The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, Edited by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos, Hatje Cantz + Serpentine

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish

Edited by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos

Hatje Cantz + Serpentine

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish

Edited by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos

Hatje Cantz + Serpentine

Serpentine announces the launch of The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, a book edited by Lucia Pietroiusti, Head of Serpentine Ecologies and curator and lecturer at the Academy of Art and Design of Basel Filipa Ramos. The launch event of the publication, which includes 100 contributors across the arts and sciences, will take place in London at the Royal College of Art on 27th October 2025.

 

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is a publication that brings together interventions across the arts, the humanities and the sciences to investigate the history and cutting-edge of more-than-human theories, from animal, plant and fungal intelligence, consciousness and affect, machine sentience and interspecies communication. This publication is an important landmark in Serpentine’s long-term research project of the same name, begun in 2018 to inaugurate Serpentine’s General Ecology project.

 

The publication includes original conversations, essays, interviews, meditations, poems and artwork representations by 100 of the most celebrated environmental thinkers and creatives across disciplines – anthropologists, artists, biologists, ecologists, gardeners, musicians, philosophers, theologians and more, including Sophia Al-Maria, Ted Chiang, Emanuele Coccia, Peter Gabriel, Tim Ingold, Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Karrabing Film Collective, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Himali Singh Soin, Merlin Sheldrake, Superflex, Jenna Sutela, Anna L. Tsing, Chris Watson and many more.

 

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is arranged in five chapters. The first, titled Worlds, focuses on principles of symbiosis and coevolution, anthropological approaches to more-than-human beings; and radical reimaginings of the planet. The second, Beings, presents more-than-human beings as collaborators, co-thinkers, and interlocutors – from the sound of a forest stretching and shifting to the swarming messiness of the soil, through to the body language of animals. The third, entitled Grounds, hosts debates concerning more-than-human and planetary life within the social and political entanglements of anthropocentrism, and calls for more-than-human and environmental practices of justice. Odes, the fourth chapter, brings to the fore an understanding of mythology, storytelling, and meaning-making as planetary manifestations, tracing human/more-than-human relations across deep time. In Oracles, the book’s closing chapter, the spiritual realm and advanced technologies (human and non-human) meet at the porous and uncertain edges of planetary computation and complexity.

 

Publication launches are planned internationally throughout 2025, including at IMMA Dublin on 14th September and then a launch at the Royal College of Art, London, on October 27th 2025, which will feature a Serpentine Cinema programme as well as the presentation of Filipa Ramos’ latest monograph, The Artist as Ecologist (London: Lund Humphreys, October 2025), which discusses the ways in which contemporary artists embrace practices of environmentalism. The London event will include a lecture performance by Elizabeth A. Povinelli. The first launch of the publication took place at E-WERK Luckenwalde, Germany as part of the festival’s sixth iteration, subtitled Love and Lament, and presented by Schering Stiftung, Berlin.

 

Art Direction by Giles Round. Contributors: Andrew Adamatzky; Yussef Agbo-Ola/Olaniyi Studio; Sophia Al-Maria; Allora & Calzadilla; Saelia Aparicio; Chloe Aridjis; Heather Barnett; Antoine Bertin; Lynne Boddy; Elizabeth-Jane Burnett; Vivian Caccuri; Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela; Federico Campagna; Teresa Castro; Alex Cecchetti; Vint Cerf; Ted Chiang; Sean Cho A.; Nicola Clayton; Emanuele Coccia; Revital Cohen; & Tuur Van Balen; The Coven Intelligence Program; Marisol de la Cadena; Michela de Mattei; Onome Ekeh; Cru Encarnação; James Fairhead; Adham Faramawy; Simone Forti; Claire Filmon; Rosalind Fowler; Peter Gabriel; Elaine Gan; Jay Gao; Sabine Hauert; Daisy Hildyard; Amy Hollywood; Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser); Tim Ingold; Derek Jarman; Alex Jordan; Karrabing Film Collective; Leah Kelly; Asim Khan; Kapwani Kiwanga; Dominique Knowles; Bettina Korek; Simone Kotva; Daisy Lafarge; Hannah Landecker; Yasmeen Lari; Long Litt Woon; Annea Lockwood; Thandi Loewenson; Miranda Lowe; Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe; Marcos Lutyens; Carlos Magdalena; Michael Marder; Alex McBratney; Natasha Myers; Nahum; Rasmus Nielsen/ SUPERFLEX; Hatis Noit; Hans Ulrich Obrist; Angelica Patterson; Lucia Pietroiusti; Elizabeth A. Povinelli; Maria Puig de la Bellacasa; Filipa Ramos; Asad Raza; Diana Reiss; Tabita Rezaire; Ben Rivers; Giles Round; Merlin Sheldrake; Kostas Stasinopoulos; Jenna Sutela; bones tan jones; Phoebe Tickell; Anaïs Tondeur & Germain Meulemans; Laurence Totelin; Anna L. Tsing; Oula A. Valkeapäa & Leena Valkeapäa; Sumayya Vally; Kim Walker; Chris Watson; Elvia Wilk; Rain Wu & Mariana Sanchez Salvador.

 

Published by Hatje Cantz, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is distributed worldwide as well as on Serpentine’s website.

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish 

History of the programme

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish began as a multi-year symposium, podcast and research project investigating consciousness and intelligence across species and beings and was launched in 2018 at the London Zoo. Since 2018, it has welcomed over 10,000 audience members and viewers and been a pioneer in environmental and ecological convenings.

 

2018 at the London Zoo: PART 1 LANGUAGE: On interspecies communications, with Ted Chiang, Vint Cerf, Peter Gabriel and more.

 

2018 at Ambika P3: we have never been one: On Gaia theory and micro-organisms, with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Sophia Al-Maria and more.

 

2019 at EartH Hackney: with plants: on plant consciousness, plant intelligence and communication with the vegetal world, with Tabita Rezaire, Chris Watson and more.

2020 online: the understory of the understory: on land, earth, soil, fungi, with Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Merlin Sheldrake and more. This event marked the launch of Sheldrake’s landmark publication, Entangled Life.

 

2022, Galeria da Biodiversidade, Porto, Portugal: The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish: on dreams in the non-human world, with Alex Jordan, Onome Ekeh, Federico Campagna and more.

2025, E-WERK Luckenwalde/Schering Stiftung: The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: Love and Lament: on grief and intimacy in a more-than-human world, with Aslak Aamot Helm, Antoine Bertin, Kapwani Kiwanga, Michael Ohl, Alejandra Pombo Su, Elizabeth Povinelli, Claudia Rankine, Asad Raza, Giles Round, Jenna Sutela, Jovana Maksic, Staci Bu Shea and Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen.

 

In addition, releases on Serpentine Podcast’s series: “On General Ecology” and collaborations with renowned environmental podcast Future Ecologies brought together some 60,000 listeners to dive deeper into the ideas and experimentations of the series.

