IMMA is excited to present the solo presentation work of painter Jo Baer, presented in association with the Highlanes Gallery and supported by Pace gallery  

In 1975, Jo Baer left New York for County Louth where she became ‘witch of Smarmore Castle’. Until and after her departure in 1982, she abandoned abstraction to tell complex trans-historical stories related to the Neolithic Hurlstone ‘thrown there by giants’ that she came upon while riding her horse Friday. 

The series of six paintings completed decades later (2009–13) was fuelled by her research into Irish Neolithic artefacts and relations in Turkey, Egypt, and Malta, as well as ordnance maps, and the role of women in the shift from female seer and male shaman to priest, among many other topics. Baer seats climate catastrophe in the transition from communal to private property. Through this work in the Neolithic she decentres colonialism’s gendered and racialized knowledge to include wider contemporary understandings of a non-West in the West. 

 ‘In this project driven by the urgency to counterbalance a Eurocentric telling of history, Jo Baer’s painting series In the Land of the Giants (2009–13) is taken as an exemplary case study in tracing a trans-historical route to Ireland – a non-West in the West – from the Middle East, collapsing time spans and recalling ideas around the Indigenous resurgence required to sustain the planet.’  (Janine Armin).

This exhibition is a co-curation between IMMA and Highlanes Drogheda in collaboration with Jo Baer and guest curator and Baer scholar Janine Armin.  Jo Baer’s exhibition will open first in Highlanes where it runs from April 29 – 17 June 2023.

Coming Home Late: Jo Bear’s In the Land of the Giants has been made possible with the generous support of Mondriaan Funds.