IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) is delighted to announce today (Monday 12 October) a new fund, supported by the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin T.D, to acquire new works for IMMA’s Collection by artists living and working in Ireland.

This new fund allows IMMA to support artists during Covid-19, enabling them to practice as artists by buying artworks, while also expanding the National Collection of contemporary art. This funding is part of a €1m fund that the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media has given to IMMA and Crawford Art Gallery to support the arts community nationally in these challenging times.

Annie Fletcher, Director, IMMA, said:

“Throughout the pandemic we have been evaluating how IMMA, as a National Cultural Institution, can best support artists. We believe a bold acquisition policy is crucial and are delighted that Minister Catherine Martin recognises this as a meaningful way to support the sector. IMMA embraces the role of arts and culture in bringing the future a little clearer into focus. With the multiple crises facing the world – climate, health, economic; IMMA works with artists to create spaces where the cultural imagination that the world needs right now is given space and is accelerated.

We are lucky to have such a wealth of incredible artists in this country and we are very proud to be in a position to invest in artworks and develop IMMA’s Collection at this critical time. As we approach IMMA’s 30th birthday in 2021, we are reflecting on its history and how we want to shape its future. As a dynamic modern and contemporary collecting institution in Ireland IMMA is a collaborative civic space, a hub where our audiences come together to explore visions, thoughts, ideas and the future. Now, this fund provides us with the resources to bring art works permanently into the Collection, ensuring that the Irish public has a Collection that is truly reflective of the present concerns of contemporary society.”

This fund enables IMMA to support artists who urgently need resources and organisational advocacy to enable them practice as artists, now and into the future, while acknowledging the immense talent in the visual arts scene in Ireland. It recognises the urgent financial needs of artists living and working through the pandemic as well as the significant recognition of being represented in the National Collection.

At a time when exhibition opportunities and international exhibition touring is limited, this fund allows IMMA to continue to promote artists and their work, supporting and enhancing their reputations by acquiring their work for the National Collection. As a global connector IMMA will further ensure that these artists practice become part of an international global dialogue as we engage more and more with our international museum partners going forward.

In acquiring new works IMMA will pay particular focus to:

·       Artworks that reflect our position as radically inclusive and globally connected.

·       Artworks that can activate impactful conversations about contemporary society and reflect on society’s urgencies in a time of dramatic social change.

·       Approaching our 30-year anniversary in 2021 and planning a major exhibition and celebration of IMMA’s Collection which investigates Ireland’s history and its journey towards the future.

12 October 2020

– ENDS –

For further information and images please contact:
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected]
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected]

The Minister for Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Gaeltacht, Catherine Martin T.D., today (Wednesday, 30 September) announced the launch of a new partnership between the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and Creative Ireland. The partnership is focused on expanding arts programming for older people as we deal with the impact of cocooning and social distancing measures in this challenging time for older communities.

Minister Catherine Martin said:

“In July I was delighted to announce a €500,000 investment in Creative Ireland’s Creativity in Older Age programme. Included in this is an exciting expansion of the ground-breaking Art and Ageing programme, designed by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which is being launched today.

“Programmes such as this are urgently required to counteract the social side effects of Covid-19 and it is heartening that organisations such as IMMA are able to respond with such energy and sensitivity to the needs of our most vulnerable citizens.”

This new partnership seeks to address some of the challenges around cocooning and social distancing by enabling access to meaningful cultural encounters and art experiences, both at home and in residential settings. This new programme includes:

1. Collaborations with Nursing Home Activity Coordinators
Many of IMMA’s visitor engagement team have completed Age & Opportunity’s Creative Exchanges course alongside nursing home activity coordinators. IMMA will pair visitor engagement team members with nursing home activity coordinators for support, ideas and remote activity facilitation. This will provide a valuable support to staff in nursing homes and residential facilities who have been through the most challenging time of their careers.

2. Digital and physical remote engagement resources, including:

A: Slow-looking IMMA Collection videos
This series of accessible (captioned, audio-described) videos will invite viewers to take a relaxed moment with a guided exploration of a selected artwork from the IMMA collection. Videos will be directly available to nursing home activity coordinators in residential facilities through networks such as Nursing Homes Ireland, Alzheimer Society of Ireland services and IMMA’s website and social media channels.

B: Armchair Azure
Dementia-inclusive live Azure tours delivered via Zoom and available to people living with dementia, their families, friends and professional carers, provided on a scheduled monthly basis for individuals and bookable on-demand for nursing home groups. Azure is a programme that aims to make art galleries and museums around Ireland dementia-friendly spaces. The tours will be delivered in collaboration with the Alzheimer Society of Ireland and promoted through the HSE Dementia Understand Together Network.

C: Collection Conversations Resource Packs
All of IMMA’s programming for older audiences encourages discussions where participants share their thoughts on IMMA artworks. These printed resource packs will highlight selected work from the IMMA collection. The resource packs include high-quality reproductions of selected artworks with an accompanying series of conversational prompts, giving participants a structure for exploring artworks. These conversational prompts can be followed alone, with family and friends, or used by activity coordinators within nursing homes or other residential settings with residents. These resources will be distributed through IMMA partnerships such as Age & Opportunity’s Cultural Companions and the Alzheimer Society of Ireland.

IMMA has established itself as the leading authority on art and ageing over the last decade. Programming for older people, both at IMMA and in local communities, is increasingly important as the population continues to age and while we live through the challenges of Covid-19.

