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

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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.

A noted international curator, Annie Fletcher has extensive leadership experience in the contemporary arts. In addition to her role as Chief Curator at Van Abbemuseum she is a tutor at de Appel, Amsterdam, the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and the Design Academy Eindhoven, and regularly worked with art institutions around the world including the SALT Istanbul, New Museum, New York, and L’Internationale network and De Appel Art Centre, Amsterdam. In 2012 she was Curator of Ireland’s Contemporary Art biennale EVA International and is regularly called upon to sit on major International juries, including the Turner Prize in 2014 and the selection committee for the Irish Pavilion at Venice in 2016.

Minister Josepha Madigan welcomed her appointment commenting; “Ms Fletcher brings great experience and dynamism to this important role. In addition to her work as Chief Curator of the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, she has worked with numerous cultural institutions in Ireland and across the world. Her passion for contemporary art and how it can resonate with the public will, I have no doubt, enable the Irish Museum of Modern Art to grow its footprint and impact both in Ireland and internationally. Her extensive domestic and international experience indicates that she will be well equipped to undertake this challenging and rewarding role.”

Born in Ireland Fletcher studied in Trinity College Dublin and started her career in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1994. She was Acting Head of Exhibitions in IMMA in 2001-2002 where she produced, among other projects, the seminal performance art weekend Marking the Territory. Curated by Marina Abramovic this three day event attracted capacity audiences to the museum. She partnered with IMMA, and then Director Sarah Glennie, on several exhibitions over the past five years, including solo presentations of Duncan Campbell and Sheela Gowda and most recently co-curated the 2016 IMMA group exhibition El Lissitzky: the Artist and the State with work from Rosella Biscotti, Nuria Guell, Alice Milligan, Sarah Pierce and Hito Steyerl, and is very much looking forward to returning to IMMA to lead the museum into its next phase. As a curator she is particular interested in how an encounter with art can generate a shared civic space and how, in today’s world, contemporary art can address complex ideas of time, space and participation in order to achieve resonance with the public.

IMMA Chairman David Harvey commented; “The Board of IMMA undertook a robust recruitment exercise and we are delighted that Annie has emerged from a strong international field of exceptional candidates as the new Director of the museum. Annie is a highly respected curator with extensive international experience and networks that can deliver on IMMA’s mission to connect audiences and art and provide an extraordinary space in Ireland where contemporary life and contemporary art connect, challenge and inspire one another. The Board has every confidence that under her Directorship IMMA will continue to place the generation of new ideas and innovation at the heart of the organisation, enabling artists to make the work they want to make while bringing Ireland’s cultural innovators into a deeper dialogue and a more fluid relationship with key international platforms and partners.”

Speaking about her new appointment Annie Fletcher commented: “I am thrilled to be taking up the position of Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It is a huge honour to be invited to lead the institution, building on IMMA’s growing legacy since its establishment in 1991. Returning to Ireland, I am excited to start working with such an inspiring, talented and active artistic community. At the same time I look forward to initiating international collaborations and dialogues, drawing on the rich discourses and artistic practices I have had the privilege to encounter over the last 20 years.”

Fletcher is currently working on a mid-career survey of the award winning artist-led collective Otolith Group and has recently curated or co-curated projects including the midcareer surveys of Qiu Zhijie, Hito Steyerl, Sheela Gowda David Malkjovic all at Van Abbemuseum. She has worked on the Museum of Arte Útil with Tania Bruguera, which opened in the autumn of 2013 at the Van Abbemuseum and developed the award winning two year programme Be(com)ing Dutch. She was co-founder and co-director of the rolling curatorial platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution with Frederique Bergholtz and Tanja Elstgeest (2005-10). As a writer she has contributed to various magazines including Afterall, Metropolis M and other publications. Annie Fletcher will take up the post of Director on 1st March 2019.

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For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane at tel: +353 1 612 9922; email: [email protected]

 

Opening on 26 October 2018, IMMA is delighted to present two major solo exhibitions, Voyages by Irish born modernist master Mary Swanzy (1882 – 1978) and Rebuilding the Future by internationally renowned German artist Wolfgang Tillmans.

