object has become a through line in Gordon’s practice, and in her most recent work, canvases are treated with direct application of paints, resins, glitters and fiberglass, as well as physical manipulation. Performing a painting becomes its own medium, as finished works are crumpled, overturned and flung. Fixed between states of de- and re-composition, battle scars from past performances become gestural abstraction via mischievous punk irreverence.

Recent selected exhibitions include in 2017 Kim Gordon & Rodney Graham, L’Académie Conti, Dijon, France; in 2016 Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland; 2015 Noise Name Paintings And Sculptures Of Rock Bands That Are Broken Up, Benaki Museum / Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece Design Office: The City Is A Garden, 303 Gallery, New York; All Instruments Agree: an exhibition or a concert, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2014 Coming Soon, Design Office, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles; 1NVERSIONS with Nick Mauss, Frieze Projects, London; in 2013 Design Office with Kim Gordon – 1980, White Columns, New York and in 2012 Karen Kilimnik & Kim Gordon, 303 Gallery, New York and in 2009 Sonic Youth ETC.: Sensational Fix, (Traveling exhibition) MUSEION, Bolzano; Kunsthalle Dusseldorf; Malmo Kunsthalle; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid.

A full talks programme will accompany She bites her tender mind, please check www.imma.ie for details.

 

PERFORMANCE

An Evening with Kim Gordon

with performers Body/Head, Heather Leigh and Elaine Kahn in the IMMA Courtyard

Saturday 27 July, 19.00 – 22.00
Tickets €25.00, on sale Wednesday 19 June at 9am from www,imma.ie

Those attending can view the exhibition She bites her tender mind prior to the performance (limited capacity). Food and drinks will be available to purchase on the night.

Note: Please be advised this is an outdoor event, while we hope for sunshine, please dress appropriate to the weather. Please note our 17^th-century courtyard has a cobbled surface appropriate footwear is advised.

 

About the Performers

Body/Head – The Switch

Creative alchemy doesn’t just happen in the studio or in the practice space; so much of it is the product of solo time with one’s instrument, learning how body and wood and electronics fuse, and of subconscious processes as one lives one’s daily life—picking up the ambient noise of the world outside, listening to others’ work, talking through ideas with friends. For Kim Gordon and Bill Nace, time together these days is limited to live performances and recording, so they’ve got to bring all their magic to every encounter. Lucky for us, these are two experimental sorcerers of significant renown.

Their debut album together as Body/Head, Coming Apart, from 2013, was more of a rock record—heavy, emotional, cathartic, spellwork in shades of black and grey. The Switch is their second studio full-length, and it finds the duo working with a more subtle palette, refining their ideas and identity. Some of it was sketched out live (if you’ve not had the fortune of seeing them in that natural environment yet, see 2016’s improvisational document No Waves), but much of it happened purely in the moment. Working in the same studio and with the same producer as Coming Apart, here Body/Head stretch out, making spacious pieces that build shivering drones, dissonant interplay, Gordon’s manipulated vocals, and scraping, haunting textures into something that feels both delicate and dangerous. Less discrete songs than one composition broken up into thematic movements, a slow-moving narrative that requires as much attention and care from the listener as it did from everyone involved in its creation, it is a record that sticks around after it’s done playing.This is Nace’s favorite of Gordon’s guitar work; she’s truly come into her own as a guitarist, having built up her confidence through solo shows. The way the duo work together, you’d never know they spend so much time apart; on The Switch, their vision and focus feel truly unified. If Coming Apart was dark magic, The Switch works with light, though it never forgets that these approaches are two sides of the same coin, and that binaries—black/white, near/far, emotion/analysis, body/head—are made to be broken open, and that the truth of things is in the energy between.

Jes Skolnik, May 2018

 

Heather Leigh

The daughter of a coal miner, weaving a trail from West Virginia to Texas to Scotland where she’s lived for over a decade, Heather Leigh furthers the vast unexplored reaches of pedal steel guitar. Her playing is as physical as it is phantom, combining spontaneous compositions with industrially-charged psychedelic rock. With a rare combination of sensitivity and strength, Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar and deforms it using hypnotic tone-implosions, juggling walls of bleeding amp tone with choral vocal constructs and wrenching single note ascensions. 2015’s critically acclaimed I Abused Animal (Ideologic Organ) was a turning point, a breakthrough album that marked her first venture into professional studio recording. Throne (Editions Mego) is her latest achievement, an album of punch-drunk desire clouded by peripheral danger. After the rawness of its precursor, Throne is a record of late night Americana and heavy femininity; a suite of alluring heartbleed ballads cauterised with burning riffs, its melodies and hooks set alight with the fiery core of her unique and distinctive pedal steel. Leigh’s work explores themes of glamour, abuse, sexual instinct, desire, romance, vulnerability, memory, shadow, fantasy, jealousy, cruelty, delusion, deception and projection.

In addition to her work as a solo artist, Heather Leigh has worked extensively with a long list of unique collaborators, most recently with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann. The duo have released four highly idiosyncratic albums: Ears Are Filled With Wonder, Sex Tape, Crowmoon and their most recent LP, Sparrow Nights on Trost Records.

Heather Leigh’s albums have been met with widespread critical acclaim and coverage in The Wire Magazine, FACT Mag, MOJO, Uncut, The Guardian, The Quietus, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Tiny Mix Tapes, Dusted, Spex, Magnet, Rolling Stone, Vice, Brainwashed, Blow Up, The List and many more.

Known for her captivating live performances, Leigh’s songs come into vivid life on stage. She has performed across the globe throughout Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Canada, USA and Mexico, playing venues/festivals including Cafe OTO, Red Bull Music Festival, Moers, Donau, Le Guess Who, Tectonics, ATP, Supernormal, Supersonic, TUSK, Issue Project Room, Tate Britain, Jazzhouse Copenhagen, A L’ARME! Festival, Dundee Contemporary Arts, South London Gallery, Colour Out Of Space, iDEALFEST, Islington Mill, CCA Glasgow, Edition Festival Stockholm, St Johns Sessions, Le Weekend Festival, The Art Institute of Chicago and many more.

Heather Leigh is published by Mute Song. Heather Leigh is a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award

 

Elaine Kahn

Elaine Kahn is the author of Women in Public (City Lights Publishers, 2015) and Romance or The End (forthcoming from Soft Skull Press). Writing has appeared in Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, Poetry Foundation, Art Papers, and elsewhere. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches at Pomona College and the Poetry Field School. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

 

Major group exhibition and accompanying programme of events exploring desire in visual art opens at IMMA.

Featuring an exciting selection of modern masterworks and landmark contemporary art works by Matthew Barney, Dorothy Cross, Marcel Duchamp, Tracey Emin, Rene Magritte, Eddie Peake and others.

IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) presents one of its most ambitious and compelling exhibitions exploring desire in our everyday lives. In particular, Desire: A Revision from the 20^th Century to the Digital Age considers desire’s relationship to structures of power, individualism and emerging collective actions.

Spanning over a hundred years, the exhibition follows the development of desire through the lens of the Eurocentric male gaze and its influence in shaping artistic depictions of desire in contemporary culture, across the world. A selection of masterworks of the 20^th century, from artists such as Duchamp, Ernst and Magritte, sit alongside new commissions and contemporary work, by artists including Matthew Barney, Tracey Emin, Genieve Figgis and Yayoi Kusama, tracing desire from the historical canon to present-day digital transformations. Desire: A Revision resists becoming a comprehensive survey that traces the role of art and desire. Instead, it presents perspectives on desire from a range of unique viewpoints in over 100 works, many of which have never been seen in Ireland before. It extends beyond the gallery space with newly commissioned performances by Eddie Peake and Elaine Hoey, alongside a programme of events and talks taking place during the exhibition.

The exhibition is divided into seven pivotal moments. These seven moments act as a conceptual framework from which to unpack the complexities of the following: desire and intimacy, the desire to integrate, desire and the gaze, the politics of desire, technology, and transformations of desire, and finally, an exploration of the evolution of utopianism in desire.

Desire: A Revision is the third in a trilogy of major international group exhibitions devised by IMMA to explore universal themes and their representation through art from the 20th and 21st centuries. In 2015, the first of these exhibitions, What We Call Love, From Surrealism to Now, looked at how notions of love have evolved in art, and in 2017, the second, As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics, examined how the spiritual endures in our everyday lives.