About Serpentine Ecologies

Since 2014’s Extinction Marathon with artist Gustav Metzger, Serpentine has been at the forefront of environmental action and thought. Since the establishment of the General Ecology project in 2018,  the Ecologies initiatives nurture Serpentine’s ongoing engagement with ecology, climate breakdown, more-than-human consciousness, environmental justice and complexity in a changing world. Stretching across all of Serpentine’s activities, infrastructures and networks, Serpentine Ecologies takes a speculative and active stance towards embedding alternative narratives and deep ecological principles into the everyday. Ecologies’ initiatives manifested with projects such as Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes: The British East India Company on Trial in April 2025, Back to Earth, (2020- 2022), Infinite Ecologies Marathon in 2023, and Daisy Ginsberg’s Pollinator Pathmaker in Kensington Gardens among many other projects. As part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project, Serpentine and Penguin Press published 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, a book inviting artists to re-think the climate emergency.

SERPENTINE GALLERIES

www.serpentinegalleries.org

Artist Anne Madden @ IMMA, Dublin - "Seven Paintings" Exhibition

Anne Madden: Seven Paintings 

IMMA, Dublin

24 August 2023 – 21 January 2024

Seven Paintings by ANNE MADDEN at IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) is a series made during the Covid-19 pandemic. It follows a sixty-year international career, during which the artist has produced a powerful and distinctive body of work.  Anne Madden’s themes explore the transformative forces and cyclical nature of life and experience.  Ideas of the empyrean, the subterranean and of the emergence from darkness to light have informed all of her work; from her earliest canvases of the glaciated Burren landscape, her series of Megaliths, Monoliths and Doorways from the 1970s, the Elegy, Pompeii, Odyssey and Garden series of the 1990s, and since 2003 atmospheric phenomena such as the Aurora Borealis.   

Anne Madden’s present series continues to excavate the human imprint through themes of death, rebirth, liminality and hubris, and draws on ancient forms and mythologies that give potent shape and expression to the anarchic forces and uncertainties of today.  The paintings reference Antigone, Ariadne and Daphne, archetypal women whose voices are not silenced, in spite of their fate, and who connect with existential, feminist perspectives today.  In their midst is Ann Lovett – a young girl of our time. Death of Ann Lovett (1968-1984), recalls the teenager’s tragic death in childbirth in a religious grotto in rural Ireland and the surrounding hypocrisy, silence and the failure of the social system, an event which continues to resonate in Irish society.   

ANNE MADDEN

Anne Madden (b. 1932, London, UK) spent her first years in Chile. Her family moved to Europe when she was four and lived in Ireland and London. She attended the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts. In 1958 she married the Irish painter Louis le Brocquy. Madden’s work, abstract at first glance, but generally with a figurative element, regularly carries references to her Irish background as well as reflecting on life and death.   

Anne Madden’s works from the 1960s on are inspired by the glaciated landscape of the Burren, pre-historic landscape, notions of the empyrean and the subterranean, astronomy and megalithic structures. While another aspect of her practice during this time responded to the conflict in Northern Ireland.    

From the 1990s, Anne Madden’s works reflected ancient Mediterranean civilizations in series such as Pompeii, Oddessy and Garden that draw on themes of death, rebirth, liminality, hubris and human imprint.    

Since the 2000s she has responded to climate, weather patterns, the Aurora Borealis and the effects of the Anthropocene as well as existential, feminist perspectives through ancient cycles.    

Anne Madden has exhibited widely, including a significant retrospective at IMMA in 2007. She is a member of Aosdána and is represented by Taylor Galleries, Dublin.  

Also on view at IMMA:

Howardena Pindell: A Renewed Language, 30 June – 30 October 2023

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin 8, D08 FW31

imma.ie

Howardena Pindell Exhibition @ IMMA, Dublin - "A Renewed Language"

Howardena Pindell: A Renewed Language 

IMMA, Dublin 

30 June – 30 October 2023 

IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) presents the first solo exhibition in Ireland by renowned American artist HOWARDENA PINDELL. Pindell is an artist, activist, and educator working through the media of painting, drawing, print and video. Primarily an abstract painter, she emerged in the early 1970s in New York, making process-driven abstractions, embellishing the language of minimalism – of circles, grids and repetition – in a visibly laborious process of hole-punching, spraying, sewing, and numbering. The exhibition, titled A Renewed Language, is the largest presentation of her work in Europe to date.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell began her career in the 1960s. Having studied painting at Boston and Yale Universities she became an Exhibition Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967, rising to Associate Curator and Acting Director, and serving on the Byers Committee to investigate racial exclusion in museum acquisitions and exhibitions. She first exhibited her art in 1971, and was a founding member of A.I.R (Artists in Residence), the first women’s cooperative gallery in New York City. In 1979 she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where she is now a distinguished Professor of Art. She rose to prominence throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, and had her first major solo exhibition at the Studio Museum, Harlem in 1986.

Trained as a figurative painter, Howardena Pindell began working abstractly in the 1960s. She started drawing and layering, a process that grew on its own and developed into the abstract works she is known for today. Her growing use of abstraction coincided with the famous “dematerialization” of the art object, the emergence of conceptual art as a movement that prioritized thought over form.

From the 1980s Howardena Pindell’s practice began to deal explicitly with issues of racism and discrimination, her work took on a more overtly political tenor, which anticipated the Black Lives Matter movement by thirty years. Pindell deals with issues including colonisation and enslavement, violence against indigenous populations, police brutality, the AIDS crisis and climate change.

Alongside paintings and works on paper, the exhibition includes two videos that frame her long career – Free, White and 21 (1980) and Rope/Fire/Water (2020). These works tackle the pervasiveness of racial inequality, drawing on Pindell’s own experiences and also on her collation of historical data relating to segregation, discrimination and race-based violence in America.

The exhibition includes new paintings fresh from Pindell’s studio, just shown in New York in 2022. These new works show Howardena Pindell circling back to some of her concerns of the early 1970s and 80s. These ‘cut and sewn’ canvases are a celebration of colour. Here Howardena Pindell expands on the scale of her paper pieces, bringing new depth and texture to her surfaces. The making of individual panels and sewing them together, is a novel and labour-intensive method of construction. The work is unstretched and pinned to the wall and harks back to her 1970s works in which she took canvas off the stretcher to create new shapes that speak of the form and function of the painted ground. These monumental works mark the artist’s return to the grid—a theme of particular interest to Pindell and other modern artists.

Howardena Pindell’s work encompasses her own story with abstraction joined to a sense of social and political urgency and an understanding that the pressures, prejudices and exclusions she faced as a black artist and a woman needed to be part of the subject of her art. 

Howardena Pindell considers her abstract paintings as “an intense relief, a kind of visual healing, so that you get some distance from what you’ve seen. Then you can have a more peaceful or critical way to acknowledge what you’ve seen. And it helps you maybe overcome some of those deadly emotions that come from being shocked. So I want people to see… It’s like using beauty as a healing element, and for me making them has a healing side to it.”