The exhibitions will be opened by Minister for Culture, Heritage & the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan T.D., on the evening of Thursday 25 October 2018 and will open to the public on Friday 26 October at 11.30am.

These two IMMA initiated exhibitions exemplify the breadth of the museum’s programme. Mary Swanzy is arguably Ireland’s first ‘modernist’ painter and this is the first major retrospective of her work since 1968. This exhibition aims to reintroduce audiences to Swanzy’s extraordinary achievements and reinstate her as a Modern Irish Master. Wolfgang Tillmans’ relationship with IMMA began over 20 years ago, when he first exhibited work at the museum in 1997 as part of a group exhibition of young emerging artists Projects and more recently in 2015 in the popular exhibition What We Call Love: From Surrealism to Now. This is his first solo exhibition in Ireland and he has created this exhibition specifically for the IMMA galleries. It follows his critically acclaimed solo show in Tate Modern, London in 2017.

Minister Madigan said “We are certain this historical reframing of Swanzy as a feminist artist of our time will reposition her powerful work on the Irish and International stage. Part of the ongoing important work IMMA does is to connect Irish audiences with contemporary work of international relevance and significance – Wolfgang Tillmans’ exhibition builds on IMMA’s twenty-year connection with Tillmans’ work. Both exhibitions will be free to the public and we feel sure will have a lasting impact on all that visit them, no doubt sowing the seeds for future generations of Irish artists.”

Wolfgang Tillmans commented “This exhibition at IMMA is long overdue. Having been in two group presentations at the museum, it’s now very timely to realise my first solo exhibition in Ireland.”

Mary Swanzy (1882-1978) is a unique Irish artist. Her level of achievement, world travel and original thinking is unmatched in Irish art, yet this is the first retrospective of her work in 50 years. Born in the late Victorian era, by her early twenties Swanzy had mastered the academic style of painting. She witnessed the birth of Modern art in Paris before the First World War and her work rapidly evolved through the different styles of the day, each of them interpreted and transformed by her in a highly personal way. In 1920, against the background of violence of the Irish War of Independence, she left Ireland in a form of self-imposed exile. Traveling first through Eastern Europe and the Balkans, she then sailed to Hawaii and Samoa from 1923 to 24 – literally crossing the globe. While there she produced a body of work that is unique in an Irish context with images that show her proto-feminism and critique of the colonial system. Best known for her Cubist and Futurist paintings, after 1914 she exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon des Indépendants and the Beaux Arts, alongside artists who are now household names. By 1946 she was included in exhibitions with Chagall, William Scott and Henry Moore but after this time her work fell into obscurity. This may in part have been due to her status as a female artist and indeed she was vocal on issues of gender, remarking; ‘if I had been born Henry instead of Mary my life would have been very different’. This exhibition aims to introduce audiences to her extraordinary achievements.

Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany) is one of the most accomplished and widely celebrated artists working today, recognised for major contributions to the development of contemporary photography in terms of subject matter, production, scale, presentation and methodology. Rebuilding the Future comprises over 100 works and captures Tillmans’ unique way of working. This new exhibition for IMMA mixes works from throughout his career and in numerous formats, installed in IMMA’s galleries in direct relation to the physical spaces and atmosphere of the museum. While primarily a lens-based artist, Tillmans also works in a variety of other media. The exhibition includes works on paper made with and without a camera, sound work, moving image works and installation. Also central to Tillmans’ practice is the prolific production of books, catalogues and magazine editorials, and more recently, live and recorded music. An immersive new sound work, I Want to Make a Film (2018), which engages with concerns over the speed and development of personal technology and its effects, is shown here at IMMA for the first time.

Rebuilding the Future includes work that is concerned with the process of time, whether it be measured through people or places. The exhibition functions as an open question for the audience to interpret. This broad range of subject matter is reflected in the variety of production and display methods seen in the exhibition. In this, as in all exhibitions produced by Tillmans, the work is selected and installed to reflect both the nature of the physical space and Tillmans’ immediate concerns at the time of the exhibition. Tillmans will give an artist talk about his work prior to the exhibition opening, on Saturday 20 October, in partnership with NCAD. Please see details below under Associated Talks & Events or visit the booking page for details.

