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

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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
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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

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

Luan Gallery, Athlone, Ireland - Inaugural exhibition of the new visual art gallery

Inaugural exhibition: Borrowed Memories 
Luan Gallery, Athlone, Co Westmeath, Ireland
Through 24 February 2013

Borrowed Memories: Exhibition from the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art is the inaugural exhibition of the new Luan Gallery, Athlone, County Westmeath, in Ireland, officially opened on Thursday 29 November 2012. 

The name ‘Luan’ derives from the Irish for Athlone, 'Baile Áth Luain' and was proposed as part of a public competition organised to name the new gallery. Designed by Keith Williams Architects, the Luan Gallery is first new visual art gallery to be opened in Ireland in over three years. In its previous incarnations the building which now houses the Luan Gallery has been many things to many people and to the town of Athlone – a library, concert hall, cinema and town hall to name but a few. Commenting on the exhibition Miriam Mulrennan, Manager, the Luan Gallery said: “Rich and colourful memories are associated with the building. Respect for people’s connection to the building formed a centre point in curating Borrowed Memories.” 

ANN HAMILTON

Ann Hamilton, Filament II, 1996

Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 2002

Courtesy of the IMMA, Dublin

The location of the Luan Gallery, in the centre of Ireland, on the banks of the River Shannon is reflected in the work of American artist Ann Hamilton. Filament II, 1996 comprises a silk organza curtain, which has been distressed by the artist, hanging from a circular rail. It is a sculpture with blurred boundaries and changeable volume and form, at once a public and private space. The curtain envelopes you but is transparent, so a shadowy figure is still visible to others standing outside. The presence or absence of people changes perceptions and experience of the work and in this regard it is interactive and participatory.  

Where Do Broken Hearts Go, 2000, by Longford-born Bristol-based artist Daphne Wright became the lynch pin for the idea of memories and the combination of shadow and light that are our own memories and those of others. Layering plays an important part in Wright’s work and here we see, not only the physical layering of the foil strips to create the giant foil cacti, but also the layering of the different elements which come together to make the entire installation – the folded strips of household tinfoil, the Country and Western lyrics and the intaglio prints made from found photographs by an anonymous photographer. 

PATRICK GRAHAM

Patrick Graham, Ark of Dreaming, 1990

Mixed media on canvas, 180 x 316 cm

Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 1991

Courtesy of the IMMA, Dublin

Westmeath-native Patrick Graham’s Ark of Dreaming, 1990, explores both colour and gesture. Words combined with vestiges of figurative imagery, and layers of heavily worked and reworked paint are applied to the canvas which has been ruthlessly split open and crudely stitched together in a diptych suggestive of an alterpiece. 

The work of Irish artist Shane Cullen created from the smuggled messages of the 1981 Maze hunger strikers presents itself to the audience as a forceful narrative of a dark time in our history which demands reflection. Fragmens Sur Les Institutions Républicaines IV, 1993 - 1997 was made over a period of four years and consists of 96 large styrofoam panels, each carrying transcriptions of the secret messages smuggled out of the H-Blocks in the Maze Prison. The subject matter is controversial but presented in a highly disciplined manner that references historical monuments. Each painted word mimics official government documents. 

Works such as Blue Crucifixion, 2003, by Manchester-born, Irish-based artist Hughie O’Donoghue and Dublin-based photographer Amelia Stein’s Memory and Loss, 2002, series of photographs are also shown. Other works shown in the exhibition include Dublin-based artist Amanda Coogan’s photograph Medea, 2001, and Northern Irish photographer Hannah Starkey’s Untitled, August, 1999.

Luan Gallery, Athlone, County Westmeath
Luan Gallery's Website: www.athloneartandheritage.ie

Irish Museum of Modern Art's Website: www.imma.ie

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 

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Knut Asdam at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Knut Åsdam 

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

29 October 2003 - 4 January 2004

An exhibition of two filmworks by the Norwegian multi-media artist Knut Åsdam opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 29 October. In this, his first showing in Ireland, Åsdam seeks to demonstrate how the architecture of a city can embody contemporary life.