A Renewed Language had its origins in Howardena Pindell: A New Language, organised by the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh; in collaboration with Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; and Spike Island, Bristol.

Howardena Pindell

Photo: Nathan Keay

© MCA Chicago

HOWARDENA PINDELL

Howardena Pindell, born in Philadelphia in 1943, began her career in the 1960s. Having studied art at Boston and Yale Universities she became an Exhibition Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967, rising to Associate Curator and serving on the Byers Committee to investigate racial exclusion in museum acquisitions and exhibitions. She first exhibited her art in 1971, and was a founding member of A.I.R (Artists in Residence), the first women’s cooperative gallery in New York City. Resigning from MoMA in 1979, she became a professor in the Art Department at Stony Brook University, where she still teaches today.

She rose to prominence throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, and had a major solo exhibition at the Studio Museum, Harlem in 1986. In 1992, Howardena Pindell: A Retrospective, her first solo touring exhibition, brought her art and writing together and in 1997, she published The Heart of the Question, an anthology of her written works. She was included in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2007; in We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate both in 2017; and The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presented her first major US survey exhibition, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen in 2018. In 2020, an exhibition of new work at The Shed, New York showed recent work against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement and growing international outrage at anti-Black state violence in the US and elsewhere, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin 8, D08 FW31

imma.ie

Doris Salcedo @ IMMA, Dublin

Doris Salcedo
IMMA, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
Through 21 July 2019

IMMA presents a major exhibition by renowned Colombian artist DORIS SALCEDO (b. 1958, Bogotá). Doris 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. Doris 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; Doris 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 Doris 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 Doris 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 Doris 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. Doris 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 Doris 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. Doris 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 Doris 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, Doris 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 Doris 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, Doris 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.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin 8, D08 FW31, Ireland
imma.ie

Hannah Fitz @ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Hannah Fitz: OK
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
23 April - 25 May 2019

Kerlin Gallery presents OK, the first solo exhibition by Dublin born artist Hannah Fitz. 

In OK, human scale and almost human-like sculptures occupy the gallery. The figures appear to be football players and there is a type of game at play… 

Hannah Fitz builds a comparable world where action is arrested, colour is drained, light and shadow have form, figures merge as though solid matter is fluid and gravity seems less in control. The ‘players’ perform tricks or jostle for the ball. One slides onto their knees, stripping off its shirt in celebration of a goal; others lounge nearby, dappled by the shade of foliage. Water bottles and footballs share the scene. In this defamiliarised sculptural landscape the life-size occupants come in and out of focus with an awkward grace. All are rendered in the same muted palette of off-white and mushroom grey disrupted occasionally by hand painted patterns that twist and distort form and shadows that rise up from unseen surroundings. 

Hannah Fitz’s figures are carefully constructed, rejecting sleekness for a finish that is deliberately crude, scrappy and uncertain. Despite this handmade quality, they present a uniform, reductive version of the body, much like the figurines on top of trophies. The directness of Hannah Fitz’s representation feels akin to kitsch aesthetics – but if kitsch strives to communicate togetherness and community by clearing away the specific and contentious, Hannah Fitz’s sculptures (re)trouble this form of representation by homogenising to a new, alienating extreme. Simple and inexact, painted in a faded, at times monochromatic spectrum, the figures are unidentifiable aside from their actions. Tribalism and representation are integral to football (whether national, club or community) and these sculptures seem to heighten the impersonal aspects of such representation. 

Hannah Fitz graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, 2102 and is currently studying at the Stadelschule Frankfurt. Previous solo exhibitions include Knock Knock, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (2018); In the Light of the Lamp, Gallery Three, Douglas Hyde Gallery and Doggy Eyed Stare, Studio 16, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (both 2016). Recent group shows include I’M TRYING TO EXPLAIN, L21 Gallery, Mallorca, Spain, 2019, Tail and Heads, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, 2019.

KERLIN GALLERY
Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin D02 A028, Ireland
www.kerlingallery.com

Liliane Tomasko @ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin - The Red Thread

Liliane Tomasko: The Red Thread
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Through 13 April 2019

Kerlin Gallery presents The Red Thread, an exhibition of new paintings by Liliane Tomasko.

Liliane Tomasko’s abstract paintings employ a distinctive, bold lyricism, with an equally unabashed sense of colour.  The artist often begins with a study of the personal effects of everyday domesticity such as bedding or clothing to create work that suggests a gateway into the realms of sleep and dreaming; delving into the gulf between what we understand as the ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious.’  This new series of paintings display an increasing vitality and assertiveness, articulating an abstraction that is rooted in the physical realm but attempting a departure from it.  Intense colour, subtle tone, shadows and painterly gesture are woven together in such a way that space comes in and out of focus, suspending one’s perception of them and emulating the clarity or lack thereof of dreams and memories.

Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Museo MATE, Lima 2018/19, a dream of, Blain|Southern (2018); 12 nights x dreams, Rockland Center for the Arts, New York State; Kunstwerk (two-person exhibition with Sean Scully), Sammlung Klein, Germany; Feeling Folding, PIFO Gallery, Beijing; Sean Scully + Liliane Tomasko, Fundación Bancaja, Valencia; Mother-Matrix-Matter, Lowe Art Museum, Miami; In Visible World, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix; dusk at dawn, Kunsthalle Rostock, Rostock (all 2015); IVAM, Valencia, travelling to Casal Solleric, Palma, Mallorca and Herforder Kunstverein, Herford (2011); New York Studio School, New York and Zweigstelle, Berlin (both 2010).

Liliane Tomasko’s work is found in public and private collections worldwide, including: The Albertina, Vienna, AU; Bank Vontobel AG, Zurich, CH; Hilti Art Foundation, Schaan, LI; Hôtel des Arts, Centre Méditerranéen D’Art, Toulon, FR; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, IE; IVAM-Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, ES; K20 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, DE; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, CH; Lowe Art Museum, Miami, US; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, DE; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, DE; Sammlung Klein, Eberdingen-Nussdorf, DE; Try-Me Collection, Richmond, Virginia, US; VMFA Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, US.

KERLIN GALLERY
Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin D02 A028, Ireland
www.kerlingallery.com

Rodney Graham @ IMMA - Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Rodney Graham: That’s Not Me 
IMMA - Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 
Through 18 February 2018

IMMA presents That’s Not Me, a survey from 1994 to the present, of the work of Canadian artist RODNEY GRAHAM. This is the first major presentation of Rodney Graham’s work in Ireland, focusing on his illuminated lightboxes and film works. Rodney 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. Rodney 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 Rodney 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, Rodney 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 Rodney 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 Rodney 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, Rodney Graham visited the late singer’s hometown of Aberdeen, a typical small-town on the border between Canada and America.

Rodney 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.

Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) 
Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin 8, D08 FW31, Ireland
www.imma.ie

Brian Maguire @ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Brian Maguire
Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Through 20 August 2016

Kerlin Gallery presents Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up, a new exhibition of works by the celebrated Irish painter BRIAN MAGUIRE (b. 1951).