IMMA recognises the diversity of experience of older people; from those who are healthy and independent, to older people with disabilities, and a growing population living with dementia. Covid-19 has resulted in significant challenges for older people and continues to see them restricted in terms of their access to cultural encounters and experiences.

Bairbre Ann Harkin, Curator: Art & Ageing, IMMA, said:

“This funding presents IMMA with a valuable opportunity to extend the reach of our existing Art & Ageing programme and rethink how we can reach our audience during this difficult time. By developing a range of options, both digital and non-digital, we are confident that older people will be able to access stimulating, enjoyable experiences connecting them with IMMA and its collection, with our staff and with other art-lovers and burgeoning enthusiasts.”

“We are extremely grateful to the Minister and Creative Ireland and our project partners, Age & Opportunity, the Alzheimer Society of Ireland, Butler Gallery, MISA St James’s Hospital and the HSE Understand Together campaign. These collaborations make it possible for us to reach beyond the museum’s walls into the community and into people’s homes around Ireland.”

ENDS

IMMA Contacts
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected]
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected]

Department Press and Information Office
An Roinn Meán, Turasóireachta, Ealaíon, Cultúir, Spóirt agus Gaeltachta
Department of Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Gaeltacht
Tel: 087 6737338 / 087 7374427
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.chg.gov.ie
Twitter: @DeptAHG
Instagram: Culture.Heritage.Gaeltacht
Facebook: DepartmentofCultureHeritageGaeltacht

 

 

IMMA is delighted to celebrate Culture Night with the opening of two major exhibitions, Obedience and Defiance is a major retrospective exhibition by the renowned Portuguese artist Paula Rego; and Ghosts from the Recent Past an exhibition of over 80 artworks from the IMMA Collection, introducing works from the major donation of the Kerlin Gallery Collection to IMMA in 2018; alongside a day long programme of Culture Night events.

For Culture Night IMMA is taking a blended approach offering online and physical events. Visitors to IMMA will have the opportunity to see the newly opened exhibitions for free, a new site-specific work Club Chroma Chlorologia by Niall Sweeney in the grounds, as well as a live workshop, Embodiment and Mark Making in The People’s Pavilion and a walking tour on the biodiversity of IMMA. The online programme begins with an Armchair Azure, a dementia-inclusive live Azure tour delivered via Zoom available to people living with dementia, their families, friends and carers. This is followed by the launch of the fifth film work to be presented as part of IMMA Screen, Helen Cammock’s The Long Note, 2018. From 4pm join us for virtual walking tours on the biodiversity of the IMMA gardens and the hidden history of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham broadcast on our website; a family art workshop for you to do at home; a cookery demonstration with Peaches Kemp from the Kemp Sisters Café and lots more. At 6pm, IMMA’s Director Annie Fletcher will broadcast the launch of Culture Night and celebrate the opening of our new exhibitions. For those who do not have the chance to see the exhibitions in person on the day, our curators and visitor engagement team will be presenting a selection of the works to our audiences online. A full programme of events is available here.

Obedience and Defiance is a major retrospective by one of Europe’s most influential figurative artists Paula Rego. The exhibition spans over 50 years of Rego’s international career, from the 1960s to the 2010s and includes more than 80 works, including paintings never shown before and works on paper from the artist’s family and close friends. Rego is celebrated for her intense and courageous paintings, drawings and prints and for her outstanding and suggestive story-telling abilities.

Rego’s work explores moral challenges to humanity, including political tyranny, gender discrimination, abortion, female genital mutilation and the death of civilians in war. Other works in the exhibition begin with her Portuguese roots and lived experiences, or respond to current affairs and stories from literature, cinema, folklore, mythology and art history. Rego often works from life, exploring conflicting emotions experienced in intimate relationships – such as affection and resentment – and behavioural codes within society at large, whilst her work reveals a distinct form of feminism.

Ghosts from the Recent Past explores how urgencies of the recent past continue to inhabit the present. Framed by key political events of the past 40 years, both in Ireland and further afield, the exhibition presents artworks from the IMMA Collection from the 1980s onwards. These works tell stories of colonisation and contested borders, of human relationships to the environment, of radical self-representation in the face of oppression and of love.

The exhibition looks at how artworks carry the language of resistances, waywardness, joys and subversions, which continue to resonate and agitate. Given the Irish context and this moment of global reckoning, the impact of contradiction, duality and paradox abounds. The placement of artworks in the galleries plays with these tensions, highlighting that opposing forces are not always easily disentangled: love from hate, fear from hope, protection from invasion. These forces are akin to lingering atmospheres or “ghosts” from the past which play an active role in structuring the conditions of the present.

Featuring artworks from IMMA’s Collection together with international collections, the exhibition debuts works from the major donation of the Kerlin Gallery Collection to IMMA in 2018. Ghosts from the Recent Past includes 44 artists and over 80 artworks and paves the way for IMMA’s 30th anniversary in 2021 in which the IMMA Collection will take centre stage.