'Filter City', 2003, is Knut Åsdam most ambitious film/video work to date. The work focuses on two women, their relationship to each other, to a larger social group and to a city that is in constant transformation – architecturally, socially and politically. The film is mostly shot outdoors in modern apartment/housing complexes, using scenes that are interchangeable with different Western cities. Through dialogue and filmic description of places and people, Knut Åsdam brings the characters into a narration with a city that is constantly changing socially and politically. 'Filter City' was first shown at the recent Istanbul Biennial.

The second work 'Cluster Praxis', 2002, deals with dancing as a form of social practice, and particularly as an expression of the desire for collectivety. The work is structured around the sound – a narrative mix of voice and ambient soundscapes – dominated by a five-minute-long poetic monologue. Writing in Artforum, Jordan Kantor, described the work as tracing an ever-deepening subjectivity with the “objective” camera.

Knut Åsdam was born in 1968, in Trondheim, Norway, and studied in London at Wimbledon College of Art and Goldsmiths College. He has exhibited extensively in the US and Europe and was selected for the Nordic pavilion in the 1999 Venice Biennale. His most recent shows include solo exhibitions at Klmens Gasser and Tanja Grunert, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, and Tate Britain, London.

A publication, with an essay by Simon Sheikh, Curator and Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Co-ordinator of the Critical Studies Programme, Malmo Art Academy, accompanies the exhibition.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

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Paul Seawright, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin - Hidden

Paul Seawright: Hidden

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

18 September - 30 November 2003 

An exhibition of large-format photographs by the Belfast-born artist Paul Seawright, created in response to recent travels in Afghanistan, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. In June 2002, Paul Seawright was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, London, to travel to Afghanistan to investigate landscapes that had been contaminated with exploded ordinance and mines. The twelve works in Paul Seawright: hidden are his response to that experience.

Paul Seawright deliberately avoids the more familiar, exotic vision of Afghanistan, as the spectacle of ruins portrayed by the media. His photographs of bleached desert landscapes and bomb-damaged buildings are sparse and understated, silent and depopulated; less concerned with the visible scars of war than the hidden malevolence of its terrain. Paul Seawright’s response to these heavily mined desert landscapes draws upon, extends and reworks the distinctive aesthetic he has established through earlier photographs of contested, politically contaminated landscapes made first within his home city of Belfast and more recently on the fringes of a number of European cities. In one of the catalogue essays Mark Durden, Reader in the History and Theory of Photography, University of Derby, draws parallels with Seawright’s Sectarian Murder series, made in Belfast in the late 1980s: “One finds a similar pictorial innocence, a contradictory sense of calm and normality in the image. One also finds the attempt to confront that which cannot be seen, the sense of an invisible threat on menace.”

Born in Belfast in 1965, Paul Seawright studied at the University of Ulster and Surrey College of Art and Design. Since first coming to international attention in the 1980s, his work has been widely exhibited throughout Europe and the USA. In 1997 he was awarded the IMMA/Glen Dimplex Artists Award. He lives and works in Newport, Wales, where he is Professor and Director of the Centre for Photographic Research.

Paul Seawright: hidden is an Imperial War Museum commissioned exhibition and is curated by Angela Weight, its Keeper of the Department of Art. The exhibition tour is organised in collaboration with the ffotogallery, Llanduno, Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Cardiff, and IMMA. Paul Seawright’s visit to Afghanistan was made possible with assistance from Landmine Action, the HALO Trust and the United Nations.

A fully-illustrated catalogue, published by the Imperial War Museum, with essays by Mark Durden and John Stathatos, artist and writer, accompanies the exhibition.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

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Willie Doherty, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin - False Memory

Willie Doherty: False Memory

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 

31 October 2002 - 2 March 2003

A major mid-career retrospective of the work of the internationally-acclaimed, Derry-born artist Willie Doherty opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. 'Willie Doherty: False Memory' is the first substantial showing of Willie Doherty’s work in Ireland and one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of his work anywhere to date.

The exhibition, which comprises more than 40 photographic works and slide/tape and video installations, explores themes of memory and place - concerns which have preoccupied the artist throughout his career. Closely keyed to his native city of Derry and the Northern Ireland “Troubles”, Willie Doherty’s work reveals a complex and shifting range of relationships between places, events and the images by which they come to be represented and recalled.