A fully illustrated monograph accompanies the Mary Swanzy exhibition with text by Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA, and a biography by Liz Cullinane, artist and researcher. An exhibition poster designed by artist will accompany the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition. An exhibition catalogue will also be published in the coming months. All exhibition merchandise will be available to purchase from the IMMA Shop.

Mary Swanzy, Voyages, is curated by Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA. Voyages is presented as part of the Modern Masters Series and will travel to the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2019.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Rebuilding the Future, is curated by Sarah Glennie, Director, National College of Art and Design and Rachel Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA, in close cooperation with the artist.

– Ends –

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

Image captions: On left Wolfgang Tillmans / Elephant Man, 2002 / © Wolfgang Tillmans / courtesy Maureen Paley, London. On right Mary Swanzy / Young Woman with a White Bonnetc.1920 / Oil on Canvas /  99 x 80 cm / Private Collection / Courtesy Pyms Gallery, London

Additional Notes for Editors

About Mary Swanzy
Mary Swanzy (1882 – 1978) was a pioneering figure in Irish art. Born in Merrion Square in 1882 she was educated in Dublin, Germany and Paris at the turn of the last century. There she witnessed the birth of Modern Art and after 1914 exhibited at the Paris Salons alongside those modern artists who are now household names. She mastered the academic style of painting at a young age and her work rapidly evolved through different styles: Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Symbolism and Surrealism; each of these interpreted and transformed by her in a highly personal way. Very widely travelled and well educated, she spoke several languages and had seen much of Europe by the age of twenty. Following the devastation of the First World War she went to Czechoslovakia as an aid worker and travelled widely in the region. In 1923 she literally crossed the world on an epic voyage to Hawaii and Samoa producing a body of work that is unique in an Irish context. Throughout the 20s and 30s she exhibited in the USA, Hawaii, UK, Belgium, Ireland and regularly in Paris at both the Salon des Indépendents and the Beaux-Arts. In 1920 she was elected to the committee of the Paris Indépendants and she also participated in the founding of the Society of Dublin Painters – Ireland’s first Modern Art gallery; and participated in the first Irish Exhibition of Living Art. In 1946 she was included in a group exhibition in London with Braque, Vlaminck, Dufy, Chagall, William Scott and Henry Moore. This record of achievement is unsurpassed by her better-known contemporaries yet there has not been a substantial exhibition of Swanzy’s work in Dublin since her 1968 Retrospective at the Municipal Gallery.

About Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (b. Remscheid, Germany,1968) lives and works in Berlin and London. He graduated from Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in 1992. He has won numerous awards including the Turner Prize, UK (2000), the Cultural award of the German Society for Photography (2009), the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, Sweden (2015) and the Goslar Kaiserring Award, Germany (2018). From 2009-2014 he was an Artists Trustee on the Board of Tate, London. From 2003 to 2009 he was Professor for Interdisciplinary Art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. In 2006 he opened Between Bridges, a not-for-profit exhibition space in London that now operates in Berlin.

Recent major solo exhibitions have been held at Musée d’Art Contemporain et Multimédias, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Circle Art Gallery and GoDown Arts Centre Nairob, Kenya, Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa (2018); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland, Tate Modern, London (2017); Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2016); The National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, Japan and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf, Germany and Les Rencontres d’Arles, France and Museo de Arte de Lima (2013); Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2012); Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2011) and Serpentine Gallery, London (2010).

His work has been included in significant survey exhibitions including the 5th Biennale of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Greece (2015), Manifesta 10, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2014), Fundamentals, the 14th International Architecture Biennale directed by Rem Koolhaas, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2014), Berlin Biennale, Germany (2014, 1998), the British Art Show 5 and 7, UK (2000, 2010); the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Russia (2009) and the 51st and 53rd Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2009).

