From Highwood to Home – Highlights from a Private Collection will run at the Glucksman Gallery, UCC until March 18th 2012. Artists include: Barrie Cooke, Dorothy Cross, Rita Duffy, Patrick Graham, Eithne Jordan, Michael Kane, Brian Maguire, Niamh McCann, Nick Miller, Hughie O’Donoghue, Patrick Scott, Donald Teskey, and Charles Tyrell.
The selected works address and interpret local territories in very different ways, from the thrilling seascape painting of Donald Teskey to the politically charged graveyard scene created by Brian Maguire. Dorothy Cross’ Currach suspends a sculptural rowing boat across the heights of the gallery while paintings by Barrie Cooke and Niamh McCann allude to the stag as a mythical symbol of Irish history and landscape.
The representation of Ireland through reference to nature, politics and imagined narratives recurs throughout contemporary artistic practices and reveals an ongoing pursuit of the themes and ideas that make up Irish identity. The exhibited artists each have their own individual perspective on Irish life and history, and realise these through wildly expressive paintings, meditative portrayals of the landscape, the incorporation of everyday objects and materials, and allusions to Ireland’s contested nationhood.
Through this range of different viewpoints, From Highwood to Home reveals an Ireland that is mournful, isolated, bright, tumultuous and inspiring.
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Out of the Dark Room – Works from The David Kronn Collection will run at the Glucksman Gallery until March 18th 2012. The exhibition is drawn from a collection of more than 450 photographs brought together by the Irish born American collector Dr. David Kronn. Encompassing works from the past century, this exhibition includes over 160 photographs by artists including Harry Callahan, David Goldblatt, Annie Liebovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Daido Moriyama, August Sander, Malick Sibidé and Edward Weston.
The collection also reflects Dr Kronn’s practice as a paediatrician, including a number of works relating to childhood. These include images by Diane Arbus and Irina Davis, where children are the focal point of the photograph, captured whilst held in their mother’s arms or sitting alone in state-run Russian orphanages. Martine Franck’s photographs of children at play on Tory Island, County Donegal reveal a startling lack of self-consciousness in her subjects, while the young boys in Kenneth Josephson’s work are posed in evocative and poetic situations.
Out of the Dark Room was first presented at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Summer 2011. In exhibiting the collection at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, the curatorial team of Chris Clarke, Fiona Kearney and Matt Packer have reworked the images selected by Seán Kissane, IMMA’s Head of Exhibitions, into four thematic groupings: Encounter, Time, Surface and Classification. These categories invite you to consider Dr Kronn’s collection in relation to wider concerns within the history of photography.
This exhibition is made possible by the support of Dr David Kronn and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
See www.glucksman.org