Since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s, Brian Maguire has approached painting as an act of solidarity. He operates a truly engaged practice, compelled by the raw realities of humanity’s violence against itself, and the potential for justice. Maguire’s preoccupations draw him to the margins of the art world—alternative space, prisons, women’s shelters, and psychiatric institutions—making shows in traditional gallery and museum spaces something of a rarity.

The title of this new body of work, Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up, which is taken from Primo Levi’s If This Be a Man, which in turn is quoting from Dante’s Inferno. In these paintings, Brian Maguire directly confronts issues of migration, displacement and human dignity in the face of the current global unrest. This kind of work is difficult to accomplish, since narrators of stories of this kind, if they care, have a fear of exploiting grief as they walk the high wire between narrative and voyeurism. With Brian Maguire, however, manipulation is entirely absent from the telling and painting, per se, is to the fore.

The paintings in this exhibition are some of Brian Maguire’s most nuanced and ambitious to date, which he has crafted with larger brushes and thinned-down acrylic on canvas. He works slowly, using photographic sources, searching for that point where illustration ceases and art begins. This growing contrast between the seductive painterly aesthetic and the subject matter only adds to the potential impact of these formidable canvases.

Brian Maguire’s most recent solo exhibitions include The Void, Derry (2015–2016) and Fergus McCaffrey, New York (2015). Group exhibitions and biennales include the Irish Museum of Modern Art; WIELS, Brussels; VISUAL, Carlow; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Korea; Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Dublin Contemporary (2011) and the 24th Sāo Paolo Bienal (1998).

Brian Maguire’s work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Art Houston, USA; Museu de Arte do Rio, Brazil; Irish Museum of Modern Art; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; Trinity College Dublin; Alvar Aalto Museum, Finland; Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, Netherlands; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK and Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

Kerlin Gallery
Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin D02 A028
www.kerlingallery.com

Isabel Nolan, IMMA - Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin - The weakened eye of day

Isabel Nolan

The weakened eye of day

IMMA - Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

7 June – 21 September 2014

A new body of work, The weakened eye of day, by Irish artist Isabel Nolan, conceived as a single project for IMMA, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition explores how light manifests as a metaphor in our thoughts, obsessions and pursuits and includes text, sculpture, drawings and textiles. Isabel Nolan’s works begin with the close scrutiny of individual literary or artistic works, or evolve out of consciously erratic enquiries into the aesthetics of diverse fields, such as cosmology, humoral theory, and illuminated manuscripts.

The exhibition takes its title from Thomas Hardy’s poem The Darkling Thrush (1899), in which the sun, described as ‘the weakening eye of day', is a dismal star drained of its force by a gloomy pre-centennial winter afternoon. As the sun’s gaze weakens, so flags the spirit of the poet who, until interrupted by birdsong, sees only the inevitability of death in the cold world around him. This show is a material account of the strangeness of the world from the formation of the planet’s crust to the death of the sun and the enduring preoccupation with light as a metaphor for truth. 

Isabel Nolan’s works both seduce and disarm us. Her work is underpinned by a desire to examine and capture in material form the moments of intensity that can define our encounters with the objects around us; inexplicable and unsettling moments that leave us with a heightened awareness of what is means to be alive. For Isabel Nolan this exploration happens through making things – whether these things are sculptures, textiles, photographs or texts, monumental or intimate in scale, they are presented to us as tentative and precarious markers of the experience of our place beneath the sun.

The weakened eye of day presents the process of making in its expanded form and as part of the exhibition there will be a series of talks by guests, invited by Isabel Nolan, on subjects ranging from cosmology, philosophy and aesthetics. These talks and events are part of the on-going investigative enquiries that inform The weakened eye of day and Isabel Nolan’s practice.

Isabel Nolan’s recent solo exhibitions include ‘Unmade’, the Return Gallery, Goethe Institut, Dublin (2012) and ‘A hole into the future’, The Model, Sligo (2011–12), which travelled to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, France (2012). Nolan was one of seven artists who represented Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale in a group exhibition, 'Ireland at Venice 2005'. Recent group shows include ‘Nouvelle Vague’, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); ‘Sculptrices’, Villa Datris, Fondation pour la Sculpture Contemporain, France (2013); ‘Modern Families’, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2013).

Isabel Nolan, The weakened eye of day is curated by Sarah Glennie, Director, IMMA, and aspects of the exhibition will travel to Mercer Union, Toronto and Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

www.imma.ie

Eithne Jordan at Rubicon Gallery and at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin

Eithne Jordan, En Route, Works on Paper

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

Through 8 December 2012

Eithne Jordan, Street
Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin 
Through 21 December 2012

Just over twenty new gouache on paper paintings by irish artist Eithne Jordan is on view at Rubicon Gallery in Dublin in an exhibition entitled En Route ('On the road' in french). The paintings are uniformly encased in carefully constructed lucite/acrylic boxes, like small TV screens on pause or a glimpsed view through a car window. Individual paintings have subtle gradations of tone and hue, in this they are evocative of Giorgio Morandi’s reduced and deliberate still-life works, yet we have to assume that Jordan had much less control over her curiously quiet city compositions. The flatness of form and distance inferred in her work are suggestive of Alex Katz’ contradictory bold planes of colour and distinctive painted forms. Eithne Jordan’s compositional balance and measured brush strokes produces considered, familiar but unspecific, urban environments.

EITHNE JORDAN

Eithne Jordan, Car Park III, 2011

Gouache on Paper, 18 x 24 cm

© Eithne Jordan. Courtesy Rubicon Gallery, Dublin

Eithne Jordan starts outdoors in her direct environs, taking countless photographs often while commuting to or from the studio and always advancing slowly on foot or bicycle. She deliberately takes incidental, unrefined, arbitrary photos - their imperfections are a valuable attribute in her work – a device she uses as a method to create a distance between what is real and how it can be manipulated and edited. The few photographs she selects as source material for paintings offer a roughness and a fragment of reality that Eithne Jordan enhances in her gouaches, as she adapts elements of the configured scenes to suit her own purposes. The detailed gouache paintings are intimate in scale and draw the viewer in, introducing a human perspective, as her works feature no figures, and are largely devoid of human presence with the occasional exception of passing traffic.    

In her major Royal Hibernian Academy -RHA- exhibition, Street [November 15 - December 21, 2012], the artist Eithne Jordan shows large-scale paintings on linen and canvas. These paintings are developed, without exception, from gouache predecessors, creating a further buffer in her re-drawn representations of reality. In replicating scenes she has produced on a small-scale, Jordan takes on new technical and compositional challenges, many details are frequently and deliberately omitted in the transition from small to larger-scale works and areas which are flat planes on a small scale become vast abstract blocks of colour. En Route, at Rubicon Gallery, features those very specific gouache images that Eithne Jordan chose to paint in oil for her Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition and, since these two exhibitions run concurrently for a time, viewers have an opportunity to see part of this artist’s working process.