Much of the work is open ended, forcing the viewer to move beyond the surface picture to explore the fallibility of human memory and our need to engage with the stories and images that make up our experience. '30th January 1972' (1993), for example, comprises two projections – one showing news footage of a crowd scene on Bloody Sunday, the other a view of Glenfada Park (scene of fatal Bloody Sunday shootings) as it looked in August 1993. These projections are accompanied by three audio tracks – one recorded during the shooting on Bloody Sunday, the other two being edited extracts from interviews with passersby on Rossville Street (another location of the fatal shootings) in August 1993. The central point is that the work is not intended to be a contribution to the body of documentary evidence on Bloody Sunday, but rather an attempt to investigate the impact of such a traumatic event on private and public memory and identity.

'Willie Doherty: False Memory' presents many such key works from all stages of the artist’s career. These include early black and white photographs, such as 'Mesh' (1986) and 'The Blue Skies of Ulster' (1986), and large colour cibachrome photographs, such as 'Unapproved Road I' (1992) and 'Out of Sight' (1997), which exist on the borderline between the documentary and the staged. In these works Doherty places us at the edge of the city, between the familiar and the unknown – a highly mediated place, shaped from a combination of television news coverage, cinematic fantasy, tourist information, popular stereotypes and collective memory. The seminal slide installations 'Same Difference' (1990) and 'They’re All the Same' (1991) question how language can shape our perceptions of images, in this instance media images of IRA suspects. Willie Doherty’s most recent video installation, 'Re-Run' (2002), commissioned by the British Council for this year’s 25th São Paolo Bienal, is here shown for the first time in Ireland.

Commenting on the exhibition, Brenda McParland, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA, said: “Much of Doherty’s artistic output is closely linked to the physical and political landscape of the city of Derry and its environs. However, there is a measure of detachment in his work that resonates beyond Ireland, giving it universal appeal and international significance”.

Born in Derry in 1959, Willie Doherty is an artist of international standing. In 1993 he (and Dorothy Cross) represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1994 and was the recipient of the IMMA Glen Dimplex Artists Award the following year. Earlier this year he represented the United Kingdom at the São Paulo Biennal. He has exhibited in a number of solo exhibitions in Derry, Dublin, London, New York and Paris and has contributed to group shows worldwide.

A major full-colour monograph, published by IMMA and Merrell publishers, London, with essays by the chief curator of the Castello di Rivoli, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and writer and critic, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, accompanies the exhibition.

The exhibition is curated by Brenda McParland, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

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Andy Warhol: After the Party - Works 1956-1986 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Andy Warhol

After the Party - Works 1956-1986
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
20 November 1997 - 22 March 1998

The first major exhibition in Ireland of the work of Andy Warhol, one of the defining figures of 20th-century art, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on 20 November. Andy Warhol: After the Party - Works 1956-1986 is sponsored by ACCBank and comprises some 100 works drawn mainly from the collections of the Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, the most comprehensive single-artist museum in the world. It includes early drawings from the 1950s as well as better-known iconic works from the 1960s and ‘70s, such as the Marilyn, Jackie, Mao and Campbell’s Soup Can paintings. Examples ofAndy Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper, Cloud Pillows, disaster paintings and a range of source material are also included; plus a series of angel and cat drawings by Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola. The exhibition will be officially opened by Ms Sile de Valera, TD, Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands at 6.00pm on Wednesday 19 November. 

The exhibition explores Andy Warhol’s work at a number of levels, providing an opportunity to see both his apparently uncritical celebration of the mass culture image as a commodity and his simultaneous subversion of that celebration. A constant, though often unacknowledged, refrain of death, culminating in the memento mori images towards the end of his life, is the core theme of the exhibition. The Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Declan McGonagle, says ‘It is interesting how new readings of Warhol’s work and influence are beginning to develop. Warhol was not just a chronicler of consumer culture. It is increasingly clear that, as a late 20th-century artist using contemporary language, media and forms, he was exploring ideas of life and death which have always formed the basis of great art. This exhibition both asks people and gives them the opportunity to look at Warhol differently by representing his total practice as an artist’. 