The exhibition is sponsored by luxury shopping destination Kildare Village representing Kildare Village’s commitment to supporting Irish art and culture. The collaboration will include a programme of events and innovative installations in Kildare Village, offering its guests the chance to experience the exhibition in another setting.

Commenting on the exhibition Annie Fletcher, Director, IMMA said; “IMMA is delighted to present Desire: A Revision, a key part of our ambitious programme for 2019. We are particularly pleased to extend the exhibition beyond the gallery spaces through a programme of performances, talks and events in the grounds at IMMA and even more excitingly at our new partners Kildare Village. We are grateful to co-curator Yuko Hasegawa and all the artists involved for their collaboration with IMMA and we remain indebted to our Corporate Partners, Patrons and Members whose invaluable support allows IMMA to realise projects of this scale and depth. Our new partnership with Kildare Village is inspirational, not only because they are fully engaged with our artistic project, but we are discovering together that we can see the potential of having a broad and international dialogue; about how art and creativity zooms into our most core desires while pushing us outward and onward into the world and into the future.”

Commenting on the exhibition Co-Curator, Yuko Hasegawa said; “ “From the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, we have witnessed major shifts in how we collectively conceive of desire, owed both to changes in how we perceive subject/object and individuality, as well as mechanisms of modern information capitalism that continue to dislocate desire from the realm of the internal to that of external forces. The “pro” mindsets of product, promotion, productivity belie the sense of acceleration and external projection of our contemporary reality. Within this loss of desire’s inner agency, the artists in this exhibition help us re-manifest the internal imaginary realms and landscapes of desire.”

Desire: A Revision is under the direction of, and curated by, Rachel Thomas, Senior Curator, Head of Exhibitions, IMMA and Yuko Hasegawa, Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

ENDS

 

For further information, and images, please contact:

Patrice Molloy E: [email protected] T: +353 1 612 9920

 

Additional Notes for Editors

Exhibition dates: 21 September 2019 – 22 March 2020

Admission: €8.00 / Concession €5.00 (Senior Citizens and Unwaged)

Free Admission for IMMA Members, full-time students and under 18’s.

Free Admission for all every Tuesday. Book online at imma.ie

Desire: A Revision open on Culture Night, Friday 20 September, with a performance by singer Lisa Hannigan as part of an ongoing collaboration with artist Dorothy Cross. The Opening Party, supported by O’Hara’s Irish Craft Beers, will take place from 6.00 – 8.30pm, with complimentary free drinks by O’Hara’s. Access to the exhibition will be free of charge on the night.

Featured artists within the exhibition include Matthew Barney, Frank Bowling, Lee Bul, Oisín Byrne, Helen Chadwick, Dorothy Cross, David Douard, Marcel Duchamp, Tracey Emin, Justine Emard, Max Ernst, Awol Erizku, Cao Fei, Genieve Figgis, Ann Maria Healy, Elaine Hoey, James Joyce, Bharti Kher, Jonah King, Seiha Kurosawa, Yayoi Kusama, Rene Magritte, Eddie Peake, Tschabalala Self, VALIE EXPORT, amongst others to be announced.

A significant publication accompanies the exhibition, featuring contributions from the exhibiting artists, co-curators and key contemporary thinkers from a variety of fields, ranging from poetry and philosophy to architecture and performance, including Sasha Bonét, Vaari Claffey, Pádraic E. Moore, Yuko Hasegawa, Johanna Hedva, Jonah King, Aidan Mathews, Eddie Peake, Mario Perniola, Jennie Taylor and Nathalie Weadick.

A series of Limited Artist Editions by artists, including Dorothy Cross, Tracey Emin and Genieve Figgis, are available for this exhibition.

The architecture of the exhibition is designed by AP+E.

A special associated project, The Prince of Homburg, by artist Patrick Staff, is co-commissioned by IMMA and Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland. The work at IMMA is curated by Rachael Gilbourne, Assistant Curator: Exhibitions – Projects & Partnerships, IMMA in collaboration with Eoin Dara, Head of Exhibitions, DCA. The Prince of Homburg opens alongside the exhibition Desire: A Revision and continues until 17 November 2019.

The Prince of Homburg is co-commissioned by Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland, and IMMA. Supported by Arts Council England, Elephant Trust, UK, and Commonwealth & Council Gallery, USA. Video work produced by Spike Island, UK. Special thanks to producer Ali Roche and Humber Street Gallery, UK.

 

Associated Events

Curator to Artist Discussion / Friday 20 September / 5.30pm / Lecture Room, IMMA
Exhibition curators Yuko Hasegawa, Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Rachel Thomas, Senior Curator; Head of Exhibitions, IMMA invite a panel of artists to discuss their featured work and commissions comprising the exhibition Desire: A Revision. From the 20th Century to the Digital Age. Admission Free, Book online at imma.ie

 

On Spirals, Part 3, Performance by Eddie Peake / Saturday 21 September / 6.00pm / IMMA Courtyard

Performed by Emma Fisher, Sara Lupoli, Kieram Corrin Mitchell and Eddie Peake.

Please Note: contains nudity. Admission Free, Book Online at imma.ie

 

Curators Lunchtime Talk / Friday 4 October / 1.15pm / Meeting Point, IMMA Main Reception
Rachael Gilbourne, Exhibitions, IMMA presents an informal walk-through of the exhibition, introducing key themes and the work of artists that are central to major group show.
Drop-In / Exhibition fee applies.

For further information on a full programme of events and to book tickets visit imma.ie

 

About the Curators

Rachel Thomas Biography

Rachel Thomas is the Chair of long-term planning and Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions at IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Dublin. Thomas is a Leonardo fellow at Trinity College Dublin, contributor to the MA/MFA Art in the Contemporary World programme at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and the European judge for the Rise Art Prize for young artists. Thomas has curated various exhibitions including solo surveys of Nan Goldin, Etel Adnan, Hélio Oiticica, Haroon Mirza, Tino Sehgal, the American Fluxus and feminist artist Eleanor Antin, Thomas Ruff, Karen Kilimnik, Margherita Manzelli, Willie Doherty, Sophie Calle and Mark Manders. She initiated and organized with Philippe Parreno the seminal group show of post relational aesthetics .all hawaii eNtrées / luNar reGGae (2007), artists included Thomas Demand, Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Garrett Phelan. Thomas has introduced a new project strand to IMMA bringing to Ireland solo and group projects and new commissions by young international artists such as Gerard Byrne, Franz Ackermann, Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Demand and the ground-breaking virtual retrospective with artist Jorge Pardo. Critically acclaimed international group shows such as Primal Architecture (2015), which included Mike Kelley, Linder, Conrad Shawcross, Bedwyr Williams and What We Call Love, from Surrealism to Now (2016), co-curated with the Director of Biennale di Venezia 2017, Christine Macel and included artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marina Abramović, Constantin Brancusi, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alberto Giacometti, Meret Oppenheim, Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono. Thomas has also re-examined the role of spirituality in As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics (2017), and included artists such as Hilma Af Klint, Bruce Nauman and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Most recently Thomas has curated the critically acclaimed solo exhibition of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Sunset, Sunrise (2018) which will travel to the Sharjah Art Foundation later in 2019.

Thomas was awarded a Millennium Fellowship to produce papers on global frameworks of contemporary art practice at Tate Britain, London. In 2006, she curated the Irish Pavilion, New Territories, ARCO ’06, Madrid. Curated Biennales include the Welsh Pavilion with Cerith Wyn Evans in 2000 at the Biennale di Venezia and the Lyon Biennale, with Gerard Byrne in 2008. She has lectured on the role of the curator at various symposia such as Curating Now and The Role of Painting in the 21st Century. Thomas initiated and curated the Irish Times critically acclaimed offsite project video with Dorothy Cross Stalactite (2011) in Cork. As a writer, she has published widely in journals and exhibition catalogues including an interview with Michael-Craig Martin and texts on artists such as Dorothy Cross, Gerard Byrne, Eleanor Antin, Sophie Calle, Pierre Huyghe, Alex Katz, and Thomas Scheibitz. She is actively pursuing research on the politics of space with philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben. She has lectured on the role of the curator at various symposia and on contemporary Irish art at the Guggenheim with Nancy Spector. As a writer, she has published widely in journals and exhibition catalogues, and has also worked as an online curator for Curate NYC.