A catalogue was published by the Royal Hibernian Academy for the exhibition Eithne Jordan: Street with foreword by the curator Patrick T. Murphy and essays by James Merrigan and Colm Tóibín

EITHNE JORDAN

Eithne Jordan, Street 

RHA Exhibition Catalogue, 2012

Courtesy of the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin

EITHNE JORDAN was born in Dublin and lives and works in Dublin and the South of France. She studied in the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology and then at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Solo exhibitions have included, Small Worlds at the Mac, Belfast and the RHA, Dublin, Street Stills, Assab One, Milan, Night in the City, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast, The DOCK, Carrick-on-Shannon and Galway Arts Centre, Galway.

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 2, Ireland

www.rubicongallery.ie

Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland
www.rhagallery.ie

Tom Climent at BlueLeaf Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

Tom Climent, Final State
BlueLeaf Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
Through 13 december 2012

Irish artist Tom Climent’s most recent work is on view at Dublin's BlueLeaf Gallery. Most recent Tom Climent's paintings tends to focus on the creation of space, investigating the boundaries between abstraction and representation as a means of conveying this, exploring the dematerialised qualities that one does not actually see in reality and using spatial structures as a vehicle to make this quality solid and physical.

The perception of space is a complex phenomenon; we have not simply a mental apprehension of space but an experience of living space. The creation of space through perspective indicates a fixed point of view; a lived space contains a remembrance of past space and a longing for future spaces. The postion of the viewer is always shifting.

Tom Climent’s practice of art to date has been as a painter and one of his interests has been in how art addresses the body in space. For him a painting could become a window connecting an inside with an outside. In his work the devices of perspective and more abstract methods of reduction can create a pictorial surface which allows our bodily world in.

Tom Climent's initial enquiry was focused around spatial constructs and how they might provide a structured space for our existence. Taking a basic structure as an analogy for our place in the world, he started to create very rudimentary spatial structures; a fundamental shape or vessel that could contain a human presence. People organise space so that it meets their needs and supports their social interations. The space buildings create have an important part in how we live our lives. A body is a lived body and as such the spaces it inhabits are lived spaces.

From this original idea Tom Climent's paintings have become more intricate and complex in structure. As traces of memories and feelings accumulate and overlap on the canvas, construction and deconstruction become active tools in the creation of his paintings. His work reminds us of how our spatial ability becomes spatial knowledge as we navigate our world and with this knowledge we create a place for ourselves. Our expression of this place inheres in the kinds of structures we create for inhabitation. A building is a container - for ourselves.  Is this space then, our most basic root in the world; a footprint of our mode of being here? 

Previous solo shows of TOM CLIMENT works include Between Chance and Rhyme at The Hunt Museum, New Paintings at The Fenton Gallery, Pure at The Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dust at Garter Lane Arts Centre, Hansels House at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, A Light Enters The Land at BlueLeaf Gallery, Dancing Parade at Triskel Arts Centre, Ashlar at The Alley Theatre Arts Centre, Harvester House at The South Tipperary Arts Centre and more recently his MA by Research exhibition at The Wandeford Quay Gallery.

TOM CLIMENT is a recipient of the Tony O’Malley award and Victor Treacey award. The artist work is in the collections of  The Central Bank, The National Treasury Management Agency, University College Cork, AIB Bank, The National Self-Portrait Collection, NCB Stockbrokers, The Cork Opera House, Cork City Council , The Office of Public Works, Cork Institute of Technology & Private Collections in Ireland, UK,USA, Spain & Canada.

Ciara Gibbons, Director
Lorna Sweeney, Gallery Manager

BlueLeaf Gallery
Whitaker Court, Whitaker Square
Dublin - Ireland
www.blueleafgallery.com 

IMMA 20th Anniversary: Twenty exhibition, Dublin, Ireland

Twenty: Celebrating 20 Years of the Irish Museum of Modern Art 

IMMA, Dublin

Through 31 October 2011

Twenty features 20 younger-generation Irish and international artists, whose work is increasing prominent in the global visual arts arena.  The exhibition is the centrepiece of a wide-ranging programme celebrating the 20th anniversary of the foundation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) on Friday 27 May 2011. Twenty: Celebrating 20 Years of the Irish Museum of Modern Art continues until 31 October 2011. Many of the works are being shown for the first time, having recently been acquired with special funding from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. The new works echo the Museum’s acquisition 20 years ago of works by leading younger artists of the day, many of whom went on to have a close and mutually beneficial relationships with IMMA in the intervening years. 

Drawn from IMMA’s Collection, the works in Twenty include installations, photography, painting and sculpture. Commonalties and dialogues appear between the works, but the exhibition seeks to allow sufficient space that each may be viewed as representing an individual practice. For example, Katie Holten’s 137.5 / It started on the c train, 2002, a web-like wall installation made from crochet, started on the subway in New York and continued as the artist traveled around Eastern Europe. Another work, Memorial Gardens, 2008, by Niamh O’Malley was made while O’Malley was participating in IMMA’s Artists’ Residency Programme. It presents footage taken in the nearby WarMemorial Gardens in Islandbridge projected on to etched-primed aluminum, creating an unreal, chimera type effect of distance and loss. Works by Orla Barry, Stephen Brandes, Nina Canell, Fergus Feehily, Patrick M FitzGerald, John Gerrard, David Godbold, Paddy Jolley, Nevan Lahart, Niamh McCann, Willie McKeown, Perry Ogden, Liam O'Callaghan, Alan Phelan, Garrett Phelan, Eva Rothschild and Corban Walker are also shown, together with a borrowed piece by Irish artist Sean Lynch. 

Many of the Irish artists live abroad – in New York, Berlin, Vienna or London – reflecting the increasingly international environment in which their work is now seen.  The significance of IMMA’s Artists’ Residency Programme, established in 1994, is also evident as many of the artists in Twenty have participated in the programme at some point, including Orla Barry, David Godbold, Liam O’Callaghan, Niamh O’Malley, Sean Lynch, Paddy Jolley, Katie Holten, Nevan Lahart, Alan Phelan and Garrett Phelan. 

Irish Museum of Modern Art 

Royal Hospital 

Kilmainham 

Dublin 8 

IRELAND 

www.imma.ie

Post-War American Art: The Novak-O'Doherty Collection at IMMA, Dublin

Post-War American Art

The Novak/O'Doherty Collection at IMMA 

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 

Through 27 February 2011 

The IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART - exhibites 76 artworks by many of America’s leading post-war artists gifted to the Museum Collection by art historian Barbara Novak and artist Brian O’Doherty. The exhibition is on view since 8 September 2010 until 27 February 2011.

POST-WAR AMERICAN ART: THE NOVAK / O'DOHERTY COLLECTION, donated in association with the American Ireland Fund, comprises paintings and sculpture and an extensive range of works on paper, including watercolours, drawings, photographs and limited edition prints and multiples. Works by Joseph Cornell, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and a host of other celebrated artists are included in the exhibition.