14 September 2020

– Ends –

For further information and images please contact: Monica Cullinane E: [email protected], Patrice Molloy E: [email protected]

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Additional Notes for Editors

Culture Night Programme

11am – 12pm – Armchair Azure
Are you living with dementia, or do you know someone who is? Why not try IMMA’s Armchair Azure, an online experience designed for people living with dementia and their families and friends. During Armchair Azure, you will explore a selection of artwork from IMMA’s Collection with a facilitator who has received special training in dementia-inclusive arts programming. This experience is ideal for family members or friends to do together. Places are strictly limited and booking is essential. For more information and to place your booking, please contact Bairbre-Ann or Ciara via email at [email protected] or phone 01 612 9955. ONLINE via ZOOM

11am – 1.30pm – Embodiment and Mark Marking workshop in The People’s Pavilion
Join us for a multi-sensory experience involving movement, dance, music and life drawing. We will explore the relationship between embodiment and mark making through guided movement, sketching and drawing to the sound of music from all over the world. The workshop will be facilitated to suit all levels of practice, no previous experience of dance or drawing is required. Booking required. THE PEOPLE’S PAVILION, IMMA

From 11.30am to 8pm – Visit an Exhibition – Book your ticket in advance
From 11.30am visit Ghosts from the Recent Past; Bharti Kher, A Consummate Joy; IMMA Collection: Freud Project; IMMA Archives: 1990s, From the Edge to the Centre.
From 4pm visit Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance
Please book your Museum admission ticket at imma.ie. GALLERIES, IMMA

From 11.30am – Club Chroma Chlorologia by Niall Sweeney
Come and see Club Chroma Chlorologia by Niall Sweeney, a site-specific work in the gardens and around The People’s Pavilion. Club Chroma Chlorologia is the first stage in a gradual outdoor extension of the recent exhibition CHROMA from the galleries to the grounds of IMMA. CHROMA was originally installed in the museum’s Project Spaces from 2019 to 2020 and explored themes of the body in relation to colour and space, identity politics, cultural blindness, forced anonymity and the theatrics of visibility and invisibility. GARDENS/THE PEOPLE’S PAVILION, IMMA

12noon – IMMA Screen: Helen Cammock, The Long Note
We are delighted to launch the fifth film work to be screened as part of IMMA Screen, Helen Cammock’s, The Long Note, 2018. IMMA Screen is an online screening series showcasing film and video works from the IMMA Collection. ONLINE

3pm – Exploring the Green Cube – Biodiversity Tour
A conversational biodiversity tour of the meadow and formal gardens led by Sandra Murphy, a member of IMMA’s Visitor Engagement Team and an amateur wildlife photographer and birdie. Sandra is the author of three blogs for the IMMA magazine, discussing the bio diversity of birds, butterflies and wild flowers found on our 48 acre site. Booking required. THE PEOPLE’S PAVILION, IMMA

4pm – Explorer at Home, Family Workshop
Explorer at Home: Culture Night Special will explore ideas of collecting and archiving, as seen in the exhibition IMMA Archive: 1990s, From the Edge to the Centre. This Explorer at Home art activity will invite you to make and decorate a card container for the things that you collect and archive. ONLINE

4.40pm – Exploring the Green Cube
A conversational biodiversity tour of the meadow and formal gardens led by Sandra Murphy, a member of IMMA’s Visitor Engagement Team and an amateur wildlife photographer and birdie. Sandra is the author of three blogs for the IMMA magazine, discussing the biodiversity of birds, butterflies and wild flowers found on our 48 acre site. ONLINE

5.15pm – Exploring IMMA’s Hidden History
A walking tour exploring the hidden history of the site of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham with IMMA’s Barry Kehoe and Stephen Taylor. Discover some of the rich and fascinating layers of history from within the buildings and grounds of IMMA, from the lost cherubs of the famine Queen to the final resting place of the original warhorse. ONLINE

5.50pm – Make your own Guinness Brownies with Peaches Kemp
Join Peaches Kemp, from the Kemp Sisters Café, to make your very own very yummy Guinness Brownies in this cookery demonstration. Including tips on making the perfect chocolate chips. ONLINE

6pm – Introduction from Annie Fletcher, Director, IMMA
Annie Fletcher welcomes you to IMMA’s Culture Night 2020, a year like no other, introducing two new monumental exhibitions Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance and Ghosts from the Recent Past and looks forward to celebrating IMMA’s 30th Birthday in 2021. ONLINE

6.05pm – Curators in Conversation on Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance
With a message from artist Paula Rego from her studio, join IMMA’s Head of Collections Christina Kennedy and the Curator of the exhibition Catherine Lampert, for a conversation on Rego’s newly opened exhibition Obedience and Defiance. Christina will introduce the themes and concepts behind the exhibition and highlight some of her personal favourite artworks. ONLINE

6.35pm – Curators in Conversation on Ghosts from the Recent Past
Hear from the curatorial team of Rachel Gilbourne, Janice Hough and Claire Walsh as they reflect on the driving themes of the exhibition Ghosts from the Recent Past. This exhibition paves the way for future IMMA Collection displays and showcases the recent donation of works from the Kerlin Gallery. Members of IMMA’s Visitor Engagement Team will highlight key works within the show. ONLINE

7.05pm – Curators in Conversation on Bharti Kher, A Consummate Joy
A Consummate Joy is an exhibition by Indian/British artist Bharti Kher, originally programmed to open in March, it has been a beacon of hope as visitors have returned to IMMA. Following a message sent from Kher in her London studio we will hear from the exhibition curator, IMMA’s Head of Exhibitions, Rachel Thomas as she describes the exhibition and discusses some of her favourite works. ONLINE

7.35pm – Outlandish Theatre Platform presents Women on Women / WoW, with an introduction by Helen O’Donoghue with Maud Hendricks and Bernie O’Reilly
Helen O’Donoghue, Head of Engagement & Learning, IMMA, introduces the WoW project which is one of the community projects that The People’s Pavilion is supporting as part of its access and inclusion policy. Outlandish Theatre Platform creates inter-disciplinary theatre and inter-media projects with local communities in Dublin 8 and beyond, exploring who we are within perceived cultural, national and global narratives. Women on Women | WoW is a project by women on women, it addresses issues of gender equality in a diverse and multicultural Europe, through a historical and contemporary perspective. Outlandish Theatre Platform will present five short videos of WoW Stories. ONLINE

7.50pm – Yes, But Do You Care? Dance Performance
Bairbre Ann Harkin, Curator, Art & Ageing, IMMA will introduce this dance work by visual artist Marie Brett (E.gress, Torpedo, Amulet) and chorographer/dance artist Philip Connaughton (Assisted Solo, Mamafesta Memorialising, Extraterrestrial Events) who are making a new collaborative, cross-medium art piece exploring how issues of capacity, autonomy and dementia care-giving are raising dilemmas amid Ireland’s new capacity legislation. ONLINE.