 

Yuko Hasegawa Biography

Yuko Hasegawa is Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2016 – present) and Professor of Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts (2016 – present). She was a Chief Curator and Founding Artistic Director (1999 – 2006) of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2006-2016). She is Artistic Director of Inujima Art House Project (2011-present).

Her recent exhibitions include Intimate Distance: Masterpieces from the Ishikawa Collection (MoCo), FUKAMI –une plongée dans l’esthétique japonaise at Hotel Salmon de Rothschild, Paris（2018, Saudade : Unmemorable Place in Time at Fousun Foundation, Shanghai,（2018), Japanorama: NEW VISION ON ART SINCE 1970 at Centre Pompidou-Metz (2017), Kishio Suga: Situations at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2016), New Sensorium Exiting from Failures of Modernization at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2016), Tokyo Art Meeting VI “TOKYO” －Sensing the Cultural Magma of the Metropolis (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, 2015-2016).

Yuko Hasegawa has worked for various kinds of biennale projects: 7th Moscow Biennale (Clouds⇄Forests), 2017, Unfamiliar Asia: The Second Beijing Photo Biennial 2015 (Co-curator, 2015), The 11th Sharjah Art Biennial Re Emerge – Toward a New Cultural Cartography (Curator, 2013), The 29th Sao Paulo Biennial (Co-curator, 2010), The 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (Artistic Advisor, 2010), The 4th Seoul International Media Art Biennale Dual Realistic (Co-curator, 2006), Venice Biennale 2003, 50th International Exhibition of Art, Japan Pavilion Heterotopias , Yutaka Sone, Motohiko Odani (Commissioner, 2003), Shanghai Biennale 2002 (Co-curator, 2002-2003), and 7th International Istanbul Biennial (Artistic Director, 2001)

Her past exhibitions include Oscar Niemeyer The Man Who Built Brasilia, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan, 2015), KISHIO SUGA – SITUATED LATENCY (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan, 2015), Thomas Demand (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, 2012), Atsuko Tanaka – The Art of Connecting (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan, traveled to the Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló, Valencia, Spain, and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, U.K., 2012), Trans-Cool Tokyo – Contemporary Japanese Art from MOT Collection (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, traveled Singapore Art Museum, Bangkok Art Culture Center and Taipei Fine Art Museum, 2011-2012), Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint (21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, traveled to Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Korea and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA, 2005), Liquid Crystal Futures: 11 Contemporary Japanese Photography (Edinburgh,1994-1996), Atsuko Tanaka – The Art of Connecting (IKON Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan, 2012)

She was a member of the Asian Art Advisory Board at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2008 – 2012), currently an advisory committee member of the Rockbund Art Museum (2014-present), an international advisory board member of The Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (CCA), 2014-present）and an international jury of the Nasher Prize Nasher Sculpture Center (2015-present).

This landmark exhibition will, for the first time, examine the interconnections between renowned British artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011) and one of the most important figures in Irish art Jack B. Yeats (1871 – 1957).

Life above Everything: Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats is a major exhibition that brings together the work of two acknowledged masters, Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats. Exploring the affinities and interconnections between these two artists, this exhibition draws the work of these two stubbornly individual painters into dialogue, placing them side-by-side for the first time in 70 years.

While Lucian Freud’s work has been exhibited in the past in group exhibitions alongside other artists from the ‘School of London’, Life above Everything is the first occasion where Freud’s work will be presented with that of a single other artist.

Freud’s interest in Yeats is little discussed, but he had a lifelong interest in the Irish painter’s work, holding a deep admiration for its force and energy. He did not cite Yeats as an ‘influence’ but instead seems to have felt a common purpose with his originality and independence, his continuous searching observation, and his sense of the connection between painting and life. A pen and ink drawing by Yeats, The Dancing Stevedores (c.1900), hung beside Freud’s bed for over 20 years.

Unique to this exhibition is the inclusion of seven paintings by Jack B. Yeats which Freud selected for a close friend, advising him on works to acquire at auction or through the relevant gallery. We are delighted to be able to present these seven paintings, ‘approved’ by Freud, as a special grouping of Yeats’s works within this exhibition.

The exhibition is made possible by the IMMA Collection: Freud Project 2016-2021, a five-year loan of 52 works by Lucian Freud to the IMMA Collection by private lenders. This is the fourth exhibition to be presented as part of the project.

Life Above Everything will include a substantial number of oil paintings by both artists, 33 by Freud and 24 by Yeats, as well as a range of works on paper, sourced from public and private collections internationally. There are five new loans of work by Freud to the IMMA Collection: Freud Project including important early works such as Girl with Roses (1947-48), Girl with Beret (1951) and Boat, Connemara (1951). Significant loans of works by Yeats include The Bus by the River (1927), People in a Street (c.1935), A Dancer (Rosses Point, Sligo) (1921), as well as From the Tram Top (c. 1925), which features one of Yeats’s rare cameos in his own work.

David Dawson, artist and Freud’s long-time studio assistant for almost 20 years, has assisted in the selection for this exhibition, bringing to the project a unique, intimate knowledge of Freud’s interest in Yeats. Dawson brings a contemporary approach to the work of both Freud and Yeats, exploring thematic affinities and sequential arrangements across their work. It was Dawson who laid the first seeds of the exhibition at the beginning of the Freud Project. Dawson speaks of the sheer pleasure Freud took in Yeats’s work, the “pure enjoyment of painting’.”

According to Dawson, “Artists always look to other artists for help. Lucian Freud kept an early Jack B. Yeats ink drawing next to his bed. Yeats painted what was personal to him and what meant the most to him. There is a greatness to Yeats’s work. He was continuously searching, observing in the most original way. He paints with such force and energy, all the brilliance is there to see. It was this sense of life that Lucian wanted to look at.”

The early ink drawing by Yeats, The Dancing Stevedores, can be seen in this exhibition. This drawing was produced as an illustration for an unpublished book Pastimes of the Londoners; it was later reproduced on the cover of the July 1912 issue of A Broadside, a monthly publication produced by the Cuala Press, combining poetry and song lyrics with illustrations. The inclusion of The Dancing Stevedores in Freud’s personal collection demonstrates his longstanding appreciation of Yeats’s work.

The two artists exhibited together only once in their lifetime. In 1948, Freud’s work Man at Night (Self Portrait) (1947-48) and Yeats’s (A) Farewell to Mayo (1929) were included in 40 Years of Modern Art, the inaugural exhibition of the ICA in London. Freud visited Ireland a few months later, staying with another painter Anne Dunn in Connemara and afterwards they spent some time in Dublin. Over the next few years, Freud became a familiar presence on the Irish art scene, visiting annually and mixing with the group of artists and writers centered upon what has since been dubbed ‘Baggotonia’; during this time he mixed with figures like Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin and Patrick Swift. Freud later recalled his awareness of Yeats during that time; he spoke to his biographer, William Feaver, of seeing the older artist from time to time walking the canal bank (between Baggot Street and Portobello), or crossing St. Stephen’s Green, but the two never spoke.

This exhibition takes its name from a description by the British painter Walter Sickert who, in the 1920s, memorably described Yeats’s practice as pursuing ‘life above everything’. The phrase came in an effusive letter addressed to Yeats following one of his rare lectures in London in 1924. Sickert praised Yeats’s ability to paint the life of his country and noted his sense of affinity with the people and scenes he depicted, an observation that could equally apply, though in quite a different way, to the art of Lucian Freud, who once described his work as a ‘continuous group portrait’.

Life above Everything: Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats presents the opportunity for new research on both painters allowing IMMA to investigate both artists’ professional and intrapersonal networks, as well as mapping out a deeper exploration of Freud’s connections to Ireland – particularly to Dublin in the ’40s and ’50s – as well as Yeats’s connections to Britain. This research will be included in a dedicated catalogue for the exhibition, introduced by Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA and lead curator of the IMMA Collection: Freud Project. Contributors to the catalogue include curators, art historians and artists, with new texts commissioned from James Finch, Eithne Jordan, Róisín Kennedy, Nathan O’Donnell and Hilary Pyle, as well as a conversation between David Dawson, William Feaver and Christina Kennedy.