The donation is particularly rich in works from New York of the 1960s and ‘70s; many the result of friendships with outstanding artists from that milieu. We can imagine the lives of Barbara Novak and Brian O'Doherty over 50 years – they married in 1960 – through these paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures and prints.  Many works were swops with other artists or tokens of friendship, inscribed with dedications or personal notes; others reflect their ongoing exchanges and correspondence through postcards and letters, such as the postcards sent by Sol LeWitt over the years incorporating sketches. Still other works were gifts, while some were purchased.  Through them we see that Barbara Novak and Brian O’Doherty were central figures in the art community of the 1960s and ‘70s and beyond.

Four important works, by Edward Hopper, Marcel Duchamp, George Segal and Jasper Johns, were gifted in 2009. The forthcoming exhibition celebrates the arrival of the balance of their collection to IMMA. Other artists represented in the collection include  Christo, Mel Bochner, William Scharf, Peter Hutchinson, Les Levine, Sonja Sekula,  John Coplans, Arnold Newman, and Elise Asher. Some works were included in the recent exhibition Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts – appropriate since the composer Morton Feldman was a close of friend of the donors.

BARBARA NOVAK short BIOGRAPHY

Born in New York, Barbara Novak is an enormously influential art historian as well as artist and novelist.  She is the author of American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, Nature and Culture and Voyages of the Self, recently published as a trilogy on American art and culture by Oxford University Press. She joined the art history department of Barnard College and Columbia University in 1958 and retired as Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor Emerita in 1998. A chaired professorship at Barnard College was named in her honour.

BRIAN O'DOHERTY short BIOGRAPHY

Born in Ballaghadereen, Co Roscommon, Brian O'Doherty variously exhibited in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and in the RHA and Oireachtas exhibitions from 1950 to 1956. He moved to the United States in 1957, where he became a pioneer in the development of Conceptual Art and also a renowned writer and critic. He has had several retrospectives, most recently in New York University's Grey Gallery. His work has been seen in Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and Rosc. He is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The influence of his ground-breaking collection of essays Inside the White Cube continues.

Commenting on the gift, Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections, said:

‘As IMMA approaches its 20th anniversary in 2011, it is its great good fortune to be the recipient of a most generous gift of artworks from the personal collection of Brian O’Doherty and Barbara Novak. Their gift to IMMA fulfills a longstanding wish of Brian O’Doherty, supported by Barbara Novak, to provide Irish artists and audiences with a collection of modern American art. While there are individual works by American artists in the Collection, the gift launches a whole new area of collecting and focus for IMMA, expanding its horizons to include an immensely rich seam of American art.

This donation cements an already important relationship: not only has IMMA in recent years acquired two superb examples of  the artist’s Conceptualist work, even more powerfully since 2008 it is the location of The Burial of Patrick Ireland.  Patrick Ireland was an identity which Brian O’Doherty assumed, in a performance enacted in 1972 called Name Change, whereby as  a gesture of patriotic protest at the Bloody Sunday killings of 13 civil rights marchers, he pledged to sign his artwork Patrick Ireland “until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights.” Thirty-six years later, in 2008, in a remarkable ceremony, an effigy of Patrick Ireland was interred in the formal gardens at IMMA, in a ceremony of reconciliation celebrating peace in Northern Ireland.’

IMMA’s COLLECTION comprises more than 4,500 works in a wide range of media, having grown significantly, through purchases, donations, long-term loans and the commissioning of new works. It is shown in themed exhibitions at IMMA, and also throughout Ireland via the Museum’s unique National Programme. The presence of IMMA’s Collection abroad has increased substantially in recent years, with large-scale exhibitions in Beijing and Shanghai, China, Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago, United States, St John’s, Newfoundland, and San Sebastian, Spain, plus numerous loans of individual works to museums and galleries worldwide.

POST-WAR AMERICAN ART
The Novak/O'Doherty Collection 
Published by IMMA, Dublin 
Exhibition Catalogue Cover
(c)2010 Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated CATALOGUE, with a contextualising comment by Brian O’Doherty and individual insights on almost all of the works by both donors; an introductory essay by Christina Kennedy and a foreword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

Royal Hospital , Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 

www.imma.ie

Robert Bordo, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Blind Spot

Robert Bordo: Blind Spot

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin

11 October - 17 November 2007

ROBERT BORDO's recent work offers abstract pictorial elements that describe the ruminative quality of experience. Meandering dots and dashes refer to weather or wandering; rippled surfaces act interchangeably as water, sky or ground; brush stroke and color field as wind or plane. His paintings  reference locations where conflict, thoughts and emotion, run together disrupting the inherent lyricism of both landscape and abstract painting. Indeed these paintings hover between abstraction and landscape utilizing the particulars of time, place and ecology. 

"All of these things are embodied in paintings of texture and nuance, positively reticent in their use of colour and form. Acutely attentive to atmosphere, they are intimate in mood and suffused with feeling -  often a quality of muted sadness, an awareness of loss - though at the same time they are thoroughly unsentimental and not particularly emotional in any overt way......... Robert Bordo indicates what almost isn’t visible, whether it’s hiding in plain sight, or fading from sight, lost in mist or falling snow or flowing water, or something distant and faint. " Aidan Dunne 2007  

New York based painter, Robert Bordo, was born in Montreal. He has exhibited consistently since 1987 at; Brooke Alexander, Tibor de Nagy, Rene Blouin and latterly, Alexander and Bonin in the United States of America. He is on the full-time faculty of The Cooper Union School of Art in Manhattan and a 2007 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Rubicon Gallery present his first Solo Exhibition in Ireland. The exhibition is accompanied by a full colour publication.

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

www.rubicongallery.ie

Tony O’Malley, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin - A Major Retrospective

Tony O’Malley

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

26 October 2005 - 1 January 2006

A major retrospective of the work of the Irish painter Tony O’Malley, one of the most important and best-loved Irish artists of the past 100 years, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, entitled simply Tony O’Malley, focuses particularly on certain core aspects and key moments in an extraordinarily productive career. It covers Tony O’Malley’s early years as an amateur artist painting the landscape of his native Co Kilkenny, through his years in St Ives and the Bahamas and his return to Ireland in 1990, to some of his last works, created shortly before his death in 2003. The exhibition comprises more than 60 works, drawn mainly from private collections. Tony O’Malley is curated by the curator and critic Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith. 

Born in Callan, Co Kilkenny, in 1913, Tony O’Malley was until the late 1950s a part-time artist working, from 1934 to 1958, with the Munster and Leinster Bank in various branches around Ireland. Although suffering chronic ill-health, he continued painting throughout the 1950s, developing his craft through a process of trial and error and through studying, in reproduction, the works of the great masters such as Cezanne and Van Gogh. A number of works in the exhibition date from these early years. Winter Landscape, Arklow (1953) and Winter Landscape, New Ross (1957) present the viewer with bleak, geometrical landscapes where small houses huddle together against the elements, reflecting something of the economic and social conditions in the country and of the personal losses O’Malley suffered – the deaths of his mother and brother – around that time.