8.15pm – #IMMAINSIDEOUT Collective Project
During the lockdown the #IMMAInsideOut Collective Project allowed us to share art, ideas and our experiences. We asked our followers on social media to share their art and lives with all of us in a collective effort to combat social isolation and boredom using the hashtag #IMMAInsideOut. View our image gallery as a digital exhibition, a reflection of our shared experience of these exceptional times. The image gallery comprises work shared by our audience from March to July 2020. ONLINE.

Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance
18 Sept 2020 – 3 Jan 2021

About Paula Rego
Born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1935, Dame Paula Rego trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Rego is celebrated for her bold and intense paintings, drawings and prints, which intertwine the private and the public, the intimate and the political, the real and the imagined, combining autobiographical elements with stories from literature, folklore, and mythology, references to earlier art, and observations on the contemporary world.. Rego lives and works in London and has exhibited widely in Britain and internationally. Since 2004, major retrospectives of her work have been held at Tate Britain, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.

Exhibition Details
Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance is curated by the distinguished art historian and former director of Whitechapel Gallery, Catherine Lampert. With thanks to Paula Rego and family and to the Marlborough Gallery.

The exhibition organised by MK Gallery, Milton Keynes with the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh and IMMA, Dublin.

Admission:
€8.00 / €5.00 Concession (Senior Citizens and Unwaged)
Free Admission for IMMA Members, full-time students and under 18’s.
Free Admission for all every Tuesday. Please book tickets before your visit at imma.ie

Please note that this exhibition addresses challenging subjects and includes images of a suggestive and/or graphic nature. Parental and carer discretion may be required.

Ghosts from the Recent Past
19 September 2020 – 2021

List of Artists:
Janine Antoni, Boyd & Evans, Gerard Byrne, Nina Canell, Helen Chadwick, Phil Collins, Joshua Compston, Barrie Cooke, Dorothy Cross, Vivienne Dick, Willie Doherty, Patrick Hall, Siobhán Hapaska, Patrick Jolley, Isaac Julien, Michael Landy, Les Levine, Brian Maguire, Tim Mara, Mónica Mayer, Niamh McCann, Stephen McKenna, William McKeown, Tom Molloy, Janet Mullarney, Asako Narahashi, Isabel Nolan, Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland, Mairead O’hEocha, Mark O’Kelly, Garrett Phelan, Sarah Pierce, Jack Pierson, Kathy Prendergast, Veronica Ryan, Margaret Salmon, Norbert Schwontkowski, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Kara Walker, Robin Warren, Elinor Wiltshire, Bill Woodrow, Suné Woods.

Kerlin Gallery Donation
In 2018, IMMA received the donation of the Kerlin Gallery Collection through Section 1003 to join the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art. This donation comprises sixty works by twenty-six artists including paintings, sculpture, photography, film. It is a compilation of some of the most significant developments in Irish art practice of the 1990s and early 2000s. The range of works overlaps and reflects patterns of extraordinary social, cultural and political change in Ireland while also connecting to distinctive developments in contemporary international practice of the time.

While IMMA Collection had already held certain works by many of the artists, each of whom are leading figures in Irish art of this period, the Kerlin Gallery donation enables IMMA to more comprehensively chart the careers of those artists’ practices and evidence how they have reached the stature they now occupy.

New to the IMMA Collection are works by Jim Lambie, Maureen Gallace, Mairead O’hEocha. Tal R, Norbert Schwontkowski, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Tony Swain, all highly significant artists in their fields.

Artists in the donation are Gerard Byrne, Phil Collins, Dorothy Cross, Willie Doherty, Mark Francis, Maureen Gallace, Liam Gillick, Siobhán Hapaska, Roger Hiorns, Callum Innes, Jaki Irvine, Jim Lambie, Elizabeth Magill, Brian Maguire, Stephen McKenna, Isabel Nolan, Mairead O’hEocha, Kathy Prendergast, Tal R, Norbert Schwontkowski, William Scott, Paul Seawright, Seán Shanahan, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tony Swain and Andrew Vickery.

Exhibition Details
Ghosts from the Recent Past is co-curated by Rachael Gilbourne, Janice Hough and Claire Walsh, Assistant Curator’s, IMMA. Steered by the vision of Annie Fletcher, Director, IMMA.

Exhibition design by Emma Conway.

Admission Free. Please book tickets before your visit at imma.ie
.

We are delighted to welcome the public back to IMMA as we reopen the campus from today, Monday 29 June. The grounds of IMMA reopen with a new outdoor tented area called The People’s Pavilion located on our front lawn and Social Distancing Circles placed across the site where friends and families can meet safely and enjoy IMMA. Our outdoor programme will focus on art trails, our gardens and an activated programme of pop-up events in The People’s Pavilion which will include collaborations with local community groups and artist collectives from mid-July. All this will be complemented by a new outdoor pop-up café The Flying Dog.