The exhibition is co-curated by David Dawson and Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA. Dr. Nathan O’Donnell (Irish Research Council Enterprise Postdoctoral Fellow, IMMA Collection: Freud Project) is lead researcher for this exhibition.

– Ends –

For further information and images please contact:
Monica Cullinane, [email protected] tel: 01-612 9922  

Additional Notes for Editors

Exhibition dates: 28 June 2019 – 19 January 2020

Admission
Tuesday: Free
Wednesday – Sunday: €8/€5
Always free for IMMA Members, full-time students and under 18s.
Tickets can be booked online

About the Artists

Lucian Freud (1922-2011) was born in Berlin to Ernst, the architect son of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his wife Lucie Brasch. In 1933, age ten, Freud fled with his family to England, ahead of the rise of Nazism. The family settled in London where Freud lived for the rest of his life.

Freud studied briefly at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London and later at Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. His first solo exhibition, at the Lefevre Gallery received critical acclaim in 1944, followed by a number of hallucinatory, finely-painted portraits that marked him as an artist to watch. Freud’s adherence to realism and focus on the human figure, when abstraction and other progressive forms of practice were more prolific, moved him in and out of the spotlight until the 1980s when renewed international interest in painting and figuration gave his work a new significance. Since then Freud has become one of the best-known and most highly-regarded British artists of the 20th century. He was awarded the Companion of Honour and the Order of Merit. Major retrospectives of his work were held in Tate Britain, 2002, IMMA 2007, MOMA, 2008 and the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2012. Further exhibitions are planned in London for 2022 to celebrate the centenary of Freud’s birth.

Freud visited Dublin and Connemara in Ireland in the late 1940s and returned regularly over the next decade. After his marriage to Caroline Blackwood of the Guinness family he was also a regular visitor at Luggala, Co Wicklow. During the late 1940s and early 1950s Freud connected with Irish artists such as Patrick Swift whose Dublin studio he used and Edward McGuire whose tutor he was at the Slade Art School, as well as the literary circle of Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Brendan Behan, Anthony Cronin and their Soho milieu. An in-depth account of Freud and Ireland will be explored through the Freud Project, including his close links with the other great figurative painter of the 20th century, Irish-born and London-based, Francis Bacon – his friend, mentor and great rival of thirty years, whose studio you can visit in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957) was born in London and grew up in Sligo with his maternal grandparents before returning to London in 1887 to live with his parents. He briefly attended the Government School of Design and the Westminster School of Art and went on to work as an illustrator for sporting periodicals and newspapers. A visit to the west of Ireland in 1898 inspired his first solo exhibition Sketches of Life in the West of Ireland. It would remain his theme for much of his artistic career. He provided illustrations for John Millington Synge’s book, The Aran Islands, in 1907.

By 1910 Yeats had moved permanently to Ireland, living in Greystones, Co. Wicklow and later Dublin. Yeats was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916. His painting The Liffey Swim won a silver medal at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. The broad fluid brushstrokes of that work mark the change in his technique during the 1920s; from that decade his work became more expressive and experimental. His work was exhibited regularly in London and Dublin including the National Gallery, London, the Tate, and the National Gallery of Ireland. Other significant exhibitions include his solo exhibition at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1954, as well as his inclusion in the First Armory Show in New York in 1913. A major exhibition of his work was exhibited posthumously at the Venice Biennale in 1962. Yeats’s work is held in numerous national collections including IMMA, the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Crawford Art Gallery and The Model, Sligo. International collections include the Tate Gallery, London, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Associated Events

SYMPOSIUM
Lucian Freud, Networks, Contexts, Responses
Saturday 7 September 2019
Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin
A day-long symposium on the work of Lucian Freud will take place in the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin. This symposium is part of an ongoing research partnership between the Department of the History of Art and Architecture in Trinity College Dublin and IMMA, in connection with the five-year project IMMA Collection: Freud Project 2016-2021.

The aim of the symposium is to explore and test out new ways to consider and critique Freud’s work, examining it in terms of adjacent cultural categories, conceived within a number of frameworks – period, subject, approach or medium. This symposium will showcase a range of new theoretical and historical approaches to Freud’s practice. The programme will comprise of keynote presentations by international speakers alongside responses from local art researchers in which to offer a variety of perspectives. There will also be a focus on the contexts and connections through which Freud worked, his networks and the galleries, publications and patrons through which his work was supported and disseminated.

This symposium is free, but ticketed. All are welcome to attend. Booking lines open in June 2019.

A full talks programme will accompany Life Above Everything, please check imma.ie for more details

Selected Specific Works

Lucian Freud

Girl with Roses (1947-48)
Girl with Roses is an important early portrait of Freud’s first wife Kitty Garman, the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman. It is a work that exemplifies a particular phase in the evolution of Freud’s style, a cold, carefully delineated, hyper-precise portrait in which the sitter seems pinioned by the artist’s gaze. Writing on the work in 1951, David Sylvester noted both its concentrated stillness and its sense of menace, suggesting a pessimistic view of humanity in Freud’s treatment of his sitters: “It is as if he had hypnotised the subject . . . if the girl with a kitten were allowed to move, she would strangle it.”

Girl with Roses is also a clear tribute to Albrecht Dürer, echoing the German artist’s Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle, (1493). Though Freud became a British citizen in 1939 and thought of himself as English, renouncing any connection to the Germany from which he and his family had fled in 1933, his engagement with Dürer suggests an ongoing relationship with the canon of German art and the art of the Northern Renaissance with which, in the early decades of his career, his work was so regularly associated.

Girl with Beret (1951)
Girl with Beret is a portrait of the Irish actress Helena Hughes, one of the Gate players in the early 1950s who went on to work in film and theatre in London for the rest of the decade, starring opposite Orson Welles in Return to Glennascaul in 1953 and the premiere of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in 1956. As Anne Dunn has recounted, Freud met her in Dublin in the late 1940s/early 1950s, one of his several romantic entanglements at that time. Her identity as the sitter for Girl with Beret was unknown until recently.

Dead Cock’s Head (1951)
Freud was a regular visitor to Dublin from 1948 to 1956. During this time he was part of the network of painters and writers who gravitated around the literary pubs and haunts of Dublin, particularly McDaids and the Catacombs, a group that included Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Swift, John Ryan, as well as Brendan Behan and his brother – with whom Freud in fact seems to have had a closer friendship – Dominic. While in Dublin Freud often shared a studio with Swift, and their work shared certain qualities and interests during this time; for instance, both painted still lives with dead birds, of which the 1951 Dead Cock’s Head is a good example. For many years it was believed that it had been painted in Dublin though more recent research has suggested it was produced at Shane’s Castle, Co Antrim, the Irish home of his friend the society hostess Ann Fleming, through whom he was introduced to his future wife Lady Caroline Blackwood.

Jack B. Yeats

The Dancing Stevedores (c. 1900)
Amongst Freud’s personal collection of work by other artists – a collection that included works by Auerbach, Rodin, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Constable, amongst others – was a small ink drawing by Jack B. Yeats. The Dancing Stevedores was produced as an illustration for an unpublished book, Pastimes of the Londoners; it was later reproduced on the cover of the July 1912 Broadside, a monthly publication produced by the Cuala Press, combining poetry and song lyrics with illustrations. Yeats was responsible for many of these cover images, though other artists were also involved. The Dancing Stevedores was among Freud’s collection of works when he died; it is now part of the collection of the Leeds Art Gallery.

(An) Evening in Spring (Dinner) (1937)
An Evening in Spring is one of a number of Yeats’s works included in the exhibition that features windows as a compositional motif. The painting was exhibited in several different UK exhibitions – including the 1942 joint exhibition of Jack B Yeats and William Nicholson at the National Gallery, London – before being bought by Yeats’s friend and patron Ernie O’Malley in 1945. It was O’Malley who introduced Yeats to Sir John Rothenstein, the director of the Tate Gallery who was involved in organising the major retrospective exhibition of his work which travelled from Temple Newsam House in Leeds to the Tate Gallery in 1948.

The Flapping Meeting (1926)
Freud’s eye was drawn to particular works by Yeats and he encouraged a friend and sitter, who was also a collector, by selecting and advising what Yeats works he himself would choose. The Flapping Meeting is one of seven Yeats works included in this exhibition that was ‘approved’ in this way by Freud, chosen at auction or through private galleries. A ‘flapping meeting’ was the name given to unofficially sponsored race meetings in Ireland, meetings that Yeats frequently sketched. A love of horses and race meetings was shared by both Freud and Yeats. The Flapping Meeting dates from the latter part of the 1920s, a period of transition in Yeats’s work, as he began to develop his later more diffuse style.