Associated Talks and Events

IMMA Talk Series / Mary Swanzy, Voyages

Curators Lecture / Seán Kissane / Mary Swanzy, Voyages
Saturday 3 November 2018, 1.00pm / Lecture Room
IMMA curator Seán Kissane discusses the major retrospective Mary Swanzy, Voyages. Mary Swanzy is arguably Ireland’s first ‘modernist’ painter and this is the first major retrospective of her work since 1968. The exhibition offers a timely review of Swanzy’s work, demonstrating her early mastery of Modernist styles, her wide travels, idiosyncratic feminism and forward-thinking ideas that makes Swanzy such a fascinating artist to explore in our times. Book here

Gallery Talk / Liz Cullinane / Swanzy’s Life and Work
Friday 7 December 2018, 1.00pm / Main Galleries, East Wing
Artist and researcher Liz Cullinane draws on her biographical investigations into Swanzy’s life long career and shares some of the most intriguing discoveries to emerge out of the artist’s own records, archives, and accounts from those closest to her. This talk explores a selection of works some of them comprising several rooms of the IMMA exhibition.

Lecture & Response / Louise Wallace
Mapping Unknown Terrain: Modernism, Gender, Space in the Paintings of Mary Swanzy
Wednesday 5 December 2018, 6.30 – 7.30pm / Lecture Room
Dr Louise Wallace, Associate Lecturer in Fine & Applied Art: Painting, Belfast School of Art, Faculty of Arts, discusses themes of gender, interior space, domesticity and women’s labour that characterize some of the most definitive works comprising of the IMMA exhibition Mary Swanzy, Voyages. This talk positions Swanzy’s oeuvre within the developments of Modernism, the cult of the flâneur and the avant-garde’s predilection for travel. Swanzy’s articulation of a particularly feminine gaze will be read alongside the contemporary concerns of female painters working today
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Curators Lunchtime Talk / Mary Swanzy, Voyages – Drop In
Wednesday 16 January 2019, 1.15 – 2.00pm / Meeting Point, Main Reception
Karen Sweeney, Exhibitions, IMMA, presents a walkthrough on the key themes and artworks featured in the major retrospective Mary Swanzy, Voyages.

Lecture & Response / Selena Daly / Futurism & Ireland, Swanzy’s Modernist Aesthetic
Saturday 19 January 2019, 2.00pm / Lecture Room
Selena Daly, social and cultural historian and Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, discusses the shaping of Swanzy’s Modernist Aesthetic from the context of her acclaimed monograph Italian Futurism and the First World War, 2016. Reflecting on Swanzy’s first-hand encounters of Futurism in Italy, Daly traces Swanzy’s Futurist’s connections, as well as the movement’s reception in Ireland, during a period when Irish society was undergoing huge social and political upheaval.

Seminar & Closing Discussion / Mary Swanzy, Voyages
Friday 8 February 2019, 2.00 – 4.30pm / Lecture Room
Examining the reception of Mary Swanzy’s work in Ireland and beyond, a panel of art writers, curators and academics come together to bridge existing art criticism with new research to emerge out of the staging of a major retrospective since the artist last exhibited in Ireland 50 years ago. This seminar / roundtable discussion delves deeper into archival materials and art contexts, to position Swanzy’s oeuvre within current discourses on Modernist art in Ireland, the place of women as artists and revolutionaries in Irish Modernism, and the role of censorship, ideology, cultural bias and displacement plays in historicising of an artist of Swanzy’s significance in Ireland. Chaired by, Dr. Róisín Kennedy, Lecturer, School of Art History and Cultural Policy, UCD, a dynamic panel of speakers will be announced shortly.

IMMA Talks Series / Wolfgang Tillmans, Rebuilding the Future

Artist Talk / Wolfgang Tillmans, Rebuilding the Future
Presented in partnership with NCAD
Saturday 20 October 2018, 3.00pm (Doors open at 2.15pm) / NCAD Rupert Guinness Theatre, D8
IMMA and NCAD are delighted to present an artist talk from internationally renowned artist Wolgang Tillmans, in advance of his much anticipated IMMA exhibition Rebuilding the Future, opening on 26 October 2018. This keynote talk from the artist will take in his most recent projects – delving deeper into the socio-political concerns that drives an expanded practice of photography, activism, publishing, performance, music and installation. Tillmans will be introduced by NCAD Director Sarah Glennie, co-curator of the IMMA exhibition.
Booking is essential. Tickets are free and can booked online here / Please take note of venue details and location here

See the IMMA website for a full programme of talks on this series. Advance booking is essential. Tickets will be available from the IMMA Talks section of our website. All talks are free but ticketed unless otherwise stated.

Supported by: