A day-long symposium on the work of Lucian Freud will take place in the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, on Saturday 7 September 2019. 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, with an intense focus on the body, its durational quality and its curious, usually implicit, relationship to certain strands of continental philosophy, particularly existentialism and phenomenology.
The programme will include two keynote talks. Jutta Koether is a visual artist whose work incorporates music, writing, performance into her abstract paintings; she will look at the existentialist model of artist/sitter in Freud’s work and its continuing resonance for contemporary artists today. Greg Salter is a specialist in British art after 1945 and a lecturer in History of Art at the University of Birmingham, who will be looking at ‘Lucian Freud’s Queer Affinities’.
Others taking part include Giovanni Aloi (School of the Art Institute of Chicago / Sotheby’s Institute of Art); Margarita Cappock (Dublin City Council Arts Office); Derrick R. Cartwright (University of San Diego); Barbara Dawson (Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane); Conor Linnie (Trinity College Dublin); Christina Mullan (Galway Mayo Institute of Technology-LSAD); Nathan O’Donnell (IMMA / Trinity College Dublin); and Ines Rüttinger (Curator at Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany).
These interests continue and expand upon the research objectives of the IMMA Collection: Freud Project, which sets out to shed new light on Freud’s practice, with a five-year programme of prolonged public engagement with his work. This international symposium is the second in a series of symposia, that builds upon previous talks and panel discussions delivered over the past two years as part of this signal partnership between Trinity and IMMA.
