Tuesday, 13 February, 2018: Minister for Culture, Heritage & the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan T.D., was in IMMA to preview The Ethics of Scrutiny, curated by Daphne Wright, the second exhibition to be presented as part of the ground-breaking IMMA Collection: Freud Project – a five-year loan of 52 works by renowned artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011); one of the greatest painters of the 20th-century.

The Ethics of Scrutiny will be opened by Minister Madigan on the evening of Wednesday 14 February 2018 and will open to the public on Thursday 15 February at 11.30am.

In 2016 IMMA secured the loan of 50 works on a five-year loan to the IMMA Collection from a number of private lenders. The IMMA Collection: Freud Project 2016 – 2021 presented all 50 works in the first year, 30 of the artist’s finest paintings alongside 20 works on paper, in a dedicated Freud Centre in IMMA’s Garden Galleries. For the second exhibition in this unique project IMMA invited visual artist Daphne Wright to curate an exhibition in response to Lucian Freud’s works. The Ethics of Scrutiny takes aspects of Freud’s intimate studio practice as a starting point to explore themes of vulnerability, longing and loss that permeate the painter’s work. Two new paintings by Lucian Freud will be exhibited at IMMA for the first time, alongside work by other artists including Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Marlene Dumas and John Berger.

The establishment of the Freud Centre in IMMA’s Garden Galleries was made possible through capital support from the Department for Culture, Heritage & the Gaeltacht to carry out essential improvement works at the Garden Galleries in 2016.

Minister Madigan, speaking at the preview said: “The IMMA Collection: Freud Project is an outstanding resource for Ireland. Not only does it give us the opportunity to see up close the work of this incredible, world-class artist through exhibitions such as this one, but IMMA is also building a body of knowledge and interpretation of his work that will be globally relevant for the future. It is fitting that IMMA, as a National Institution for contemporary culture, are approaching this great artist’s work by inviting living artists to offer a fresh perspective on Lucian Freud. The first exhibition was visited by tens of thousands of visitors, including thousands of school-children and students around Ireland, and I am sure they will find much to inspire them again in this latest exhibition, curated by Irish artist Daphne Wright.”

The ambitious Freud Project includes exhibitions, artist residencies research partnerships, talks, lectures and other events that offer a host of ways to connect with this celebrated artist. The project has been made possible by the generosity of the lenders and the support of the Department in conjunction with support from the visionary members of the Freud Circle; BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse who have each committed to the project for a period of three years. This commitment will ensure free access for audiences every Tuesday, in addition to the customary free access for full time students and those under 18.

Over the five-years of the loan the display in the Freud Centre will change at least once a year, bringing in new works by Freud and by other artists to offer new ways of looking at, and thinking about, Lucian Freud’s work. Artist Daphne Wright describes what drew her to curating this particular exhibition: “When I was approached by IMMA to curate this show I was fascinated and pleased, but also very aware of the challenging complexities of Freud’s work. I knew I would be consumed by dealing with these, and I have been both resentful and captivated by wrestling through issues he brings related to the psychology of looking. It has been an incredibly engrossing and deeply interesting experience, particularly when I have explored the links between Freud’s practice and that of contemporary artists, writers and scientists who have influenced my own.”

Lucian Freud chose his subjects from people who entered his life through various means from the acquaintances he encountered regularly during his gambling days, to the members of his own family and inner circle of friends who all modelled within the tight constrains of his studio. In his portraits, some painted over many months or even years, we see a body of work that examines the complex relationships between an artist and their sitter or, more broadly, we see paintings that deal with the psychology of looking.

Taking these specific aspects of Freud’s intimate and insular studio practice as a starting point, The Ethics of Scrutiny explores themes of vulnerability, longing and loss that permeate the painter’s work, while also looking to the works of other artists who address on a wider scale the complexities of representation. Placing Freud’s paintings alongside the work of writers Emily Dickinson, John Berger and Lydia Davis, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and artists Gwen John, Kathy Prendergast, Wiebke Siem, Marlene Dumas and Thomas Schütte, The Ethics of Scrutiny calls into question how we see ourselves, how our gazes fall onto one another, and importantly how our identities shift over the cycle of time. The exhibition also sees the addition of two major works by Freud, Two Brothers from Ulster, 2001, and Man in a Silver Suit, 1998.

IMMA’s Head of Collections Christina Kennedy said: “The intention of the five year IMMA Collection: Freud Project is to explore Lucian Freud’s processes and motivations and how they link to contemporary life, both within and beyond the art context. We are delighted that Daphne Wright accepted our invitation to curate this exhibition. Daphne’s own work is renowned for the manner in which it excavates the emotional archaeology that lies beneath the surface of everyday life and relationships; the tension between the appearance of things and what they reveal on closer inspection. With The Ethics of Scrutiny Wright has selected material by artists, writers, scientists and others which she has interwoven among Freud’s paintings to great effect, exploring the human psyche and the challenges of its representation. Throughout the exhibition she probes Lucian Freud the artist, the times he lived in, the impact of his own life story on his work and what drove him to paint as he did.”

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

For Freud images please contact John Moelwyn-Hughes, Bridgeman Images, London
E: [email protected] T: +44 (0)20 7727 4065

Additional Notes for Editors
The exhibition will be formally opened by Minister Josepha Madigan T.D. on Wednesday 14 February at 6.00pm (invitation only event). The exhibition opens to the public on Thursday 15 February at 11.30am.

Admission for this exhibition is €8/5 (concession) with free admission for IMMA Members, full-time students and under 18’s. There will be free admission for all every Tuesday. Monies raised through admission charges will directly contribute to the care and development of the IMMA Collection. Due to the number and delicate nature of the works and the limited circulation space of the historic Garden Galleries, admission will be by timed entry. To avoid disappointment please pre-book your preferred time-slot online in advance of visiting. Online booking will be available from Wednesday 14 February.

The exhibition made possible by the Freud Circle – BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse – and those donors who wish to remain anonymous.

About the curator
Daphne Wright, born 1963, Ireland, is represented by Frith Street Gallery, London, and was elected as a member of the Aosdána, in 2011. She lives and works in Dublin and Bristol. Wright’s work manoeuvres things into well-wrought but delicate doubt – shifting between taughtness and mess, it sets imagery, materials and language in constant metaphorical motion. Using a wide range of materials – plaster, tinfoil, video, printmaking, found objects and performance – she creates worlds that are beautiful and rather eerie which feel like the threshold to somewhere new.