In 1960 Tony O’Malley moved to St Ives in Cornwall, which he had already visited on a number of occasions and where he was to live for the next 30 years. The change wrought in his work by his new circumstances and surroundings – St Ives had been a well-known artists’ colony since the 1930s – can be seen in two self-portraits painted just two years apart.  In Self-Portrait, Heavy Snowfall at Trevaylor (1962-63) the artist is depicted in muted tones, in a solemn, ordered studio as the snow piles up outside. In Bird Painter (1965), by contrast, he is suffused with an elemental energy, poised to transform nature into art, his interest in birds, present from the start, having taken on a new life in St Ives. This leitmotiv recurs again and again in a variety of works, including the powerful The Hawk Owl (1964) and in Hawk and Quarry in Winter, in Memory of Peter Lanyon (1964), his tribute to his close friend and fellow painter Peter Lanyon, who died in a gliding accident in1963.

In the early 1960s, Tony O’Malley began one of his best-known series of pictures, which he continued until the late 1990s. Painted every Good Friday and frequently drawing on images from local Kilkenny tomb carvings, they address, often obliquely, the theme of Christ’s passion. These ranged from Wooden Collage, Good Friday (1968), a strikingly simple evocation of the Crucifixion in blackened fragments of wood and slate, to Good Friday Painting (1994), which bears the expanded repertoire of gesture and colour resulting from his visits to the Bahamas in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Tony and his wife, Jane – the Canadian artist Jane Harris, whom he had married in 1973 – made their first visit to Jane’s family in the Bahamas in 1974. This radically different environment initially posed some challenges for Tony O’Malley, more especially in terms of the vastly different nature of the Caribbean light. However, Tony O’Malley’s legendary persistence won out. In Bahamian Butterfly (1979) the formal idiom developed in gloomier climes is expanded to accommodate the visual resplendence of his new surroundings. During this period Tony O’Malley’s work began to be exhibited much more regularly in Ireland, particularly at the Taylor Galleries. In 1984 he had a retrospective in Belfast, Dublin and Cork. A solo exhibition by the Newlyn Gallery in Cornwall toured to a number of English and Irish venues. The inclusion of four of his larger Bahamian canvases in the 1988 ROSC came as a considerable surprise to those whose knowledge of his work was confined to his paintings from the 1960s and ‘70s. The first exhibition of Tony O’Malley’s work at IMMA was held in 1992-93. Following receipt of a major body of his work on loan from George and Maura McClelland in 2000, a further exhibition from that collection, was held in 2001. Since then the Museum has received a heritage donation from Noel and Anne Marie Smyth of 60 of the Tony O’Malley works from that collection to add to those already in its Collection. 

This new chromatic range was carried over into Tony O’Malley’s later Irish paintings, following his permanent return to Ireland in 1990. Undeterred by failing eyesight, he found new modes of expression in works such as Sense of Old Place (1997) in which the watery depths of the pond spread out to encompass the entire landscape. Tony O’Malley continued working almost up to the time of his death in January 2003, true to his feelings, expressed in an interview with The Sunday Tribune in 1984, “I have no time for people who mess about, doing nothing when it suits them …There’s so much to do. If I run out of canvas I just paint over something I’ve already done. I’m an old man and I started painting late. I don’t want to waste any time”.

A major publication with an introduction by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, essays by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Catherine Marshall, Head of Collections, IMMA, and an interview by writer and critic Brian Fallon, accompanies the exhibition.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

www.modernart.ie

Flix Artists, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Remote Access - Neva Elliot; Fiona Larkin; Hannes Malte Mahler; Fionna Murray; Ciaran Murphy; Isabel Nolan; David Rhodes

Flix Artists: Remote Access

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

28 April - 28 May 2005

FLIX is a cleverly constructed cabinet containing portfolios of drawings, artists’ books, paintings, prints and photographs. It has up to 60 artists’ work at any given time and they each have one portfolio in the cabinet. The idea behind FLIX was manyfold: to introduce new artists to established collectors, to encourage individuals to start a collection by offering affordable pieces and to present a larger selection of contemporary artists to an audience of artlovers, curators, artists and anyone.

The Rubicon have invited seven leading names from the world of the arts to browse through our FLIX portfolios and select one artist each that impresses them. Their work will be on the walls for the duration of the exhibition. But we also invite you to make a selection. Call in and flick through our cabinet of portfolios. Or, even simpler, just go on-line to find your favourite artist.

The Selectors are: Helen Carey - Director, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; Caoimhín Corrigan - Arts Officer, Leitrim County Council; Mike Fitzpatrick - Director, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick; Aideen Howard - Director, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray; Ronnie Hughes - Artist; Hugh Mulholland - Director, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast ; Anna O’Sullivan - Director, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny

The Exhibiting Artists are: Neva Elliot; Fiona Larkin; Hannes Malte Mahler; Fionna Murray; Ciaran Murphy; Isabel Nolan; David Rhodes

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

www.rubicongallery.ie

Juan Uslé, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin - Open Rooms

Juan Uslé: Open Rooms

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

8 September 2004 - 3 January 2005

A major exhibition of the work of the internationally-acclaimed Spanish painter Juan Uslé opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Juan Uslé: Open Rooms, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Ireland, comprises some 33 abstract paintings dating from the early 1990s to his most recent works. Although influenced by ideas ranging from philosophy to multiculturalism, Juan Uslé’s work is not in any way representational, rather it seeks to convey his personal vision of the world, which is poetic rather than narrative.

The works in Open Rooms are grouped in five categories and all date from the period after 1987, when Uslé left Spain for New York. This move lead of a marked change in his work, away from the calming browns, blacks and blues of his native Cantabria to a more varied, contrasting palate, reflecting the fleeting sensory impressions and intense visual stimulation of a vibrant, ever-changing city.

The Sońé que Revelabas (meaning I dreamt you were revealed) series comprises large dark canvases - deep, pulsating spaces built up from luminous horizontal stripes, which seem to register the vital pulse of the artist, as it might appear on a cardiac monitoring machine. The Eolo (“el otro orden” or “another order”) works, by contrast, contain much lighter shades, often with large white spaces and simple playful forms in the style of Joan Miró as in Mosqueteros, o mira cómo me mira Miró desde la ventana que mira a su jardin, 1995 (Musketeers, or look at how Miró looks at me from the window that looks out onto his garden).

Rizomas includes some of Juan Uslé’s most complex compositions, with a layering of line and colour creating rhythmic, dynamic spaces which celebrate the sensory possibilities of painting. They also reveal the thought processes behind the works, while at the same time pointing to the complex history of painting. The In Urbania paintings are based on the horizontal and vertical structures of an urban landscape and also, the movement of light and form. Their tones of red, white and blue call to mind the flag, while their geometric structures, referencing freeway interchanges and subway lines, underline their urban inspiration.