Annie Fletcher, Director, IMMA, said “The roadmap to recovery has placed a new focus on the importance of outdoor convivial spaces where we can gather safely and I am pleased that we can celebrate this at IMMA. The grounds are going to be of central importance to IMMA’s programming going forward. This summer we encourage you to use IMMA as a place to meet with friends and family in our Social Distancing Circles, follow our outdoor art trails, drop into the People’s Pavilion and try our new outdoor pop-up café The Flying Dog”.

The galleries will reopen in phases from tomorrow, Tuesday 30 June, beginning with the Freud Project which examines the work of Lucian Freud through an accompanying digital research programme exploring the role of the studio. Also opening is our archive exhibition IMMA Archive: 1990s, From the Edge to the Centre which celebrates the ambitious IMMA Collection and Archive Digitisation Project. From 21 July we will open the long-awaited exhibition by British-Indian artist Bharti Kher, A Consummate Joy, together with the main reception area, the IMMA Shop and an increased offering in The People’s Pavilion. We will launch a full programme of exhibitions in the autumn.

In order to ensure that public health guidelines are adhered to we are reducing the number of people into our exhibition spaces. Entry to the exhibitions is free but by ticketed timeslot. Tickets can be booked via our new booking system at www.imma.ie where visitors will find more information to ensure their visit is safe and enjoyable.

We will also continue to offer our online programme throughout the summer months. Newly launched is the IMMA International Summer School which takes place from 3 to 28 August 2020. This is an online programme of lectures, discussions and workshops by artists, theorists and educators who will focus on the theme of ‘statecraft’ and the role of art and artists in relation to the state. We will also continue to present IMMA Screen, an online screening series showcasing film and video works from the IMMA Collection. We are delighted to present Visibility: Moderate (1981) by Vivienne Dick as the second work from the Collection to be showcased as part of IMMA Screen alongside a new interview with the artist.

29 June 2020

– ENDS –

For further information and images please contact:
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected]
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected]

 

Additional Notes for Editors

 

Museum opening hours

Mon: Closed (Grounds are open to the public)
Tues to Fri: 11.30am – 5.30pm
Sat: 10am – 5.30pm
Sun: 12noon – 5.30pm

 

The Flying Dog Café
Mon to Sat: 10am – 5pm

Sun: 12noon – 6pm

 

The People’s Pavilion
The People’s Pavilion is open Museum hours.

 

Exhibitions
Links to our website for further details on exhibitions

IMMA Collection: Freud Project, The Artist’s Studio – from 30 June

IMMA Archives, 1990s: From the Edge to the Centre – from 30 June

Bharti Kher, A Consummate Joy – from 21 July

Outdoor Art Trails

IMMA Families: Outdoor artworks, Natural Materials & Steel and Bronze

A Guide to the Gardens and Meadows: Tree Walk

A Guide to the Gardens and Meadows: Wild Plants and Flowers

 

IMMA Explorer Activity Pack
This free family activity pack includes an activity booklet with games, puzzles and tasks, as well as a pack of colouring pencils and an Explorer identity badge. Packs can be picked up from the Freud Centre reception.

 

IMMA Online

Further details of IMMA’s online programmes are available on our webpage IMMA Online.

IMMA is delighted to present IMMA Screen, a new series which celebrates film and video works from the IMMA Collection. Previously only shown in an exhibition space, IMMA Screen provides an exciting opportunity for audiences to view artworks by Helen Cammock, Phil Collins, Vivienne Dick, Kevin Gaffney, Isabel Nolan and Alanna O’Kelly in their own homes.

Available from today, Tuesday 26 May, we are pleased to present Sanctuary/Wastelands (1994) by Alanna O’Kelly as the first work to be screened as part of this programme. The screenings are available online for a limited time only alongside a new interview with the artist.

As we reflect on the psychological implications of newly imposed physical distancing between ourselves and others, IMMA Screen invites a timely reflection on the power and politics of representation and the continuous fabrications of the self and the other. In different ways, the works engage with performance and the role of the camera in the construction and mediation of identity. A number of these works also deal poignantly with ideas of loss and erasure.

Alanna O’Kelly’s, Sanctuary/Wastelands (1994), was shown as part of the exhibition IMMA Archive: 1990s, From the Edge to the Centre when it was closed on 12 March due to COVID-19. In addition to the video, the original soundtrack, which accompanied the 1994 slide-tape installation of Sanctuary/Wastelands, is available for the first time since the re-making of the work in 1998.

Alongside the screening a new interview with O’Kelly is also available with a poem by the late Eavan Boland and a photograph taken by the artist showing the now disappeared burial mound at which the video was set. The poem and photograph were both presented alongside Sanctuary/Wastelands when it was first shown as part of the 1994 Glen Dimplex Artists Award exhibition.

Although the work itself takes the form of a video, Sanctuary/Wastelands is deeply connected to performance and the embodied cultural expression of grief. Made in 1994, Sanctuary/Wastelands captures a famine burial ground at Teampall Dumhach Mhór, or ‘Church of the Great Sandbank’ in Thallabhawn, County Mayo. This site was a monastic settlement from the 6th century and a famine burial ground in the 19th century. Known as ‘The Sanctuary’ to 17th century mapmakers, it was referred to as ‘The Wastelands’ by local people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The work was conceived following a performance by O’Kelly at the site in which she circled the burial mound while keening for the dead. Once located on the edge of an estuary between Mweelrea Mountain and the Atlantic Ocean, the burial ground has now completely dissolved due to erosion.