IMMA Collection: Freud Project is made possible through the visionary support of the Freud Circle BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse and those donors that wish to remain anonymous.

Opening on Friday 26 April 2019, IMMA presents a major exhibition by renowned Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (b1958, Bogotá). Salcedo is one of the world’s leading sculptors and this is her first solo exhibition in Ireland.

Doris Salcedo makes sculpture and installations that function as historical witness and memorial, using ordinary domestic materials charged with significance and saturated with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events, and experiences of loss and violence, as her point of departure. Her work involves extensive research to convey burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means. Some of her best-known installations include her 2007 Unilever commission at Tate Modern; Salcedo created Shibboleth, a chasm or fissure running the length of the Turbine Hall that represented exclusion, separation and otherness.

IMMA’s Director, Annie Fletcher, on the significance of showing Salcedo’s work at IMMA said; “We are so lucky to have Doris Salcedo coming to our shores to share with us in her most eloquent and singular way the sheer power and beauty of her monumental art practice. It is a masterful lesson in what art can do. Her practice serves as a gift; understanding and translating for all of us, in the most intimate and intelligent way, the trauma of violence and yet reinforces so compassionately the ability to survive and the will to resist”.

Acts of Mourning focuses on key aspects of the artist’s career since the 1990’s and the challenges her work poses to the traditions of sculpture. The exhibition brings together six bodies of work including two substantial installations works A Flor de Piel II (2013-2014) and Plegaria Muda (2008-2010) that are rarely seen together, as well as works from the Disremembered (2014-2017), Atrabiliarios (1996) and Untitled – Furniture Works (1990-2016) series. The artist’s most recent sculpture series Tabula Rasa (2018), which is inspired by Salcedo’s conversations with survivors of sexual violence at the hands of armed men, is also included.

Each work in the exhibition performs a gesture of mourning, at once delicately beautiful yet silently brutal. The overall experience of the exhibition may be read as a site of remembrance or memorial, an invitation to reflect on personal and collective trauma and brutality within human experience and historic moments.

Described by the artist as a shroud, A Flor de Piel II (2013-2014) is composed entirely of rose petals that have been treated and preserved, in effect, suspending them between life and death. The petals are sutured together by hand. This piece developed out of Salcedo’s research into the story of a nurse in Colombia who after overcoming great obstacles in her life, was kidnapped and tortured to death. Salcedo explains that A Flor de Piel II started with the simple intention of making a flower offering to a victim of torture, in an attempt to perform the funerary ritual that was denied to her.

In its largest manifestation, Plegaria Muda (2008-2010) comprises of 165 units, all of which are made from wood obtained from demolished houses in Bogotá. Each individual unit consists of two tables, the surface of the underside of each upturned table has a unique pattern of almost invisible punctures through which thin blades of grass grow over time, having been originally grown from small grass seedlings. The inspiration for this work is drawn from many sources, perhaps most directly it speaks to recent events in Colombia, where members of the army killed innocent citizens. Bodies of the victims were dumped into mass graves and the size and shape of each unit here is that of a standard coffin. Salcedo has worked closely with the victims’ families and in Plegaria Muda the individual is given a unique memorial, which is reflected in the title that loosely translates into English meaning as ‘silent prayer’.

Tabula Rasa (2018), meaning ‘clean slate’, is a new work inspired by Salcedo’s conversations with survivors of sexual violence at the hands of armed men. Consisting of worn, wooden domestic tables subjected to a brutal and complex cycle of destruction and reconstruction, the sculptures suggest how, after such experiences, one can never be whole again since the self will always be changed or ‘lacking’. After being strategically damaged and splintered, each table is painstakingly ‘repaired’, glued back together fragment by fragment over a lengthy period of time. Although at first glance appearing complete and ‘whole’, they remain, in fact, a fragile composite of tiny parts, rebuilt as faithfully as possible in an impossible act of recreation. Salcedo has described her sculpture as a ‘topology of mourning’.

Other works in the exhibition include, Disremembered (2014-2017), here four seemingly fragile spectre-like sculptures based on the form of a blouse, belonging to the artist, speak to the materiality of mourning. The idea for this series developed from interviews Salcedo conducted with Chicago mothers who had lost children to gun violence. Handwoven thread by thread and needle by needle, each delicate but menacing garment embodies a painstaking gesture of mourning.

Also included are two works from the Atrabiliarios (1996) series. In the early 1990s, Salcedo  researched the lasting affects of violence through extensive fieldwork across Colombia. During this time, she learned that female victims were treated with particular cruelty and that shoes were often used to identify remains. In Atrabiliarios, worn shoes, primarily women’s, are incased in niches embedded into the gallery wall.

Four works are included from Salcedo’s Untitled – Furniture Works (1990-2016), one of her largest bodies of work to date. Based on extensive research with victims of political violence, Salcedo transforms their experience into sculptures that convey a sense of how their everyday lives are disrupted. Using everyday domestic furniture she fills them with concrete, rendering them functionless.

Admission is free.

ENDS –

For further information and images please contact

Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] T: +353 (0)1 6129922

Caption for image: Doris Salcedo, Plegaria Muda, 2008-2010, Wood, mineral compound, cement and grass, Dimensions variable, © the artist. Courtesy White Cube.

Additional Notes for Editors  

Exhibition dates: 26 April – 21 July 2019

About Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1958 where she continues to live and work. Her solo exhibitions include White Cube, London and Alexander Bonin, New York (2018); Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2017); Harvard Art Museums, Massachusetts (2016); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, touring to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2015–16); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2014); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, touring to Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, White Cube, London and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2011–13); Tate Modern, London (2007); Camden Arts Centre, London (2001); Tate Britain, London (1999); and New Museum, New York (1998).

Salcedo has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2014); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013); Hayward Gallery, London (2010); MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York (2008); 8th International Istanbul Biennial (2003); Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002); and 24th Bienal de São Paulo (1998).

Associated Events

Lecture: Dan Adler – Tainted Goods. Recent Assemblage Sculpture and Cultural Critique
Wednesday 10 April / 13:15 / Lecture Room
In association with the NCAD and IMMA awarded fellowship programme, art historian and critic Dan Adler presents a lecture that draws on his research and writings including Tainted Goods: Contemporary Sculpture and the Critique of Display Cultures (Routledge, 2018). Adler offers close readings of sculptures by Geoffrey Farmer (Canada), Isa Genzken (Germany), Rachel Harrison (USA), and Liz Magor (Canada), and also discusses works by Doris Salcedo. Book your free place.

Artist Talk: Doris Salcedo
Thursday 25 April / 13.00 – 14.15 / The Lighthouse Cinema, Smithfield, Dublin 7
IMMA is delighted to present a lecture by Doris Salcedo. Introduced and moderated by IMMA’s new Director Annie Fletcher, Salcedo will discuss her major new exhibition Acts of Mourning. Reflecting on acts of ‘forgetting’ and ‘memory’ in artworks, Salcedo will explore the philosophical underpinnings of her most iconic bodies of work, set against the backdrop of global, geopolitical realities.
Booking fee applies – Ticket €6.00. Concession/IMMA Members €3.50. Please note this talk will take place at the Light House Cinema, Smithfield, Dublin 7.
Please contact the IMMA press office if you wish to attend this talk.

Curators Lunchtime Talk
Wednesday 22 May / 13:15 / 45 mins / Meeting Point, Main Reception
Join Karen Sweeney, Exhibitions, IMMA, for an insightful walkthrough of the exhibition Doris Salcedo, Acts of Mourning. No need to book in advance, just come to the Meeting Point in IMMA Reception.

Building on the achievements of the inaugural IMMA 1000 residencies we are delighted to announce three new artists selected through this successful initiative established to support artistic development in a meaningful or transformative way with the provision of time and space on IMMA’s Residency Programme.

In December 2018 IMMA’s invited panel, Zoe Gray (Senior Curator, Wiels, Belgium), Niamh O’Malley (Residency Alumni) and Sean Kissane (IMMA Curator), met to decide of the next three IMMA 1000 awardees.

