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This exhibition borrows its title from Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s comparison of the work of translation to re-assembling fragments of a broken vase – the individual fragments must come together, but need not be like each other. This could also be taken as an allegory for exhibition making, or collecting.

The exhibition includes the first-showing since their acquisition of a number of recent works by Irish artists, including The sky looks down on almost as many things as the ceiling, (2013) a wall based sculpture by Aleana Egan and commissioned works by Ronan McCrea and Alan Phelan. The latter two are lens-based works titled Medium (Corporate Entities) and Include me out of the Partisan Manifesto, which resulted from IMMA’s programme of temporary exhibitions. McCrea’s photographic enquiry into spaces where corporate art collections are hung, took place before the economic collapse.

Caoimhe Kilfeather’s newly acquired lead sculpture Abbreviation, (2011) joins works by Michael Warren, Shirazeh Houshiary, Brian King and Kathy Prendergast selected from the IMMA Collection. These works have an aesthetic and historic affinity with the sculpture and drawing of Gerda Frömel – whose retrospective, will be running concurrently in IMMA’s Garden Galleries.

GILBERT & GEORGE’s large-scale photowork Smoke Rising, (1989), Nigel Rolfe’s Dance Slap for Africa, (1983) and will be shown along with other activist works or works with emphasis on performance including a film by Phil Collins and historic works by Marina Abramović.

Fragments will include a number of Subjectivist works by WW II imigrès, the White Stag artists, bequested by the late artist Patrick Scott to IMMA in 2014.  Scott exhibited with the White Stag from 1941 and the group swopped each others paintings.  The donation is particularly rich in key works by Kenneth Hall who was a close friend of Scott.

Now in her 85th year, Camille Souter’s works included in Fragments are among some of her finest works of the 1950s and 60s and show her interest in Miró, Klee, Jackson Pollock and Arte Povera. In 1958 Lucio Fontana bought two of her paintings.

A pioneer of Conceptual Art and author of the renowned Inside the White Cube, Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland’s enduring obsession with themes of language, perception and identity are represented by a selection of his works from the IMMA Collection dating from 1954 onwards and include a major new Rope Drawing which is a recent gift to IMMA by the artist, entitled: The doors to good and evil and the windows to heaven – Christina’s World,  Rope Drawing No # 124,  2015.


Brian O’Doherty

Brian O’Doherty 1928–2022

Brian O’Doherty was born in Ireland and moved to New York in 1957. A qualified medical doctor, O’Doherty became renowned as an artist, writer, television host, and educator. Consistently exploring the multiple nature of identity, he adopted various personae, notably 'Patrick Ireland', who was buried at IMMA in 2008. Major retrospectives of O’Doherty/Ireland’s work were held at the National Museum of American Art, Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane and the Grey Art Gallery, New York.

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Patrick Scott

Patrick Scott 1921–2014

Patrick Scott is considered one of the first exponents of pure abstraction in Irish art and a significant contributor to the development of modernist design in Ireland. He was elected a Saoi of Aosdána in 2007. Retrospectives of his work were held at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1982, and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in 2002 and 2014 when the exhibition ‘Patrick Scott: Image Space Light' brought together the most comprehensive representation of his 75 year long career.

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Camille Souter

Camille Souter 1929–2023

Camille Souter trained as a nurse before taking up painting in the mid 1950s. Though abstract in appearance, her paintings are based within reality and the everyday. Souter exhibited extensively since the 1960s, including major retrospectives at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in 1980, and the Ulster Museum, Belfast, in 2000. Souter received the IMMA Glen Dimplex award for contribution to visual arts in Ireland in 2000. She was a member of the RHA and was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 2009.

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Talks and Events

Gallery Talk | Fragments
Saturday 9 May 2015,2 – 2.45pm East Wing Galleries
Marguerite O’Molloy (Collections, IMMA) discusses the broad range of sculpture on show in the exhibition Fragments. The tour covers a number of sculptural approaches, including examples from the 1950’s through to contemporary works recently acquired for the IMMA Collection.

National Drawing Day at IMMA
Saturday 16 May, 10:30am-4:30pm
Human beings have been drawing for tens of thousands of years, with the earliest examples still as fresh as the day they were drawn on the walls of caves deep underground. For the National Drawing day on Saturday the 16th of May IMMA invites you to stay in touch with our cave dwelling ancestors and join us for a collaborative wall drawing project based on our new collection exhibition Fragments.


Additional Resources

Artforum produced a piece on Brian O’Doherty’s rope drawing that provides insight into the new work.

 


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