Originally a slide-tape installation involving three projectors, Sanctuary/Wastelands was later digitised in 1998. The visuals remained the same, with the video capturing the 1994 set-up of one static image of the mound projected onto a wall overlaid with slowly revealed close-ups of the site from the two other projectors. However, a new audio track added in 1998 replaced the original. While the first track related specifically to the site in Mayo and featured the sound of the artist keening as she had done in her early performance there, the new version, made with musician Tommy Hayes, moved the focus away from the cultural specificities of Ireland.

To coincide with IMMA Screen, a new online talk by Dr Maeve Connolly, titled Media-based Time: Infrastructure and Temporality in 1990s Art, is available to listen to. This talk explores media-based time and artworks as it relates to the exhibition IMMA Archive: 1990s and selected work by Willie Doherty, Alanna O’Kelly and Caroline McCarthy.

New screenings will be available monthly alongside a new interview, related resources and material from the IMMA Archive. Each screening will be accessible online for one month.

26 May 2020

– ENDS –

For further information and images please contact: Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] or Patrice Molloy E: [email protected]

Additional Notes for Editors

Visit the webpage IMMA Screen

Watch Sanctuary/Wastelands (1994) by Alanna O’Kelly

Talks Online
Media-based Time: Infrastructure and Temporality in 1990s Art by Dr Maeve Connolly
40mins | May 2020
To coincide with IMMA Screen, this new online talk explores media-based time and artworks, as it relates to IMMA Archive: 1990s and selected work by Willie Doherty, Alanna O’Kelly and Caroline McCarthy. Presented in collaboration with ARC at IADT. Listen here

About the Artist – Alanna O’Kelly
Irish artist Alanna O’Kelly (born 1955) attended the National College of Art and Design and the Slade School of Art, London. Her practice incorporates sculpture, performance, slide installation and film. Influenced by feminist politics, O’Kelly explores ideas of the psychic conflicts of our shared history and the continuity of tradition. O’Kelly’s work has featured in major group and solo exhibitions since the 1980s. She represented Ireland at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1996.

Opening on Friday 13 March 2020, IMMA presents A Consummate Joy a solo exhibition by acclaimed British-Indian artist Bharti Kher (b1969 London). Kher’s art gives form to daily life and its rituals in a way that reassesses and transforms its meaning to yield an air of magical realism.

A Consummate Joy comprises nineteen new and recent works, ranging from sculpture, painting, installation and watercolours. Now living in New Delhi, India, Kher’s use of found objects is informed by her own position as an artist located between geographic and social surroundings. Kher’s way of working is exploratory; surveying, looking, collecting and transforming, as she repositions the viewer’s relationship with the object and initiates a dialogue between metaphysical and material pursuits.

Bharti Kher on the significance of showing her work in Ireland said “Ireland has always been an interest for me in its similarities to ancient Indian history and mythologies; from the worship of pagan goddesses to the practice of oral storytelling and song”. 

At the centre of Kher’s practice are her sculptures, early examples of which featured fantastical hybrid characters, blurring the distinctions between humans and nature, ecology and politics. In line with this early practice, Kher continues to assemble, juxtapose and transform found objects that are witness to their own histories.

The title of the exhibition, A Consummate Joy, is taken from a work in the exhibition, Consummate joy and a Sisyphean task (2019), a sculpture made of wood, copper, steel and red jasper stone. The term Sisyphean is derived from Greek mythology, where Sisyphus was punished in Hades for his misdeeds in life by being condemned eternally to roll a heavy stone up a hill. As he reached the top, the stone rolled back down again and his labour in loop, was everlasting and seemingly futile. This endless metaphor translates for the artist as a metaphor for the cycle of life itself, aligning Eastern and Western philosophies. A Consummate Joy celebrates the repetition of all cycles, to find meaning in the everyday, in the enacting and activating of our daily rituals.

The exhibition explores further these cycles of life and Kher’s interest in myth and the narrative, in the work Artemis (2019), also inspired by ancient Greek mythology. Artemis is the goddess of the hunt, the wilderness, animals and the moon. Kher portrays her as the ‘many breasted’ goddess and her many heads represent her plurality. She is the archetype mother goddess and is also its antithesis, of death, she gives life and takes away life. Artemis like many of the female Indian goddesses such as Kali, that Kher also refers to in her sculptural works, remain for her, essentially transformative beings, whose equivocal natures, both nourish and destroy.

Rachel Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of exhibitions at IMMA, said “Bharti Kher’s practice acknowledges and celebrates the architypes women of great importance from mythology and the past. It is interesting then to have the exhibition here as Ireland has a wealth of Celtic goddesses who were pioneers and shaped history. This exhibition explores these themes with complex narratives of history, duality and questions the ideas of ritual itself”.

Three of Kher’s artworks are currently on show at IMMA as part of the international group exhibition Desire: A Revision from the 20^th Century to the Digital Age. Two sculptures And all the while the benevolent slept (2008) and Warrior with Cloak and Shield (2008), an empowered life-size hybrid sculpture of a half-woman, half-stag; and the painting Blind matter, dark night (2017), one of Kher’s Bhindi paintings; the Bindi is a signature material of Kher’s work. Desire: A Revision is on show until 22 March 2020. The work, Warrior with Cloak and Shield, started a conversation with the artist on the role of the female, both in historical, mythological and contemporary representations that then led to the inspiration for her solo exhibition at IMMA.