The 2019 IMMA 1000 Residency Awardees are: Emma Wolf-Haugh, Sibyl Montague and Katie Watchorn.

Emma Wolf-Haugh, a visual artist and educator based in Berlin, will return to Dublin in July for a live/work residency at IMMA. Working across disciplines Emma Wolf-Haugh weaves together installation, performance, publishing and collaborative workshop techniques. Wolf-Haugh is interested in re-orienting attention in relation to cultural narratives and develops her work from a working class-queer-feminist questioning of ‘what is missing?’ A continued engagement with club culture and dyke aesthetics informs the collective making of temporary, autonomous spaces.

‘Six months as resident artist in IMMA offers a very welcome period of non-outcome oriented, process based, studio practice. The supported time and space will allow for the development of ideas that have had to take a back seat to the demands of project oriented frameworks and travel.’

Based in Dublin Sibyl Montague will commence a live/work residency at IMMA in May 2019. Her practice foregrounds the primacy of material and its ability to perform. Working with a range of sources; vegetable and digital matter and engaging strategies of appropriation, or the (dis)assemblage and hacking of commodity goods, her work focuses on locating generative, dissident terms from which to approach material and democratise form.

‘An award of this nature creates a significant, exciting platform for my practice. Access to studio, institutional support, incubated within the period of the residency, creates huge potential in terms of the level of experimentation and development I will be able to achieve in my practice.’

Katie Watchorn is a young artist from Carlow who has been based on a working 98 acre dairy farm in rural Co. Carlow since graduating from the National College of Art and Design in 2014. Watchorn is scheduled to join the residency in April 2019 in a live/work capacity. Drawing on her upbringing Watchorn’s practice primarily deals with illuminating the nuances and materiality of Irish rural farming, highlighting the process of contemporary and ancestral Irish life and tradition which is often understated and overlooked.

‘I am over the moon to have been selected to take part in IMMA’s second year of it’s 1000 residencies. The opportunity to be re-positioned in a city, surrounded by exhibitions, events, talks, mentorship opportunities, and studio visits after the remoteness of the past four years being based in a rural environ will be hugely beneficial.’

What IMMA 1000 Support Does

The IMMA 1000 Residency aims to expand, complement or challenge artistic development in a timely or transformative way for each artist selected. A chance to live and work at the museum amongst a peer group of creative practitioners in an environment which responds to and supports the requirements of artistic research, development and production. IMMA’s Residency is one of the many programmes that activates the museum and RHK site as a participatory campus of ideas and shared knowledge for audiences, artists and creative practitioners.

IMMA 1000 has brought about a significant increase in the amount of Irish artists applying for a residency at IMMA, it is one of the most substantial awards in the country with an accumulative estimated value of €3,000 per month per artist, €1,000 of which comes from IMMA 1000.

Open Call programming offers the museum a chance to hear directly from artists about what makes IMMA important to them and what’s required to support artists and their practices. IMMA 1000 brings together a solid community of Irish practices which weaves and connects with a number of other national and international residencies turning the site of IMMA in to a creative neighbourhood.

A New IMMA 1000 Opportunity

In April IMMA will provide full details on a unique IMMA 1000 Open Call opportunity for a selected photographer or visual artist working with photography to undertake three residency experiences through one single award. This award will provide institutional support across two established residencies in partnership with the internationally renowned Light Work photography organisation and residency in Syracuse, New York. Details will follow on IMMA’s website.

Processing IMMA 1000

March 2019 saw the end of this phase of programming with the inaugural IMMA 1000 awardees. IMMA thanks Dragana Jurisic, Jenny Brady and Neil Carroll for their commitment to the residency programme. The culmination of these residencies was marked by Process 1000/1 in IMMA’s Project Spaces.

Jenny Brady offered an exclusive excerpt from her new film work Receiver when she screened chapter four titled Second Person. It featured an interview from 1981 between Orson Welles and a live audience around his film The Trial, this found edited interview reflects core themes to Brady’s imminent new film work. Since the exhibition Brady has completed another short excerpt of the work.

Painter Neil Carroll used the volume and architectural characteristics of the Project Spaces to weave the viewer through and around varied perspectives of assembled structures. The works offered monumental and rugged landscapes embodying both urban and rural qualities, reflecting a visceral and intuitive use of materials, scale, energy, texture and colour to bring together an abstract, dynamic and physical viewing experience.

Creating the present in a place of history, photographer Dragana Jurišić captured the big snow of 2018 when residents were the only people free to roam these temporarily abandoned grounds. Over this time the environment took on a new potential and atmosphere, landscape becoming infinite, bodies wrapping up in warmth, scenes of captive freedom and a poem which connects the history of the hospital to its current residential use.

It was an honour to have Walker and Walker on residency for a flagship IMMA 1000 Invited Award for a one year residency providing crucial annual support to an art practice at a significant moment in their career. Independent to the residency award Walker and Walker were offered a solo exhibition at IMMA, Nowhere without no(w) brings forward the subtleties and durational elements of their practice heavily influenced by poetry and literature, many aspects of the exhibition were developed onsite during their residency allowing new works to merge with existing works.

Who else is joining the IMMA 1000 artists for residencies in 2019?

At the same time as selecting IMMA 1000, another panel with Sean O’Sullivan (Writer & Curator), Antonia Alampi (International Curator, Savvy Berlin) and Seamus McCormack (Programme Manager, New Contemporaries, UK) met to select four international practices to participate in the 2019 programme. The recipients of these residencies are Suzanne O’Haire, Laurie Robins, Callum Hill, and Lyndon Barrois Jr, IMMA is excited to have these dynamic practices in residency over the forthcoming months.

Further programming for 2019 includes support for exhibition and engagement programming with invited artists and practices such as Patrick Staff, Alexis Blake, Fiona Whelan, Stasis, The Summer School, The Mothership Project and Michelle Horrigan / Askeaton Contemporary. Production Residencies continue with external partners including the Project Art Centre nominating Sandra Johnston, Kevin Kavanagh nominating Margaret Corcoran and The Hugh Lane Gallery nominating Mark Dion.

Continued support is crucial to making IMMA 1000 Residencies an exceptional opportunity for Irish artists, offering the potential to recalibrate research and artistic directions. Space and time are valuable, and the provision of a proper bursary makes a huge difference with these awards.

Opening on Friday 12 April 2019, IMMA presents a group exhibition of emerging Irish and international artists addressing some of the broader concerns of Generation Y. A Vague Anxiety addresses concerns that we face in contemporary society, from political points of departure such as borders, housing, and the environment; to the personal such as mental health, hook-up culture, gender identity and precarity; pressing issues in today’s society.

Such themes are addressed through diverse mediums from traditional painting, sculpture and photography; through to installation, workshops and performance. Featured artists include Cristina Bunello, Marie Farrington, Saidhbhín Gibson, Helio León, plattenbaustudio, Brian Teeling and Susanne Wawra, with performances by Alexis Blake and Stasis.

The exhibition title reflects on the rising levels of anxiety in our media-driven lives and how many of these concerns are constantly, and somewhat vaguely in the backdrop of our daily existence. This exhibition neither poses questions nor presents solutions but reflects on our present tensions.

Works in the exhibition range from Irish artist Saidhbhín Gibson’s Don’t call me daisy (2019), which investigates the issue of climate change through the biographical account of a plant, native to the Arizona desert, which is wilting from the excesses of heat.

Tenses (2019) and Settings (2019) are by Irish Sculptor Marie Farrington. Farrington uses conceptually loaded materials thought out her practice including used engine oil, a by-product of the petrochemical industry and transport, both of which involve the massive transfer of carbon into the atmosphere with destructive environmental results.

Susanne Wawra, born in the former East Germany, addresses borders and politics in her painting Pointers (2018); an image from her family’s personal photographic archive transferred onto canvas and combined with abstract painting. The work shows the habit of pointing fingers and having to develop a sense of who could be trusted or who might be a spy for the Stasi, the secret police in East Germany.

The Irish housing crisis is investigated by plattenbaustudio, a Berlin-based duo of architects Jonathan Janssens and Jennifer O’Donnell. 20 Square Metres (2013), is a scale drawing of an architectural plan which corresponds exactly to a bedsit which they lived in, in Ranelagh, Dublin. Irish artist Brian Teeling addresses the housing crisis in his photographs, Apollo House (2016) and House (2016), taken before the demolition of Apollo House; the NAMA-controlled empty office building had been the focus of popular protest. Spanish artist Helio León’s Tarlabaşi, Istanbul (2012), shows a city in the midst of aggressive gentrification policies. This work shows the partially derelict neighbourhood of Tarlabaşi, which is waiting for demolition; breaking up an ethnic community within the city.