In the context of this full retrospective, the Museum will also present a series of Gun paintings, which were made in 1982-83. The series was shown at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London earlier this year, their first showing as a group in over a decade. In these images, ‘so beautiful, so desirable’; Andy Warhol evokes the appeal of the gun as a commodity and a cinematic prop and draws on American mass culture to create a powerful symbol of life and death. This repetitive, intense exploration of a single image represents a powerful coda to the main exhibition. The Irish Museum of Modern Art is grateful to the d’Offay Gallery for lending the works for this element of the overall project. 

Born in Pittsburg in 1928 to East European parents, Andy Warhol moved to New York in 1949, where he became one of American’s leading commercial artists. By the early 1960s he had turned his attention to the field of fine art and was exhibiting his Pop paintings and sculpture - including Heinz Boxes, Marilyns and Campbell’s Soup Cans - in New York and Los Angeles. At this time he was already making images about death and disaster, which remain among his most critically-acclaimed series. Despite a near fatal shooting in 1968, Warhol continued to be enormously prolific. During the 1970s and ‘80s though widely known for his celebrity portraits, he also made some of his most ambitious and greatest paintings during this period, including Skull 1976, After the Party 1979, and Last Supper, made in the year of his death 1986. 

Over the course of a 30-year-long career, Andy Warhol transformed contemporary art. The power of his work comes from its concentration on fundamental human themes - the beauty and glamour of youth and fame, material culture and the passing of time, and the presence of death. Employing mass-production techniques, Warhol challenged preconceived notions about the nature of art and erased traditional distinctions between fine art and popular culture. 

Irish Museum of Modern Art
Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8
www.modernart.ie

Kiki Smith at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin - Convergence

Kiki Smith: Convergence
Irish Musuem of Modern Art, Dublin
24 October 1997 - 15 February 1998

The first major solo exhibition in Ireland of the work of Kiki Smith, one of America’s leading contemporary artists, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on 24 October. Kiki Smith: Convergence ranges over ten years of Kiki Smith’s work from 1988 and reflects her main concerns in terms of subject matter and use of colour and materials. It features a number of her characteristic sculptures based on the human body, a number of more recent drawings from 1996 and 1997, and mixed-media works using materials such as glass, crystal and neon, which mark a shift in focus from the human to animal forms and the natural world. 

Kiki Smith is best known for her works based on the female body which she presents in stark, often provocative terms - its flesh, blood, secretion and excretions suggesting fundamental questions of life and death. As an artist Smith gives birth to adult forms still grimy with the process of delivery. Indeed, a paradox of her works is that one cannot tell if they are coming into existence or passing out of it through decay and disintegration. Both formally and psychologically, these sculptures break with traditional notions of the depiction of the human figure in art. 

Using the physical body as her starting point, Kiki Smith explores the wider female condition in works suggesting pain, humiliation and subservience. There are also allusions to religious rituals and beliefs, which reflect her Catholic upbringing. The artist has selected works for this exhibition by using the device of colour for individual rooms at the museum - red, yellow, blue, green, brown and silver - colours which have been a strong force in her work. 

Kiki Smith was born in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1954. She moved to the United States as a child and in 1976 moved to New York where she now lives and works. In 1979-80 she began to work with the body using Gray’s Anatomy as a reference. She had her first solo exhibition Life Wants to Live at The Kitchen in New York in 1982. Since then she has exhibited to considerable critical acclaim in solo and group shows worldwide. Kiki Smith’s sculpture was included in From Beyond the Pale at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1994. 

Irish Museum of Modern Art
Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8
www.modernart.ie

Joseph Kosuth at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Joseph Kosuth: Guests and Foreigners, Rules and Meanings
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
13 March - 11 June 1997

The first solo exhibition in Ireland of the work of Joseph Kosuth, one of the founders of Conceptual art, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on 13 March. The exhibition, entitled Guests and Foreigners, Rules and Meanings (James Joyce, Pola, Roma, Trieste, Paris, Zurich, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dublin, County Wicklow, Connemara), includes a large scale installation which utilises the writings and history of two important 20th-century figures; James Joyce and Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. This installation, one of his most ambitious to date, will counterpoint 14 seminal works (from 1965 to 1997) which established Kosuth as one of the pivotal figures in Conceptual art. 

Joseph Kosuth’s work played a key role in the redefinition of art which took place in the 1960s and ‘70s, which questioned traditional art forms and practices and the assumptions surrounding them. The questions asked then are still contested as a new generation comes under their influence, and Kosuth is at the centre of these debates. For Kosuth the meaning of art, as expressed in language, is more important than its appearance, the concept more important than the object. Through a variety of means, from dictionary definitions to advertising billboards, he presents abstracted information to the viewer. This information simultaneously explains itself and broadens the perceptions of artistic practice as it reveals the mechanisms which produce meaning. 

Joseph Kosuth describes the process used in works such as One and Three Chairs 1965, one of the key works in the exhibition: “I used common, functional objects - such as a chair - and to the left of the object would be a full-scale photograph of it and to the right of the object would be a photostat of a definition of the object from the dictionary. Everything you saw when you looked at the object had to be the same that you saw in the photograph, so each time the work was exhibited the new installation necessitated a new photograph. I like the fact that the work itself was something other than simply what you saw. By changing the location, the object, and still having it remain the same work was very interesting. It meant you could have an art work which was that idea of an art work, and its formal components weren’t important ... The expression was in the idea, not the form - the forms were only a device in the service of the idea.” 

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1945, Joseph Kosuth studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art; the School of Visual Arts, New York City and New School for Social Research. He was a founder member of the Art and Language group and contributed to the defining debates of that period in the late 1960s and early ‘70s before leaving in 1975. He has been a prize winner at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and was made Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1993. His collected writings Art after Philosophy and After were published by the M.I.T. Press in 1991. He has lectured widely throughout Europe and North America, and is presently a professor at the Stuttgart Kunstakademie. His work has been shown in countless solo and group exhibitions worldwide and forms part of all the major public collections and many key private collections. He lives in New York City and Ghent, Belgium. 

Irish Museum of Modern Art
Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8
www.modernart.ie

Beverly Semmes at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin - New and Recent Sculpture

Beverly Semmes: New and Recent Sculpture
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
2 October 1996 - 16 February 1997

The first one-person exhibition in Ireland of the work of the American sculptor Beverly Semmes opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 2 October. Beverly Semmes: New and Recent Sculpture comprises 10 of Semmes’s characteristically large, dramatic clothing pieces, all created in the last four years, and 10 earlier photoworks of smaller wearable garments. 

Beverly Semmes’s monumental sculptures and her smaller fabric creations are a delightful and provocative fusion of personal fantasy and social commentary. They explore the power of clothing and its ability to influence, and even define the self - who we think we are, how we choose to represent ourselves, and how we are seen and defined. The strangely distorted bodices and elongated arms of Semmes’s dresses, with their profusion of colours and fabrics, present rich psychological terrain. Her exaggeration of clothing forms to surreal extremes, result in sculptural creations that reflect a concern, shared by many contemporary artists, with the politics and psychology of identity. 

Scarlett, 1994 is a typically striking work, a 71/2 foot long ‘dress’ of scarlet crushed velvet with skirt and arms flowing down the gallery wall and spilling luxuriantly onto the floor. In Green Braided Dress, 1992 the collar and shoulders are of a normal, though greatly enlarged, dress, which is then contorted into three pairs of plaits stretching to the ground. Two new works have been made especially for this exhibition. One, Twister, 1996 is one of the first works in which a kinetic element is introduced. In all of the larger, more recent works the human figure is absent - but made all the more visible by its very invisibility. This ‘presence of absence’ resonates throughout Beverly Semmes’s work with both dramatic and telling effect. 

In contrast, the small scale photoworks and film stills each depict a costumed figure, frequently in a landscape with the shapes and textures of their costumes mimicking their surroundings. Figure in the Purple Velvet Bathrobe and Cloud Hat, 1991 depicts a figure standing on a sandy point overlooking the ocean. Her voluminous, purple robe falls in thick folds, like a waterfall or a stream that will lead to the ocean below, while her cloudlike hat is barely distinguishable from the sky. 

Born in Washington, DC, Beverly Semmes lives and works in New York City. Solo exhibitions include shows at the Sculpture Centre, New York, ICA, Philadelphia, Camden Arts Centre, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, She has shown in many group exhibitions in the US and in Dusseldorf, London, Nova Scotia and Ontario. Her Four Purple Velvet Bathroles was one of the most memorable works in IMMA’s From Beyond the Pale season in 1994-95. 

Irish Museum of Modern Art
Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8
www.modernart.ie