Wright has exhibited extensively in England and Ireland since 1994, with solo exhibitions at many venues including, Emotional Archaeology, R.H.A Gallery, Dublin, 2017 and The Arnolfini, Bristol, 2016, Where Do Broken Hearts Go, Douglas Hyde Gallery, 2002, Nonsense with Death, Sligo Art Gallery, 2001, and Daphne Wright, Limerick City Art Gallery, 2006, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 1994, The New Art Centre Sculpture Park and Gallery and The Lowry, 2001. She has also participated in various group exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2008, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2000, P.S.1, New York, 1999, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1997, and Tate Liverpool, 1995. Commissions include Ham House, Trust New Art, Hanbury House, Worcester and Carlow County Council, South Tipperary County Council and Cork City Council.

Works by the artist are held in the following collections: Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Towner Art Gallery, Sussex and private collections in Ireland and the UK.

About Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud 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 at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London and 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 1980’s 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.

Freud visited Dublin and Connemara in Ireland in the late 1940s, partly on a pilgrimage to Jack B. Yeats whom he considered the greatest living painter and later when married to Caroline Blackwood of the Guinness family. From the 1950s he 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 and whose studio you can visit in Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane.

Associated Talks and Events

Lucian Freud Lecture Series
IMMA is presenting a Lucian Freud Lecture Series in collaboration with The Irish Art Research Centre, Trinity College, Dublin (TRIARC). IMMA and TRIARC have invited leading artists, critics and cultural researchers to offer new perspectives on Freud’s work from October 2017 to April 2018, concluding with a major symposium in April 2018. The next lecture in the series is a keynote lecture by Isabelle Graw, Professor, Städelschule, Frankfurt on 7 March 2018.

International Symposium
Rethinking Freud: Contemporary Perspectives
13 and 14 April 2018
IMMA builds on longstanding partnerships and develop new ones with colleges and universities, this symposium explores the themes, methods, motivations, milieu and multifaceted contexts of this important artist’s work in terms of contemporary art practice. The symposium takes its cue from several exhibitions themes comprising IMMA Collection: Freud Project, The Ethics of Scrutiny,

Speakers will present their research on the role of painting in art today; the anthropological and ethnographic content that Freud’s work elicits and revisit the critique of Freud’s art, in the context of his relationship with Ireland and Irish Modernism. Amongst the speakers taking part are: Catherine Lampert, Curator and Leading Specialist advisor on Freud’s work and former Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Elena Crippa, Curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain; Brian Dillon,  writer, critic, and UK editor of Cabinet magazine and Head of Programme, Critical Writing in Art & Design, Royal College London; Daphne Wright, Artist and curator of The Ethics of Scrutiny; Angela Griffith, (TRIARC) TCD; as well as contemporary artists taking part on the IMMA Freud Residency.

Programmed in association with (TRIARC) TCD. Tickets are €8 and will be available to purchase at www.imma.ie

Curator Lunchtime Talk
Friday 20 April / 1.15 – 2pm / Drop-in / Meeting Point – IMMA Main Reception
Join curator Johanne Mullan for an insightful walkthrough of The Ethics of Scrutiny to hear more about the key themes and artworks featured. Each tour is free of charge. No need to book in advance, just come to the Meeting Point in IMMA Reception

Additional talks and events will be announced throughout the Freud Project. See www.imma.ie for the most up to date events and for booking.

IMMA Collection: Freud Project is made possible through the visionary support of the Freud Circle listed below, and those donors that wish to remain anonymous.

The exhibition is supported by

Opening on 26 January 2017, IMMA presents War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings, a new series of work by Irish artist Brian Maguire. The paintings are a result of Maguire’s observations and photographs of the destruction caused by the struggle for control of the eastern and central areas of Aleppo, Syria.

An earlier exhibition, Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up, (Kerlin, 2016), examined the refugee crisis then hitting Europe’s shores. As reflected in the both exhibitions, Maguire sees the war in Syria and the refugee crisis as being intricately linked. Taken collectively then, these exhibitions bear stark witness to the destruction of a city, and the human displacement caused by such destruction; manifested in the waves of Syrian refugees crossing into Europe.

As with all Maguire’s work, this exhibition emerges from a considered engagement with the political and social complexities of place and people. In 2016 Maguire travelled with Paris based artist John Lawler though France Italy, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Austria. Visiting many of the cities across the overland journey from Greece to Germany; a route familiar to so many Syrian refugees. In March 2017 he then travelled to the Syrian cities of Damascus and Aleppo with Colm Laighneach. While in Aleppo Maguire engaged with the remaining local population and was struck by the fact that life there had persevered throughout the war, and in its aftermath was beginning to re-emerge. The research done by Maguire involves more than photography; he also undertook workshops with children affected by the conflict and talked to people living and working there about their experiences of living at war and under siege.

The resulting exhibition includes new, previously unexhibited works. All sharing the title Aleppo, these new paintings are made in a washed-out palette of browns, greys and blues, with the occasional small burst of colour. The uniformity of colour reflects the wiping out of detail and design caused by widespread destruction of the city’s architecture, and the seeming total removal of life from these streets. Rather than a vibrant colourful city, one of the oldest in the world, the viewer is left looking at a place that has been stripped of identity, as well as physically destroyed. The paintings call to mind a stage set, empty after the spectacle of war. The occasional small burst of colour speaks to the unquenchable urge for life to continue, even among the most unpromising of settings.

The exhibition title – War Changes Its Address – speaks to the never-ending cycle of war, constantly ongoing somewhere in the world, perpetuated for profit and power, at the expense of communities, countries and human lives. Maguire works partly in Paris, which plays host to a global armament fair in which heavy-duty weapons are presented in the manner of luxury goods; clean, well-designed, desirable. Maguire’s concern is that war is perpetuated by the global arms trade, indifferent to the suffering caused by their commerce and industry, the constant victim being the global poor, unrepresented in the media, and unseen by the majority of people in the West.  Fuelled by a desire to see beyond the news coverage to gain a personal insight into the reality of the situation, Maguire’s Aleppo paintings document the ruined buildings of the city, offering a visceral and stark insight into the physical consequences of war.