Other works by Brian Teeling include Brief Terror (2018) and Help Me I Am In Hell (2017), deeply intimate portrayals of the artist’s struggle with mental health. While Wet Dream, (2017) is a record of fleeting and unfamiliar intimacy, documenting sexual encounters that Teeling sought out through online dating apps.

Throughout the exhibition are portraits by Italian artist Cristina Bunello witnessing what is happening in the contemporary world. Girl Seated (2014) is a painting in which the anxiety of a young girl is palpable; and we are confronted with thoughts that these issues will be passed to the next generation.

IMMA has previously addressed some of these concerns in projects including A Fair Land, 2016, for which a model village was built in the IMMA Courtyard, and The Calais Maps, 2017 by architect Grainne Hassett.

Admission is free.

ENDS –

 

For further information and images please contact

Patrice Molloy E: [email protected] T: +353 (0)1 6129920

 

Additional Notes

Exhibition dates: 12 April – 18 August 2019

Performances

Visit imma.ie in the coming weeks for details of performances by Stasis and Alexis Blake.

Talks and Events

In association with the exhibition A Vague Anxiety, an interdisciplinary talk series will address contemporary concerns expressed in the work of the featured artists. Ranging from the political to the personal, artists and their invited guests explore prevailing anxieties of contemporary living, in tacking issues of gender, identity, the environment, space, borders and the paradigm of digital technologies. The programme comprises of artists’ talks, workshops, topical lectures and a lunchtime talk by curator of the exhibition Seán Kissane, on Friday 7 June at 1.15pm.

For a full programme of talks and events and to book tickets visit www.imma.ie

Exhibition curated by Sean Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA

Performance programme curated by Poi Marr, Curator, Glasgow International

IMMA opens six new exhibitions, with solo exhibitions by Irish artists Les Levine, Fergus Martin, Janet Mullarney and Walker and Walker

Opening on 15 February 2019, IMMA is delighted to announce the opening of six new exhibitions for its spring programme. Four are solo exhibitions by Irish artists Walker and Walker, Les Levine, Fergus Martin and Janet Mullarney.

Two group exhibitions are also opening on the same date. From the IMMA Collection the exhibition A Fiction Close to Reality explores how the past inhabits the present through stories and cultural traditions passed down from generation to generation. Featured artists include Bassam Al-Sabah, Geta Brătescu, Nalini Malani, Dennis Oppenheim, Mary Farl Powers and Betsabeé Romero. The second group exhibition, Process 1000/1, presents new work and research developed by artists Jenny Brady, Neil Carroll and Dragana Jurišić, 2018 awardees of the inaugural IMMA 1000 residencies, while working and living at the museum.

Nowhere without no(w) is the first solo exhibition at IMMA by Irish artists Walker and Walker. The twin brothers have collaborated since 1989, becoming one of Ireland’s most captivating and valued artists, with an established international reputation that includes co-representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Walker and Walker’s work is primarily grounded in the elusiveness of language and the new exhibition showcases a number of pre-existing works from their extensive 30 year career, alongside a suite of new works responding to their ongoing research into language, its meaning and its construction. Walker and Walker work in a wide range of forms and media and the exhibition encompasses film, sculpture, drawing and installation; featuring materials as diverse as steel, neon, a pearl and a flower that blooms once a year.

Resurrection (1972-2016) is a new work by the world-renowned artist Les Levine. In 2010 Levine donated an 80-piece photographic work to the IMMA Collection entitled The Troubles: An Artist’s Document of Ulster (1979), in memory of his parents Muriel McMahon and Charles Levine. The work was produced from photographs he had taken while in Belfast and Derry in 1972. Revisiting the series in 2015 Levine was struck by the sheer number of images of children. This process resurrected the intense feelings that he had experienced while documenting Northern Ireland and resulted in this revision of the original work. Selecting a number of these images of children, Levine has attributed a question to each photograph. Each image is also surrounded with contact sheets of all the photos he took in 1972, providing extra context for the viewer while they consider the questions and arrive at their own answers.

Solo exhibitions by Fergus Martin and Janet Mullarney are presented as part of the Then and Now series – a curatorial approach to exploring works in the IMMA Collection where artists are invited to place their early work among their current practice.

The exhibition of works by Fergus Martin presents work from the 1990s to the present. Through painting, sculpture and photography, Martin creates geometric forms that give shape to his preoccupation with space, colour, tension and materials, reflecting the world around him. Martin states

“I would like the works in the exhibition to have a real and material presence, to contain my feelings about the weight and density of things, their expansion and contraction, containment and release, their different speeds, as well as their fragility and impermanence”.

The exhibition includes a selection of works by Martin from IMMA’s Collection, presented alongside recent works Tree (2014), Sky (2016) and a new work shown here for the first time, Screw Protruding Tubes (2019).

The exhibition of works by Janet Mullarney, from the early 1980s to 2018, demonstrates the remarkable multiplicity of her career. Although the works presented are diverse in scale, form and materials, they clearly belong to the distinctive world of Mullarney’s imagination. Her underlying concerns with the strangeness, darkness and fragility of the human condition also form a connecting thread. Mullarney’s desire for the exhibition is to create,

“an environment of textures, dimensions and thoughts conceptually leading to a path concerning the enigma of humanity, and to the ambiguity of our intentions and self-knowledge, that I believe universal.”

This exhibition provides the opportunity to showcase the recent acquisition by IMMA of Mullarney’s sculptures All Ears (1995) and Domestic Gods I (1997).

A Fiction Close to Reality was developed in response to themes within the adjoining display of Mullarney’s work. In both exhibitions artists explore inner worlds as well as ideas of memory and inherited narratives. Featured artists include Bassam Al-Sabah, Geta Brătescu, Nalini Malani, Dennis Oppenheim, Mary Farl Powers and Betsabeé Romero. The works presented create a dialogue between materialisation and erasure. From the traditional Mexican patterns appearing as shadows reflected on the wall in Betsabeé Romero’s work Amarillo al Cubo (2010), to the continually emerging and dissolving figures of Nalini Malani’s video animation Stains (2000). A display of prints and sculptures by Mary Farl Powers demonstrates her interest in lifecycles and decay, while Bassam Al-Sabah’s work explores the unreliability of memory as the result of trauma and exile. The exhibition will be expanded to include works by Caroline McCarthy and Richard Wentworth in May 2019.

IMMA’s Residency is one of the many programmes that activates the museum and Royal Hospital of Kilmainham site as a participatory campus of ideas and shared knowledge for audiences, artists and creative practitioners. Marking the culmination of the 2018 awardees of the inaugural IMMA 1000 residencies, Process 1000/1 presents new work and research developed by artists Jenny Brady, Neil Carroll and Dragana Jurišić. The exhibition includes work realised over the duration of the artists’ time living and working at IMMA and brings together a diverse range of practices from film to painting to photography.

– Ends –

For further information and images please contact

Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] T:+353 (0)1 612 9922#

Patrice Molloy E: [email protected] T:+353 (0)1 612 9921

Associated Events Talk & Preview

Walker and Walker, Nowhere without no(w) Thursday 14 February 2019, 5.30pm, Lecture Room / Booking Advised

In association with the exhibition opening Nowhere without no(w) by Irish artist duo, Walker and Walker, the artists will be joined in conversation with Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, writer and Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish at University College Dublin, to discuss their exhibition. The Spring opening preview and reception follows.

IMMA Collection: Then and Now, Janet Mullarney Artists’ Conversation / Janet Mullarney & Helen O’Leary Saturday 16 February 2019, 3pm, Lecture Room / Booking advised

In association with the opening of the solo exhibition by Janet Mullarney as part of the IMMA Collection: Then and Now series, Mullarney discusses key developments of her longstanding career and the influence of her time spent in Italy. Mullarney is highly regarded as one of Ireland’s most significant artists working today, recognised for making small to large sculptures juxtaposed with theatrical backdrops, lighting schemes and drawings, in which to reveal the power and imagination of the artists mind. Fellow artist Helen O’Leary, moderates this discussion, reflecting on shared artistic experiences and interests that span Mullarney’s practice.

Publication

Walker and Walker, Nowhere without no(w) A new publication will accompany the Walker and Walker exhibition and will include contributions by Fergus Daly, Brian Dillon, Jörg Heiser, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith; Rebecca O’Dwyer, and Rachel Thomas, Head of Exhibitions, IMMA. The publication is edited by Rachel Thomas and assisted by Victoria Evans, Assistant Curator, IMMA. The catalogue is available to purchase from the IMMA Shop. Price €15.00.

IMMA announces landmark solo exhibitions in 2019 by Derek Jarman, Doris Salcedo, Walker and Walker, Kim Gordon, a major exhibition that places Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats side-by-side for the first time in 70 years and an international group exhibition examining desire in art, co-curated by Yuko Hasegawa with IMMA’s Rachel Thomas.

IMMA is pleased to announce highlights of the 2019 exhibition programme which include solo exhibitions by international artists Doris Salcedo (Colombia), Derek Jarman (UK), and Kim Gordon (USA), and by Irish artists Walker and Walker, Les Levine, Fergus Martin and Janet Mullarney. A major international group exhibition exploring desire in art Desire in Art from the 20th Century to the Digital Age and an exhibition that examines the interconnections between two of the best-known painters of the 20th-century Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats in the exhibition Life above Everything: Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats.

Doris Salcedo is one of the world’s leading sculptors whose work is deeply rooted in her native Columbia. Salcedo makes sculptures and installations that function as political and mental archaeology, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. IMMA will present recent works by Salcedo in her first solo exhibition in Ireland this May.

A major retrospective of the work of British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942-1994) will mark 25 years since the death of the artist. A true renaissance man his practice encompassed painting, sculpture, film making, writing, gardening, theatre design, pop-videos, as well as important queer agit-prop and political activity. Jarman has been the subject of many important exhibitions but this is the first time that the diverse strands of his practice will be brought together.

With a career spanning more than three decades, Kim Gordon is one of the most prolific and ground-breaking female creatives working today. Gordon, synonymous with Sonic Youth – the iconic band she co-founded in 1981, is an artist who crosses boundaries between visual art, music, fashion, film, writing and performance, insisting on radical experimentation within every field. As an overview of Kim Gordon’s practice over the past 25 years, this exhibition will re-frame and contextualise her work as an artist.

We are pleased to open the year with a new exhibition from Irish artists Walker and Walker. The twin brothers have collaborated professionally since 1989 and have become one of Ireland’s most highly regarded artists internationally. The exhibition showcases a number of pre-existing works from the artists’ extensive 30 year career with a series of new works responding to their ongoing research into language, its meaning and its construction.

Two solo displays by leading Irish artists Fergus Martin and Janet Mullarney will be presented as part of the IMMA Collection, Then and Now series, featuring a range of work from the 1990s to the present. Through painting, sculpture and photography, Fergus Martin elicits geometric forms that give shape to his preoccupation with space, colour, tension and materials. The display of works by Janet Mullarney focuses on the importance she places on materials and the meanings they convey in sculpture. It will demonstrate the remarkable multiplicity of her career through a wide-ranging body of work.

Les Levine, regarded as the founder of Media Art, has made 13 new photographic works of children during the conflict in Northern Ireland. Entitled Resurrection, 1972-2016, this new work has been recently donated to the IMMA Collection. Resurrection is a reconsideration of an earlier work The Troubles: An Artist’s Document of Ulster, a suite of 80 photographs Levine took in 1972, which are also in the IMMA Collection.

These three displays will be shown alongside A Fiction Close to Reality a group exhibition featuring a selection of key works from the IMMA Collection by Nalini Malani, Caroline McCarthy, Dennis Oppenheim, Mary Farl Powers, Betsabeé Romero and Richard Wentworth, alongside loaned works by Bassam Al-Sabah and Geta Brătescu. Through various mediums the artists explore cycles of life and death, migration, materialisation and the erosion of materiality.

Later in the spring a group exhibition of emerging Irish and international artists addresses some of the broader concerns of Generation Y. Entitled A Vague Anxiety artists include Marie Farrington, Saidhbhín Gibson, Helio Léon, Brian Teeling and Susanne Wawra amongst others.

The 2019 Summer exhibition from IMMA Collection: Freud Project (2016 -2021) will examine the interconnections between renowned artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011) and Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957); one of the most important figures in Irish art. Freud thought of Yeats as a great painter of his time, and Freud’s first visit to Ireland in 1948 has been described as, at least in part, a ‘pilgrimage’ to the site of Yeats’ work. Freud and Yeats exhibited together only once in their lifetime, in the inaugural exhibition of the ICA in London in 1948. Entitled Life above Everything, this exhibition will draw into dialogue the work of these two stubbornly individual painters, placing them side-by-side for the first time in 70 years. David Dawson, artist and Freud’s long-time studio assistant, has assisted in the selection for this exhibition, bringing to the project a unique, intimate knowledge of Freud’s interest in Yeats. This will be the fourth exhibition to be presented as part of the IMMA Collection: Freud Project, a major five-year initiative where 52 works by painter Lucian Freud have been lent to IMMA’s Collection by private lenders.

Opening the 2019 Autumn season at IMMA is a large-scale international group exhibition Desire in Art from the 20th Century to the Digital Age co-curated by Yuko Hasegawa, Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Rachel Thomas, Senior Curator; Head of Exhibitions, IMMA. The exhibition will explore the evolving role of desire in art and life and its relationship to structures of power. New commissions of contemporary works alongside a succinct selection of master works of the 20th-century will offer a unique examination of the relationship between desire, technological advancements, and its impact on social structures. Spanning over 100 years, the exhibition explores the development of desire through the lens of the eurocentric male gaze and its influence in shaping artistic depictions of desire in contemporary culture.

IMMA continues to place Engagement & Learning at the core of our programme and our work with artists, a key cornerstone of IMMA since its inception in 1991. In 2019 major projects include the continuation of the Art and Ageing Fellowship and IMMA’s particular focus on creating Dementia friendly programmes, the Artist Residency which is poised to announce new bursaries for IMMA 1000 artists in 2019, and a major September symposium on the work of Lucian Freud. Presented in partnership with Trinity College, Dublin, this one-day event will bring together both established and early-career researchers to map out new approaches to Freud’s work.

Annie Fletcher, recently named as the new Director of IMMA, will join the museum in March.

IMMA Exhibition Highlights 2019
IMMA has this week launched a major new website, highlighting the depth of its programme, the vibrancy of the Collection and a particular focus on the artists IMMA has worked with over the last 27 years. Click on the links below to read more about the individual exhibitions, which will be accompanied by a dynamic programme of talks, events, screenings, displays, artist residencies, symposia, and artist commissions to be announced throughout the year.

IMMA Collection: A Fiction Close to Reality / 15 February – 29 September 2019

IMMA Collection: Then and Now, Fergus Martin / 15 February – 29 September 2019

IMMA Collection: Then and Now, Janet Mullarney / 15 February – 29 September 2019

IMMA Collection: Les Levine, Resurrection / 15 February – 6 May 2019

Walker and Walker, Nowhere without no(w) / 15 February – 3 June 2019

A Vague Anxiety / 12 April – 18 August 2019

Doris Salcedo, Acts of Mourning / April – July 2019

IMMA Collection: Freud Project 2016-2021 / Life above Everything: Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats / June 2019 – January 2020

Kim Gordon / July – November 2019

Desire in Art from the 20th Century to the Digital Age / September 2019 – February 2020

Derek Jarman, PROTEST! / November 2019 – 23 February 2020

Continuing into 2019

Wolfgang Tillmans, Rebuilding the Future / 26 Oct 2018 – 17 Feb 2019

Mary Swanzy, Voyages / 26 Oct 2018 – 17 Feb 2019

IMMA Collection: Freud Project, Gaze / 4 Oct 2018 –19 May 2019

– ENDS – 

For further information and images please contact:
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] T:+353 (0)1 612 9922
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected] T:+353 (0)1 612 9921

Please note: Images of the work of Jack B Yeats are held by IVARO, we can send images for use but journalists would need to contact IVARO to enquire if a licence is necessary for their particular use. Details sent on request.