The rich variety of Juan Uslé work is evident in Celibataires (singles). Although identical in size, this series can be seen almost as an exercise in the varied styles which are such a defining feature of his work. The Duchampian title emphasises further the individuality of each work.

Commenting on Juan Uslé’s work, the curator of the exhibition IMMA Director Enrique Juncosa said: “His work depicts the history of painting, with a complete awareness of its linguistic splendour . . . But it also expresses a vision of the world which moves and affects us, exploiting the power of metaphors and symbols which derives from the assimilation of new ideas and of a world which has changed externally, above all, with the extensive use of new technologies.”

Born in Santander in 1954, Juan Uslé began painting in the early 1980s. Since then his work has been presented internationally in many important museum and gallery exhibitions, including at the MACBA, Barcelona, the Saatchi Gallery, London, the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, and at Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany.

Juan Uslé: Open Rooms was first shown at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (MNCARS), Madrid. It has travelled to Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander, Spain, and Stedelijk Museum Voor Actuele Kunst, (SMAK), Gent, Belgium. The exhibition is supported by the Directorate General for Cultural and Scientific Relations of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, along with the State Corporation for Cultural Action Abroad (SEACEX) and MNCARS. The opening event at IMMA is supported by the Instituto Cervantes, Dublin.

A fully-illustrated catalogue, with essays by Enrique Juncosa, Jan Hoet and David Carrier, writers, and Eva Wittocx, Co-Ordinator of Exhibitions, SMAK, accompanies the exhibition.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

www.modernart.ie

Martin Puryear, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Martin Puryear

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 

21 January - 9 May 2004

The first exhibition in Ireland by Martin Puryear, one of the leading exponents of US post-Minimalist sculpture, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Martin Puryear comprises a selection of characteristically large-scale, enigmatic, semi-abstract sculptures, dating from 1997 to 2001, presented alongside a selection of large, limited-edition prints from 2001 and 2002.

Martin Puryear uses a vocabulary of simple reductive forms to create works with a strong and direct physical presence. Process and materials are crucial to his work, which is predominantly based around traditional craft techniques of woodworking, furniture making, basketry and boat making. Puryear works primarily in wood, creating meticulously hand-crafted sculptures, which are often painted or combined with manmade material, such as wire and tar.

Martin Puryear’s work often presents dual meanings and contradictions, in both physical form and potential meaning. While essentially abstract, it frequently contains references to organic forms or physical objects - vessels, huts, nets - and demonstrates a striking physical duality appearing both dense and solid and transparent and fragile at the same time.

An extensive knowledge of nature, wildlife, history and geography, as well as an interest in Native American, African, Scandinavian, Japanese and Arctic cultures, have been major influences on Puryear’s visual language. During the 1960s Puryear learned traditional wood joinery and the use of hand tools while teaching in Sierra Leone in West Africa. In Sweden he studied printmaking and sculpture at the Swedish Royal Academy. While in Sweden, he met renowned furniture craftsman James Krenov which was a formative experience.

Commenting on Puryear’s work, IMMA Director Enrique Juncosa said: “We are delighted to give Irish gallery-goers the opportunity to experience this extraordinary body of work by Martin Puryear, whose originality and complexity make him one of the most important American artists of our time.”

Born in Washington DC in 1941, Martin Puryear, who is an African American, has been creating sculptural works since the mid 1970s. He has exhibited extensively in the US, including one-person shows at the Brooklyn Museum (1988/89) and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1990). He also represented the USA at the 1989 São Paulo Biennial. Puryear’s sculpture is included in the collections of many of the major American museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Gallery in Washington.

The exhibition originated in BALTIC - the Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England. A catalogue, with an essay by Sune Nordgren, former Director of BALTIC, accompanies the exhibition.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

www.modernart.ie

Louise Bourgeois, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin - Stitches in Time

Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

26 November 2003 - 22 February 2004

The first large-scale exhibition in Ireland by Louise Bourgeois, one of the greatest and most influential artists of our time, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time includes an extraordinary group of life-size sewn fabric busts, a series of cell-like vitrines, housing curious scenes of torture and ecstasy, and a small group of totemic figures, reinterpreting in fabric Bourgeois’s very first sculptures of the late 1940s and ‘50s. Over 20 pieces, most created in the last three years, are accompanied by a selection of the artist’s graphic work including 'He disappeared into Complete Silence', 1946, her first major suite of etchings and poems in which she unfolds tales of loss and loneliness.

Born in 1911, LOUISE BOURGEOIS was one of the first artists to assert the importance of autobiography and identity as subjects for contemporary artists. Her family background and childhood in the suburbs of Paris and the traumatic relationship between her father, mother and governess have continued to underpin her work throughout her long career. 'Seven in a Bed', 2001, for example, seems to distil the artist’s memory of far distant weekend mornings when she and her siblings would tumble into bed with their parents, but the Janus-like addition of extra heads warns us that things, especially people, are not always what they seem.

In the 1980s Louise Bourgeois began making a series of theatrical spaces entitled 'Cells', representing different types of pain – “the physical, the emotional and the psychological, and the mental and the intellectual”. The 'Cells' are self-contained or partial enclosures which can be experienced either by entering the space or by encountering it close up through mesh walls, doors or windows. These works are the anthesis of Bourgeois’ famous monumental installations, such as the three vast towers, 'I do, I undo, I redo', commissioned for the opening of Tate Modern in 2000.

Some of the most arresting of Louise Bourgeois’ recent works are a series of extraordinary upright and front-facing fabric heads, of which three can be seen in the exhibition. Sewn with a crudeness that belies their structural sophistication, they are nevertheless uncannily lifelike – open mouths appear moist from exhalation and their eyes apparently focus directly on the viewer, or seem to deliberately glance away. These are difficult works to confront; a difficulty compounded by the mute and resistant glass cases which encase them.

Born in Paris during the heyday of Cubism, Louise Bourgeois moved to New York following her marriage to the American art historian Robert Goldwater. Her first exhibition of sculpture took place in 1949. Although her early work was respected by contemporaries, it was not until she was 71 that she received wider acclaim for her first major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition revealed a sculptor of startling originality and a unique ability to work with many different materials, from marble and bronze to latex and fabric. The event gave Louise Bourgeois the confidence and opportunity to set out, in fascinating detail, not only the domestic dramas of her childhood but also the architecture, furnishings and artefacts which had surrounded her as the child of a mother whose family had been engaged in the Aubusson tapestry industry and a father who was a dealer in restored tapestry and antique furniture.

Now in her 92nd year Louise Bourgeois’s artistic practice has spanned the best part of the last century. She has always led the field of innovation, often working at more than one remove from the well-known avant-garde movements of her lifetime: Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art.

The exhibition is selected by Frances Morris, Senior Curator, Tate Modern, and is co-curated by her with Brenda McParland, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA.

A catalogue published by IMMA and August Projects, with an essay by Frances Morris, accompanies the exhibition.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

www.modernart.ie