A full programme of talks and associated events will accompany this exhibition and explore the inherent themes in more detail, with contributions from Brian Maguire, Sarah Glennie, Ghiat Ibraheem, Paddy Woodsworth, Colm Laighneach, Ben Stafford, Lara Marlowe, Elisa Perriguer, Ed Vulliamy and many others.

Brian Maguire, War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings is presented in the Courtyard Galleries at IMMA from 26 January – 6 May 2018. The exhibition is co-curated by Sarah Glennie, Director, NCAD and Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA. Admission is free.

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For more information and images please contact [email protected] + 353 1 612 9920

Supported By

IMMA are pleased to announce highlights of the 2018 exhibition programme, including two major new exhibitions for the museum fromWolfgang Tillmans and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. Tillmans has shown his work in previous group exhibitions at IMMA but this will be his first solo exhibition at the museum, and his first solo project in Ireland.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian is one of the most prominent contemporary Iranian artists and was a key figure of the New York art scene during the 1960s and 70s. This new exhibition of her work draws on the diversity of Monir’s practice over a period of 40 years, focusing on her large-scale mirrored sculptures, colourful collages, and works on paper. Entitled Sunset, Sunrise it draws attention to this under-recognised female artist, now in her early 90s, who has been a pioneer in merging traditional Persian techniques with contemporary abstraction. This exhibition marks the first time Monir’s work will be shown in Ireland.

IMMA will also present the first major Irish exhibition of the work of Frank Bowling which comes to Dublin this Spring from Haus der Kunst, Munich. A comprehensive survey of the work of the Guyana born British artist, Mappa Mundi covers five decades of Bowling’s artistic achievement with a focus on his monumental and large-scale paintings.

We are particularly pleased to open the year with an exhibition of new paintings from Irish artist Brian Maguire entitled War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings, resulting from a visit to Syria in 2017. The Aleppo Paintings document the ruined buildings of the city, offering a visceral and stark insight into the physical consequences of war and the international arms trade that fuels all conflict.

A key moment in the spring is a re-examination of the work of Lucian Freud through the lens of Irish artist Daphne Wright in a new exhibition entitled The Ethics of Scrutiny. Drawing from the IMMA Collection: Freud Project, Wright will place a number of Freud’s paintings alongside the work of writers Emily Dickinson, John Berger, Lydia Davis, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, singer Johnny Cash, and artists Gwen John, Alice Neel, Kathy Prendergast, Wiebke Siem, Marlene Dumas and Thomas Schütte.

Continuing our Modern Irish Masters series we will bring a renewed focus to the work of modernist painter Mary Swanzy this Autumn. Despite being one of the most iconic and recognisable of modern Irish artists, there has not been a substantial retrospective of Swanzy’s work since 1968, and this new exhibition aims to make a definitive study of her work.

Continuing our commitment to performance, IMMA has invited pioneering dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and writer Yvonne Rainer to Dublin. One of the most influential artistic figures of the last 50 years, Rainer’s work has been foundational across multiple disciplines and movements including dance, cinema, feminism, minimalism, conceptual art, and postmodernism. One of Rainer’s most influential dance pieces, Trio A with Flags (1966), will be performed live together with her works Talking Solofrom Terrain (1963) and Chair/Pillow (1969), and Rainer herself will be in Dublin for an historic conversation about her career.

Click on the exhibition names 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 exhibition highlights 2018

Brian Maguire, War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings
26 January – 6 May

IMMA Collection: Freud Project, Ethics of Scrutiny, curated by Daphne Wright
15 February – 2 September 2

Frank Bowling, Mappa Mundi
24 March – 8 July

Yvonne Rainer
Live Performance, 4, 5 May

Brian O’Doherty, Language and Space: Rotating Vowels, Structural Plays and other Works24
April 26–September 16

Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection 2018
11 May – 16 September

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Sunset, Sunrise
10 August – 2 December

Wolfgang Tillmans
26 October – 17 February

Mary Swanzy
26 October – 17 February
 

The Chairman and Board of IMMA are pleased to announce that Dr. Moling Ryan has been appointed Interim Director of the Museum, effective Monday 4 December 2017.

A career public servant until his retirement in 2014, Dr. Ryan is a former Chief Executive of the Legal Aid Board, a position he held for 10 years. He was previously Director of Human Resources and Strategy in the early years of the Courts Service. Prior to that, he was head of Heritage Policy in the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands. He also spent 6 years on management training and strategy initiatives with the Civil Service Training Centre. Since his retirement, Moling has been engaged with a significant project on the reform of the Public Service in Cyprus and on a justice reform project in Vietnam. He has also undertaken a number of projects in different areas of the public service. He is currently a member of the Policing Authority.
 
He served as Chairperson of the Association of Chief Executives of State Agencies and is the co-author of the Guide for Chief Executives.  Moling was called to the Bar in 1979 and has primary and Masters’ degrees in management. He also has a Doctorate in Governance from Queen’s University, Belfast.

Welcoming Dr. Ryan, David Harvey, IMMA Chairman, said – “Moling is a highly experienced manager and administrator and we have every confidence in his ability to guide the organisation through this period of transition. I believe he will be a great assistance in supporting management and staff in delivering the 2018 programme and planning for the developmental and strategic objectives, which are already underway. We will be working closely with him and wish him every success”.

Dr Ryan will remain in post until the Board has recruited a new Director.

13 October 2017 – 30 September 2018

Now open at IMMA, a new exhibition by Lennon entitled Porous Plane, presents a range of work from the 1970s to the present which includes 1/3/92B, 1992, from the IMMA Collection and Folded/Unfolded MM 1972 (for Fiona), 2017, shown originally in Lennon’s first solo exhibition at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 1972 and remade especially for the IMMA Galleries as part of this exhibition.

Lennon’s exhibition is part of a curatorial approach that explores works in the IMMA Collection where artists are invited to place their early work among their current practice – ‘Then and Now’. Lennon’s art began in the 1970s with the Folded/Unfolded paintings and has continued to explore innovative forms of painting, most recently, AL¹³s, Denier7s, Autochthones and the on-going Arbitrary Colour Collections.

The Folded/Unfolded paintings first appeared in Lennon’s first solo exhibition at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 1972. They are paradoxes and were his most emphatic early response to his discovery, aged 12, of the Holocaust. Lennon’s early paintings function like high relief sculptures, with the artist folding the canvas in order to control and manipulate the space of and around the work. Lennon describes his 1972 making of Folded/Unfolded in an essay, Self-making in a Post-Colonial Culture, written for the IMMA exhibition; “I had been experimenting with ways of making paintings by pouring paint into canvases and shaping them by handling and folding them in ordinary everyday ways that most people do. I decided to exaggerate and make a large version of these ideas; the resulting paradoxical thing that emerged was Folded/Unfolded. Making it was a simple strategy of separating out facts from feelings, choosing ‘givens’: the canvas for the outer world of facts, and poured paint (added to it in a mixed complex of colour) for the inner emotional world of feelings. The support would be a conventional wall, a temporary arrangement”.

Within the essay Lennon also describes his experience of making and exhibiting art; “My experience in a lifetime of art-making is one of intense activity followed by long pauses and stoppages, lots of moving about and making my hands, arms and body exert form, shape and colour in a vigorous activity. Then long, timeless pauses of motionless gazing, observing those strange after-image and after-actions, re-enacting what has just happened and beginning the process of making judgement on how to continue, all the while watching the paint drying and hoping it will still look as good as it did in the tin. It is this motionless latter part that is asked of you the viewer, in that special space and time of art: the stopping part. To stand still and to observe your own inner responses in your own unique individual dimensions and private inner feelings of which you are the sole authority”.

The painting, AL¹³, is on aluminium and is composed of five composites – each one a composite of brushstroke and surface. The AL¹³ paintings have no verticals: the viewer is the vertical who completes the composition.

Porous Plane is presented alongside Coast-Lines a major new exhibition from the IMMA Collection. Drawing on the paradox implicit in the word ‘coastline’ – for never has a coast followed a linear course – the title of this exhibition throws a line around a 12 month period of changing displays of artworks and archival material that will explore our sense of place, perception, representation and memory. Artists include Dorothy Cross, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Clare Langan, Richard Long, Anne Madden, Anita Groener, Michael Mulcahy, Donald Teskey, Tony O’Malley, Alexandra Wejchert, Bridget Riley, Brian O’Doherty, Hamish Fulton, Timothy Robinson amongst others.

Porous Plane and Coast-Lines are both open until 30 September 2018 in IMMA’s Main Galleries. Admission is free of charge.

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For more information and images please contact [email protected] or [email protected] 01 612 9922.

Additional Notes for Editors

About Lennon
Born in Dublin in 1947, Lennon studied at the National College of Art & Design from 1963 to 1967. He has been awarded the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award twice in 1991 and in 1997. In 1993 he became an elected member of Aosdána and in 1996 he was chosen to represent Ireland at the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in museums and art galleries in Ireland and abroad including: the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; National Gallery of Ireland; IMMA; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Chester Beatty Library, Dublin; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast; Annely Juda Fine Art, London and Galerie Lahumier in Paris. His work has also been included in exhibitions representing contemporary Irish art in London, Paris and New York. Lennon’s work is represented in many major collections including Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; the National Gallery of Ireland; IMMA; Kamarsky Collection, New York and the Fogg Museum of Fine Art, Harvard. He lives and works in Dublin.

24 November 2017 – 18 February 2018, Main Galleries, West Wing. Admission is Free

IMMA is delighted to present That’s Not Me, a survey from 1994 to the present, of the work of Canadian artist Rodney Graham. Opening during Dublin Gallery Weekend, this is the first major presentation of Graham’s work in Ireland, focusing on his illuminated lightboxes and film works. Graham lives and works in Vancouver, Canada and is associated with the 1980s Vancouver School of post-conceptual photography alongside peers such as Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas (who so memorably exhibited in IMMA in 2014). The Vancouver School is a group defined by a style of photography in which moments from art history are replicated. Graham represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and his work features in significant museum collections around the world including Tate Modern, MoMA and the Centre Pompidou.      
                                   
Rodney Graham is one of the most consistently inventive artists to have emerged in the last 40 years, tirelessly questioning what it means to be an artist today. Through genre-defying experimentalism, Graham’s practice has shifted from conceptual photography and installation to encompass film, performance, music and painting. His works, informed by psychology, literature and storytelling, present cyclical narratives layered with puns and references. Historical figures such as Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, Raymond Roussel and Kurt Cobain are explored with Graham’s typical sense of humour.

The focus in this Dublin exhibition is on Graham’s illuminated lightboxes, and on his film works. The lightboxes, usually constructed on a monumental scale, elevate the subject matter by making a high level of detail perceptible to the viewer. The scenes depicted are highly stylized, and usually set in the 20th century at a specific time. The form of the lightbox lends itself to close examination, and Graham’s constructed studio sets reward close inspection of newspaper headlines, signage and picture’s within the picture.

Most of the lightbox works feature the artist himself, assuming a variety of roles in meticulously staged environments. In these works, Graham is playing a series of fictional characters, but this can also be considered a form of self-portraiture. In The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962 (2007) for example, Graham assumes the role of an amateur artist, creating generic abstract works in a Modernist interior. This subversion of the perceived role of the artist shows Graham undermining the popular mythology of the artist and highlighted the constructed nature of identity, while also being a warm tribute to ‘amateur’ art. Adding to the richness of the work is the fact that Graham has exhibited paintings like the one pictured here, further blurring lines between invented and ‘real’ personae.

Included in the IMMA exhibition are four major film works made between 1994 and 2010: Halcion Sleep (1994), Torqued Chandelier Release (2005), The Green Cinematograph (Programme 1: Pipe smoker and overflowing sink), (2010); and Rheinmetall/Victoria8, (2003). These works speak to Graham’s interest in experimentation, along with his interest in silent film and seemingly obsolete production and display methods, such as over-sized projection equipment and 16mm and 35mm film.

Other works in the exhibition reference Graham’s long-time interest in music and music making. Aberdeen (2000) is a slide projection set up as a lo-fi lecture class, consisting of 80 slides with a Syd Barrett-style musical soundtrack by Graham. The work references Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, a band central to the Seattle Grunge scene of the early 1990s. Following his early death by suicide in 1994, Cobain remains a legendary cult figure. For this work, Graham visited the late singer’s hometown of Aberdeen, a typical small-town on the border between Canada and America.

Graham has spoken openly on drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources, and freely borrowing techniques and materials from other artists, in particular Ian Wallace, Douglas Gordon and Jeff Wall, all peers or friends of Graham. While these influences are clearly seen in his use of lightboxes and highly controlled set-pieces – both techniques used by other Vancouver artists – this openness is a major part of Graham’s practice as it relates to his collaboration with other artists, writers and musicians.

That’s Not Me is organised in partnership with the Baltic Centre, Gateshead and is presented as part of an on-going initiative, New Art at IMMA, proudly supported by Matheson, which allows IMMA to continue to support artists’ vital work in a strand of programming that recognises and nurtures new and emerging talents, new thinking and new forms of exhibition-making.

Admission is free.

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For more information and images please contact [email protected] or [email protected] 01 612 9920.

Additional Notes

About the Artist

Biography
Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada in 1949. He graduated from the University of British Columbia, Burnaby, Canada in 1971 and lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Solo exhibitions include BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2017); Le Constortium, Dijon, France (2016); Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany (2015); Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada (2014); Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2012); Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria (2011); Museu D’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2010); Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA, USA (2004); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK (2002); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2001); and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (1999). He has participated in group exhibitions such as the Carnegie International (2013), the 13th, 14th and 17th Sydney Biennales, Australia (2002, 2006, 2010), the Whitney Biennial, New York, USA (2006) and the Biennale d’Art contemporain de Lyon, France (2003). He represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale, Italy (1997) and among awards he has received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, Toronto, Canada (2004), the Kurt Schwitters-Preis, Niedersächsiche Sparkassenstiftung, Germany (2006), and the Audain Prize for lifetime achievement in visual arts, British Columbia, Canada (2011). Rodney Graham was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2016 for his contributions to Canadian contemporary art.

Associated Events

That’s Not Me / Artists’ Conversation with Rodney Graham & Gerard Byrne
Saturday 25 November 2017, 2 – 3pm, IMMA 
Artists Rodney Graham and Gerard Byrne discuss the sculptural, cinematic, performative and humorist nature of Graham’s practice, drawing attention to the multiple references layered within his work, that enable Graham to seamlessly shift into different roles, characters and contexts. This talk is programmed concurrently with Dublin Gallery Weekend. Admission is free, book now.

Curators Lunchtime Talk / Meeting Point – IMMA Main Reception
Wednesday 29 November, 1.15 – 2pm                
Join Seán Kissane, Curator, Exhibitions, IMMA for an insightful walkthrough and hear more about the key themes and artworks featured. Admission is free, drop in.

Exhibition Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication with critical essays and commentaries by art historians Briony Fer, Patrik Andersson and artist and writer Robert Linsley, among others. It is available in the IMMA Shop, Price: €24.95.

13 October 2017 – 30 September 2018, East Wing Galleries

Coast-Lines is a major new exhibition from the IMMA Collection that draws on the paradox implicit in the word ‘coastline’ – for never has a coast followed a linear course. Instead the title throws a line around a 12 month programme of changing displays of artworks and archival material that will explore our sense of place, perception, representation and memory.

Works by Dorothy Cross, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Clare Langan, Richard Long, Anne Madden, Anita Groener, Michael Mulcahy, Donald Teskey, Tony O’Malley, Alexandra Wejchert, Bridget Riley and others variously explore pattern and line, surface, folds, enclosures, erasures, borders, terrain, the inherent coastal tensions between motion and stillness and any attempt to map what our senses perceive. Others such as Brian O’Doherty, Hamish Fulton, Tim Robinson and OMG collective criss-cross those themes using photographic, linear, linguistic and coded systems to invoke a mind/body relationship.

A key work in the exhibition, and shown at IMMA for the first time, is the monumental installation, Tabernacle (2013), an extraordinary work by Dorothy Cross in which a life-size currach forms the roof of a hut-like structure that opens towards a projection of her video work Sea Cave (2013). Shot near the bottom of her land in Connemara, the sea cave she captures is only accessible a few days a year due to tides. Cross previously used the currach as part of her set design for the English National Opera’s 2008 production of J.M. Synge’s haunting play ‘Riders to the Sea’, (1903) directed by Fiona Shaw.

The decade of the 1960s is another particular focus in the exhibition. On the international art scene it was a time that was highly energised, much more than any other decade. Each year saw a new movement surface: Pop, Op, Kinetic, Minimalism, Conceptual art, amongst others. In Ireland at that time we saw, in 1967, the emergence of the first Rosc; a series of six major exhibitions of international art that had a significant impact on contemporary art developments in Ireland. While Rosc ’67 was indeed a major showcase it was less about contemporary developments of that time than it was a ‘catch-up’ survey of 20th century masterworks for the benefit of Irish citizens and visiting international audiences. IMMA has been re-examining Rosc across the programme this past year, and Coast-Lines continues this thread by provides glimpses of some concurrent moments in the art world of the 1960s and ’70s with artworks and archival holdings that draw on the Gordon Lambert and Timothy Drever/Robinson archives in the IMMA Collection.

A number of displays in Coast-Lines will include Irish artists who were working internationally in the late ’60s and ’70s such as Brian O’Doherty, James Coleman, Noel Sheridan and Anne Madden. A key work of the period is the ground breaking Aspen 5+6 (1967), a double issue of the experimental New York magazine, assembled, curated and edited by Brian O’Doherty. Known as ‘The Minimalism Issue’ it is a multimedia exhibition in a box, consisting of artworks, recordings and theoretical writings and is recognised as the first conceptual exhibition that did away with the gallery space. Delivered to subscribers in a two-piece white box containing 28 items, Aspen 5+6 includes contributions by artists such as Robert Morris; Robert Rauschenberg; Mel Bochner; essays by Susan Sontag; Roland Barthes; sound recordings by Marcel Duchamp; William Borroughs; Jack McGowran’s recording of a text by Samuel Beckett; as well as music scores, films and DIY miniature cardboard sculptures.

Invited to respond to Aspen 5+6, the Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG) is a group of artists and non-engineering researchers based at CONNECT, Ireland’s research centre for future networks and communications based at Trinity College Dublin. For Coast-Lines OMG draw together two projects from 1967: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) founded by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver and Aspen 5+6 edited by Brian O’Doherty. In the work Placement as Language (2017) Aspen 5+6’s three essays become source material for parallel Twitter feeds, replacing its original communication platform (a magazine in a box) with a contemporary one (Twitter). Two feeds; Aspen ordered and re-ordered, are printed onto streams of paper in the gallery and are available to read online. @aspen_ordered divides the three essays into Twitter-sized 140 character chunks, transmitting them one by one into the world. @aspen_reordered employs an algorithm to create new variations on the original texts. These variations are generated by a statistical algorithm called a Markov Chain that generates sentences based on the probability of one word following another in the original text.

OMG’s multi-faceted project for Coast-Lines will include a talk by E.A.T. Director Julie Martin on the history of the organisation, an ‘unboxing’ of Aspen 5+6  by Julie Martin and curator/NYU Professor Melissa Rachieff in December (a video documenting their experience will be available to see in the gallery from January) and a special series of talks and workshops taking place in 2018 to introduce the work of Aspen 5+6 and E.A.T to maths teachers.

Coast-Lines will evolve and expand throughout the run of the exhibition; a key moment will be the addition of a number of Lucian Freud works from the IMMA Collection: Freud Project in January 2018.

-ENDS –

For more information and images please contact [email protected] or [email protected]; 01 612 9922.

Additional Notes for Editors

Coast-Lines is showing in the Main Galleries, East Wing from 13 October 2017 to 30 September 2018. Admission is Free.

Featured Artists
Margaret Benyon, Dorothy Cross, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Gerard Dillon, Brian Eno, T.P. Flanagan, Gerda Frömel, Hamish Fulton, Helena Gorey, Anita Groener, Paul Henry, Patrick Heron, John Hinde, John Hoyland, Clare Langan, Richard Long, Julio Le Parc, Anne Madden, Norah McGuiness, Stephen McKenna, Sean McSweeney, Michael Mulcahy, Brian O’Doherty, Tony O’Malley, Betty Parsons, Bridget Riley, Nano Reid, Tim Robinson, Peter Sedgley, Noel Sheridan, Jesús-Rafael Soto, Camille Souter, John Millington Synge, Donald Teskey, Victor Vasarely, Alexandra Wejchert and Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG) at CONNECT.

Exhibition Timeline
A timeline within the exhibition spanning the 1940s to the 1970s contextualises the pre and post Rosc art scene in Ireland, highlighting key moments and exhibitions. These include the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (IELA), an annual exhibition of Irish modernist developments initiated by Mainie Jellett; to the establishment of the Hendriks Gallery in 1957; Project Arts Centre in 1967 and other significant events. Archive material related to the shortlived but seminal Signals Gallery, London, has particular significance in any account of Optical, Kinetic and Conceptual Art developments of the 1960s. Examples of such works were introduced to Irish audiences of the day through the vision of the Hendriks Gallery and many are now in the IMMA Collection due to the philanthropy of Gordon Lambert.

Video footage from The Roland Collection, the Cruz-Diez Art Foundation, Joe Lee and the RTÉ archives is available to view.

Associated Events

IMMA Talks & Public Programmes     

Curators Lunchtime Talk Series: Drop In, Meeting Point, Main Reception
Friday 17 November, 1.15-2pm
Join Johanne Mullan, Programmer Collections, IMMA, for an insightful walkthrough of Coast-Lines.

A Conversation with Julie Martin: The History of E.A.T
Saturday 9 December 2017, 1pm, Lecture Room                                                                                                                          
Julie Martin co-founder of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) discusses the history of the E.AT, a collaborative group of engineers and artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Tinguely. This talk looks in details at the E.A.T seminal New York art project ‘9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering’, that resulted in ground-breaking conceptual artworks comprising performance, dance, theatre and music. Programmed is in collaboration with O.M.G, Connect.

A full programme of talk and events runs alongside the exhibition for further details visit www.imma.ie

13 October 2017 – 8 April 2018, Main Galleries, IMMA

IMMA is delighted to present William Crozier, The Edge of the Landscape. This is the first major presentation of Crozier’s work in Ireland since the retrospective held at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and the RHA, Dublin in 1991. Best-known in Ireland for the lyrical landscapes made close to his home in West Cork from the mid-1980s, this exhibition of 30 works presents William Crozier’s early work, inspired by the Existentialist movement and the anxieties of the post-war period.

For Crozier the landscape was the source of his visceral paintings. Instinctive, animated brush strokes convey the primitive energy he unearthed in the natural world. This is evident in both the lyrical landscapes of his West-Cork work, and the ravaged landscapes of this earlier period; symbolising the torment and fear of the post-war condition at the heart of existentialism.

In the introduction to Crozier’s 1961 solo exhibition, critic G. M. Butcher wrote; “if there is one thing that Crozier wishes to get across in all his painting, it is a mood of fear, anxiety, unease. This is his personal reaction to the world as it is – where savagery is only just beneath the surface.”
Commenting on the exhibition Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA said; “William Crozier turned to landscape painting at a time when Abstraction was dominating artistic discourse, a gesture typical of an artist who consistently sought an individual vision and artistic path. His connections to European painting and writers single him out as a unique voice. His quotation of Existentialism, and his expressionist style create very potent images – yet few of these seminal works have been seen in major exhibitions. This exhibition hopes to address that gap and reposition Crozier as an essential post-war painter.”

The Edge of the Landscape is curated by Seán Kissane at two separate locations. The first part of the exhibition was presented at the West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen from 15 July to 31 August 2017 and the second part opens in IMMA on Friday 13 October 2017.

As we enter the second year of the IMMA Collection: Freud Project it is timely to offer a presentation of another artist who, like Lucian Freud, was a central part of the post-war London art scene, but who was also a much-loved Irish painter. Our broader programme regularly explores the very close cultural links between Ireland and Britain, and Crozier is a prime example of an artist who straddled both territories throughout his career. He began to exhibit in London in the late 1950s and was a central part of the Soho scene that included Freud and Francis Bacon.