24 February 2020

– Ends –

 

For further information and images please contact:

Monica Cullinane, [email protected] tel: 01-612 9922  

 

Additional Notes for Editors

 Bharti Kher, A Consummate Joy
13 March – 17 May 2020
Admission Free

About the artist
Bharti Kher was born in 1969 in London, England and lives in New Delhi, India. She studied painting, graduating in 1991 from Newcastle Polytechnic. In 1992 she travelled to India, deciding to live there in 1993. Kher’s recent solo exhibitions include: ‘A Wonderful Anarchy’ Hauser & Wirth Somerset, ‘Chimeras’, Centre Pasqu’Art, Biel (2018), ‘Djinns, things, places’, Galerie Perrotin, Tokyo (2018), ‘Points de départ, points qui lient’, DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal (2018), ‘Dark Matter’, Museum Frieder Burda, Berlin, 2017), ‘This Breathing House’, Freud Museum, London (2016), ‘The Laws of Reversed Effort’, Galerie Perrotin, Paris (2016),’Three decimal points. of a minute of a second. of a degree’, Hauser & Wirth, Zürich (2014) and ‘Misdemeanours’, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai(2014).

Recent group exhibitions include: ‘In the Company of Artists’ Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2019), ‘Desire in Art, from the 20th Century to the Digital Age’, IMMA, Dublin (2019), ‘Les arts du Tout-Monde’, Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (2019), ‘Driving Forces: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Ann and Ron Pizzuti’, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus (2019), ‘Facing India’ Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (2018), ‘Like Life: Sculpture, Colour and the Body (1300-Now)’, The Metropolitan Museum, New York (2018), ‘Vision Exchange: Perspectives from India to Canada’, Canada tour: Art Gallery of Alberta – Alberta; University of Toronto Art Centre – Toronto; Winnipeg Art Gallery – Winnipeg (2018-2019).

Full captions for above images:
Bharti Kher, Artemis, 2019, Clay, cement, wax, brass, 157.2 x 30 x 30 cm / 61 7/8 x 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches, Sculpture: 48.2 x 16 x 16 cm, Cement plinth: 100.5 x 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Bharti Kher, Consummate joy and a Sisyphean task, 2019, Wood, copper, steel, red jasper stone, 247 x 66.9 x 200 cm / 97 1/4 x 26 3/8 x 78 3/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Associated Talks, Events

Preview Artist Discussion / Bharti Kher and Dr Lisa Godson
Thursday 12 March 2020, 5.30pm, Lecture Room, Booking required – Book here
Bharti Kher joins Dr Lisa Godson (Lecturer, NCAD) in conversation to discuss the artist’s new solo exhibition A Consummate Joy. Together they trace key tenets that inform Kher’s longstanding sculptural practice that combines hybrid beings that unite contradictions of gender, race, ecology, labour and politics; juxtaposed with the material histories of found objects.

Post-colonial interests in Indian and Irish mythologies, the worship of pagan goddesses, oral storytelling and song, are amongst the topics to be explored with the artist. This talk launches the exhibition A Consummate Joy and is followed by the preview and drinks reception.

Curators Lunchtime Talk Series: Bharti Kher, A Consummate Joy
Friday 1 May 2020, 1.15 – 2pm / Meeting Point – IMMA Main Reception, Drop In
Join Annie Lynott, Exhibitions, IMMA for a guided walkthrough of the exhibition and hear more about the themes and artworks selected for this solo show.

A full talks programme will accompany the exhibition, please check www.imma.ie for details.

The IMMA Collection: Freud Project presents a new research and activation programme exploring The Artist’s Studio

Very few artists spent as much time in the studio as Lucian Freud (1922–2011). The studio was his world. Now in its fourth year, the IMMA Collection: Freud Project is dedicating a six-month period to the investigation of the theme of the artist’s studio, exploring its role and function in the production of art. Opening today, Wednesday 12 February, The Artist’s Studio presents the work of Lucian Freud with a new research and activation space in the Freud Centre.

The studio, in all its forms, exerts a fascination as the physical and conceptual site of an artist’s work. The IMMA Collection: Freud Project provides the framework for an investigation of the timeless subject of the relationship between the artist and their studio. The basement of the Freud Centre is a new site for research, functioning as a reading, screening and seminar room. This is the home for a public exploration of the role and function of the studio as the space of production. This project maps out and builds on existing ways of thinking about the studio, focusing on international contexts as well as the contemporary situation in Ireland.

Annie Fletcher, Director of IMMA said “the significance of The Artist’s Studio as a model of research and activation within the Museum, together with the IMMA Archive exhibition ‘From the Edge to Centre’, are dynamic templates for looking to the enormous potential of a future Collection and Learning Centre at IMMA.

Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections at IMMA said “The Artist’s Studio stands for the creative process. With this programme of research and activation IMMA positions itself at a juncture where curatorial, art historical and educational research can converge. IMMA is uniquely poised, by fusing where art is made and art is displayed, to investigate at first hand the role and function of the studio in the relationships between art, politics and contemporary life.”

A series of core research questions inform and steer the various activities taking place. What are the uses of the studio? What are the limits of the studio? What are other possibilities for the studio? How do we value studio versus non-studio practices and how do we make space for alternatives within the Museum? Using Freud’s work, and his intense focus on the interiors of his studios as a prompt, this project explores and makes visible the alternative forms of research and learning that can take place in the environment of the Museum.

Highlights of the research programme include a summer school in June; engagement with IMMA’s own Artists’ Residency Programme and the IMMA Archive including the history of the Residency; discussion on Freud’s studio and an investigation into the contemporary situation in Ireland today.