The Edge of the Landscape is presented in association with West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen and is supported by the Crozier Circle:

Mareta & Conor Doyle
Celtic Ross Hotel
Kelly’s Resort Hotel
And Anonymous Supporters

Admission is free.

-ENDS –

For more information and images please contact [email protected] or [email protected] 01 612 9922.

Additional Notes

About the Artist
William Crozier (1930 – 2011) was born in Glasgow where he would later attend the Glasgow School of Art. His paternal family were Irish, from Co Antrim and as a child he often visited his grandparents at their home in Ballinderry. As a teenager he hitchhiked all around the country and developed a love of Ireland that would remain with him throughout his life. Immediately on leaving art college he travelled to post-war Paris where he absorbed the Existential writings of Sartre and de Beauvoir that became central to his practice as an artist. London was Crozier’s main base where he moved in the same circles in Soho as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.

In 1953 he moved to Dublin with his family and made a living painting theatre sets. At the time he made few connections to visual artists but became friends with some of the greatest writers of the time: Anthony Cronin, Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien. These writers, particularly Kavanagh, shaped Crozier’s thinking about Ireland and influenced how he saw and represented the landscape in his work. Crozier maintained contact with these writers throughout the 60s and Cronin invited him to spend some time with him near Malaga, which inspired a large body of new work inspired by the landscape of heat and vines. Around this time he began to teach at Winchester School of Art. Crozier’s relationship with Ireland deepened when he adopted Irish citizenship in 1973 and finally bought a home in West Cork in 1983. This began a hugely productive period of work as he grappled with the powerful landscape there. He would go on to produce some of the most iconic works of the Irish landscape made in the latter half of the twentieth century. William Crozier was an elected member of Aosdána as well as honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy and represented both Ireland and the UK internationally in numerous museum collections including Tate, London; Imperial War Museum, London; National Museum in Gdansk, Poland; and the National Gallery of Ireland.

Associated Talks and Events

Curators Talk & Exhibition Preview
Thurs 12 Oct, 6pm / Lecture Room
Seán Kissane, Curator, Exhibitions, IMMA, introduces the retrospective of William Crozier. Kissane considers the darker impetus behind Crozier’s early works that continued throughout Crozier’s career. Admission is free but tickets must be booked in advance, book now 

Curator’s Lunchtime Talk / William Crozier: The Edge of the Landscape – Drop In
Friday 19 January 2018, 1.15pm / Meeting Point, IMMA Main Reception
Join Seán Kissane for a gallery walk through of William Crozier: The Edge of the Landscape where a selection of artworks and key exhibition themes will be explored in the galleries. Spaces are limited.

Lecture / Sarah Victoria Turner
Savagery, just beneath the surface: William Crozier’s early work
Wednesday 14 March 2018, 6.30pm, Johnston Suite, IMMA
William Crozier’s early work bursts across the canvas with an intensity of purpose and a raw energy, capturing something of the fear, anxieties, and also the ambitions, of the post-war period. Returning to the London art world into which Crozier arrived in 1957, this talk will situate Crozier’s painting within the artistic and intellectual circles which shaped Crozier and his early work. Crozier was not part of any one group, rather his early career was shaped by a diverse and international constellation of characters and relationships. By following Crozier to London in the 1950s and early ‘60s –a journey which takes us via Glasgow, Paris, Dublin, Folkstone and Essex – we can map something of a more expansive history of post-war painting and connections to the work of other artists such as Lucian Freud and Frank Bowling.

Lecture / Dr Sarah Victoria Turner
Date to be confirmed
Dr Sarah Victoria Turner is Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. She is also Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Sarah’s research interests encompass many aspects of British art from 1850 to 1950 and she has published her work in exhibition catalogues, academic publications and online. In 2018, she will co-curate a major exhibition with Mark Hallett at the Royal Academy in London to mark 250 years of the Academy’s Summer Exhibitions. She is co-editor of the multi-award winning British Art Studies, an open-access online journal.

Catalogue
The Edge of the Landscape is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with texts by Riann Coulter, Curator at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Studios, County Down, Katharine Crouan, art historian and former Head of Winchester School of Art and wife of the late William Crozier, Mark Hudson, writer, journalist, and critic for The Telegraph, Enrique Juncosa, poet and former Director, IMMA, Seán Kissane, Curator, Exhibitions, IMMA and Dr Sarah Turner, Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre. Available from the IMMA Shop €30.00.

Limited Edition
An edition by William Crozier Untitled, Kilcoe Strand is presented by IMMA in association with the Artist’s Estate and The Graphic Studio, Dublin on the occasion of William Crozier: The Edge of the Landscape. Photo-intaglio on archival etching paper, Untitled, Kilcoe Strand is a Limited edition of 120, each stamped and signed by the William Crozier Estate. Price: Unframed: 38.5 x 30.5 cm – €95, Framed 42.5 x 34.5 cm – €145.

IMMA and NIVAL have announced details of the artists and collaborators who have been selected to create new projects in response to ROSC 50; a collaborative research project from both organisations to mark the 50th anniversary of the first Rosc exhibition in 1967. Through a programme of talks, events, research commissions and exhibitions ROSC 50 revisits the Irish art historical account of these landmark visual art exhibitions in Ireland; exploring their legacy and meaning in the present day.

The year-long project examines the ambition, reception, controversies and legacy of the Rosc exhibitions, which took place in Ireland between 1967 and 1988 and which had a significant impact on the development of contemporary art in Ireland.

An important part of ROSC 50 is to uncover new research and new perspectives from both artists and audiences today, and to record these for future generations.  Audiences are being invited to submit their testimonials of their experiences of Rosc, which will in turn be folded back into the NIVAL archive, while artists Amanda Coogan, Emma Haugh and a collaborative project comprising Christodoulos Makris, Nathan O’Donnell and Suzanne Walsh have been selected from an invited call to undertake research projects in response to Rosc. Each will take as a starting point the material relating to Rosc in the NIVAL archive, and take into account of themes relating to the ambition, memory and legacy of Rosc and also the critical and public engagement with the exhibitions.

The period of research is from July to December 2017 and will be informed by the ongoing ROSC 50 programme, including the current presentation of archival material relating to Rosc in IMMA’s Project Spaces, open until July 31st.

ROSC50 Research Commissions

Amanda Coogan is proposing to research the live performances in Rosc ’80 with a view to appropriating and folding these live, unstable works into a newly imagined performance work. Rosc ’80 was the first Rosc to include performance and live art, and 14 artists, including Ulay and Marina Abramoviæ, Marta Minujin, Tim Hennessy, Laurie Anderson, Nam June Pai and Nigel Rolfe, were invited to create site specific of live performance works in Dublin.

Coogan has said about the project: ‘I claim this research strategy as one that is open to the possibility of performance itself – that is to say performance works that are in a constant state of becoming.’

Emma Haugh is proposing to develop Reading Troup #11  ‘the relations of power involved in enunciation and reception’ (Teresa de Lauretis) reading the Rosc archive via a queer-feminist, post-colonial critique of minimalism and post modernism. The Reading Troup is a continuing and ever-developing practice of performative and theatrical reading techniques. Incorporating improvisation, collage, fortune telling, psychogeography and collective cut-ups.

Haugh comments “What is most intriguing about archives is what isn’t there. Those collected fragments that can be found within the archive tell (if looked at from a certain perspective) of that which is missing. Documents from the Rosc archive tell much about Irish art historical struggles around national identity, status, ambition and representation. I propose to consider the ambition and legacy of Rosc through performative cross-readings with critical texts and other research materials as a means of speaking back to and with the archive in order to appear that which is not immediately present.”

Christodoulos Makris, Nathan O’Donnell and Suzanne Walsh are proposing, Inflammatory Speech;: a research programme and subsequent performative event in response to Rosc. It is devised as a collaboration between three practitioners working at the intersections of contemporary art, poetry, and writing. Inverting Rosc’s subtitle – ‘the poetry of vision’ – they propose an alternative ‘vision of poetry.’
They will create a repository of material from the Rosc archive from which they will shape several original poetic texts for performance. This may take the form of a multivocal or polyphonic performance; a sort of choral call-and-response with poetic texts and music overlaid to create a meshwork of sound.

In their submission the collaborators stated: “Responses to Rosc were (and are) marked by hostility, bafflement, defensiveness; languages of resistance but also of territorialism and the fear of the unknown, the troubling, the provocative … It is to this context, rather than the content, of Rosc that we wish to respond, creating work that explores and amplifies the exhibitions’ reception, rather than the exhibitions themselves per se.”

Closing Discussion

In this, the final week of the ROSC 50 | 1967-2017 display at IMMA, there will be a closing event featuring a series of reflections on the Rosc exhibitions and their impact on the visual arts in Ireland. Speakers include Patrick J. Murphy, former Chairman of Rosc; Matt Packer, Director of EVA International; Jonathan Carroll, writer and independent curator; and Sarah Glennie, Director of IMMA.

This closing discussion is free of charge, and takes place from 3pm – 5pm on Friday 28 July 2017. It is a drop in event, no booking required.

ENDS  

For further information, and images, please contact: Meghan Elward Duffy [email protected] / +353 (0)1 612 9920/22

About the Artists

Amanda Coogan is a visual artist based in Belfast practicing in the arena of performance art. Her works encompass a multitude of media: objects, text, moving and still image, all circulating around her live performances. Her expertise lies in her ability to condense an idea to its very essence and communicate it through her body. She completed her doctoral thesis on live durational performance art in 2013 at the University of Ulster. She has exhibited and performed her work widely, including the Broad Museum, Michigan; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Arts Space, New York; The Niemeyer Centre, Aviles; The Benaki Museum, Athens; The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester; and The Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Project Arts Centre.

Emma Haugh is a visual artist and educator based in Dublin and Berlin. She is interested in representations of desire and the examination of cultural structures (architectural, linguistic, spatial, educational) from queer-feminist and post-colonial perspectives. She works with performativity, publishing, installation and collaboration towards developing and proposing spaces of potential and alterity.

Christodoulos Makris is one of Ireland’s leading contemporary explorers of experimental poetry. His current practice concerns itself with public-private language, and multiple/shifting personas, enabled by digital communication. In 2016, he was named as one of Poetry Ireland’s ‘Rising Generation’ poets. He is co-curator of Dublin’s multidisciplinary event series Phonica and the poetry editor of gorse and associated imprint gorse editions.

Nathan O’Donnell is a writer of fiction and criticism, and co-editor of the journal of contemporary art criticism Paper Visual Art. He has published in The Dublin Review; New Irish Writing; The Manchester Review; gorse journal; The Irish Times; Apollo; this is tomorrow; and Architecture Ireland among others. He is editing the reissue of the radical avant-garde magazine, Blast, for Oxford University Press, and he has written and presented widely on magazine histories. He teaches as part of the MA Art in the Contemporary World programme at NCAD.

Suzanne Walsh is a cross-disciplinary artist currently in residence in Fire Station Artist Studios. She works across art, writing and music, often combining the forms or collaborating with other artists. She has published in gorse journal, on Fallow Media and in Circa among others. She performs both with text and music and was part of a recent commission in the Lab Gallery A Different Republic. She is part of sound group ‘Hissen’ who performed in IMMA in 2016. Her work draws on editing, poetics, human/animal interactions and questions on consensus reality.

About ROSC 50

2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Rosc exhibition in Ireland. These pivotal, and often controversial, exhibitions were the first major series of large scale international art exhibitions in Ireland, at a time when Ireland did not have a National Museum of Contemporary Art. Rosc took place approximately every four years between 1967 and 1988, with IMMA being founded in 1991. Fifty years following the start of the Rosc Exhibitions IMMA and NIVAL are revisiting these landmark exhibitions of contemporary art in Ireland.

The opening display, ROSC 50 – 1967 / 2017 is open until 31 July 2017 in the ground floor Project Spaces of IMMA. The IMMA/NIVAL Rosc Programme continues throughout the year with a busy programme of talks and other events to explore the Rosc exhibitions in context, encouraging archival research and constructive dialogue by the public. ROSC 50 will conclude with a symposium at IMMA in the Autumn. See www.imma.ie for more details.

Admission:  The exhibition is free and open to the public during normal operating hours.
Museum opening hours are as follows:  Tues to Fri 11.30am – 5.30pm / Sat 10am -5.30pm / Sun and Bank Holidays 12 – 5.30pm. Closed Mondays (Except Bank Holidays)