This research project is rooted in the IMMA Collection: Freud Project, which presents 29 paintings and 16 works on paper in this exhibition. Freud is widely recognised as one of the greatest realist painters of the twentieth century, renowned for his intimate, honest, often visceral portrayal of the human form. He changed the way we see portraiture and the nude in art. The works in this exhibition, mainly dating from 1970 onwards, explore several of the artist’s key themes such as portraiture, self-portraiture, still-life, animals and nature. They include portraits of his family, other artists, an art writer, his art dealer, business people and his doctor. The loans also reflect his friendships and contacts within the racing world, his love of horses and dogs, his interest in the physical and psychological relationships between human and animal sitters, his studio and garden.

12 February 2020

– Ends –

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

 

Caption for image: Lucian Freud standing on his head, with daughter Bella, in his studio, circa 1986. © Estate of Bruce Bernard, courtesy of Virginia Verran.

Image use: Full title and copyright notice must be displayed with the photograph. No cropping or alteration is allowed. Full image must be used, ie that the top of the foot (at top of photo) is fully in view.

 

Additional Notes for Editors

IMMA Collection: Freud Project, The Artist’s Studio

12 February – 30 August 2020

Admission Free

 

About the Artist

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.

 

About the IMMA Collection: Freud Project

The IMMA Collection: Freud Project marks a major five-year initiative for IMMA. Fifty-two works by Lucian Freud have been lent to the Museum’s Collection until 2021. The loans, from a number of private collectors, include thirty-two paintings and twenty works on paper comprising nineteen large-scale etchings and one early drawing.

Four exhibitions have been presented to date, the inaugural IMMA Collection: Freud Project exhibition; The Ethics of Scrutiny curated by Daphne Wright; Gaze and Life above Everything: Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats.

 

The Freud Project in 2020

From 12 June to 1 November, affiliated to the Freud Project exhibition programme, IMMA presents a major exhibition of the work of Paula Rego, Freud’s fellow artist and peer, in Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance. From September in the Freud Centre we will present the exhibition Lucie and Daryll: Chantal Joffe looking at Lucian Freud focusing on the theme of the Painter’s Mother.

 

Associated Events

A full talks programme will accompany The Artist’s Studio, please check www.imma.ie for details.

IMMA today announces highlights of its 2020 programme which includes solo exhibitions by Bharti Kher, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Paula Rego and Eva Rothschild; a major international exhibition Xenogenesis by The Otolith Group and an exhibition from the IMMA Collection Ghosts From the Recent Past. The IMMA Collection: Freud Project will be accompanied by a response by Chantel Joffee to Lucian Freud’s portraits.

The first major exhibition Ghosts From the Recent Past explores how urgencies of the recent past continue to inhabit the present. Framed by key political events over the recent past it focuses on artworks from the IMMA Collection, including a major donation from the Kerlin Gallery, from the 1980s to the present. This exhibition can be seen as part of a series of major collection displays which will open at IMMA over the next three years, combining the IMMA collection and other international collections all established in the 1990’s as the beginning of the contemporary Global moment and will bring Irish practice in dialogue with other innovative artistic centres and collections throughout the world.

This summer a major retrospective of the work of renowned Portuguese artist Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance, spans Rego’s entire career from the 1960s, comprising more than 80 works, including paintings that have never been seen before and works on paper from the artist’s family and close friends.

Opening in the autumn The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis presents a cross section of artworks from 2011 to 2018 by The Otolith Group; the artist’s collective with Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. Xenogenesis weaves together many strands of imaginative speculation on deep pasts and possible futures.

Chantal Joffe has been invited to engage with Lucian Freud’s portraits of his mother, Lucie Brasch in Lucie and Daryll: Chantal Joffe looking at Lucian Freud. The investigation will centre around two of Freud’s most outstanding portraits of his mother which form part of the IMMA Collection: Freud Project (2016-2021).

Other solo exhibitions showing throughout the year include Bharti Kher whose art gives form to quotidian life and its daily rituals in a way that reassesses and transforms their meaning to yield an air of magical realism.

Christodoulos Panayiotou’s exhibition will engage with the history of IMMA’s building and site. His research-based practice focusses on the identification and uncovering of hidden narratives in the visual records of history and time.

IMMA is also delighted to present The Shrinking Universe by Eva Rothschild which was first shown as the national representation of Ireland at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2019.

The final exhibition of the year from the David Kronn Collection entitled Borders will reflect on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The exhibition includes work by the Magnum Agency, Evelyn Hofer, Paul Caponigro, Roger Mayne, Rosalind Solomon, Paul Seawright and Donovan Wylie

IMMA and EVA International (Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art) are excited to announce a new commissioning partnership for 2020. This partnership will see two of Ireland’s most significant contemporary arts organisations work together on a major artistic production.

Exhibition Highlights 2020

IMMA Collection: Freud Project
The Artist’s Studio
February –  August 2020

Bharti Kher
March – May 2020

Ghosts From the Recent Past
24 April – 13 September 2020

Christodoulos Panayiotou
24 April – 13 September 2020

Eva Rothschild, The Shrinking Universe
12 June – 11 October 2020

Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance
12 June – 1 November 2020

IMMA Collection: Freud Project
Lucie and Daryll: Chantal Joffe looking at Lucian Freud
11 September 2020 – Feb 2021

The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis
9 October 2020 – 17 January 2021

David Kronn Collection, Borders
21 October – Feb 2021

– ENDS –

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

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.