calendario eventi  :: 

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26/2/2008

Two exhibitions

Irish Museum of Modern Art - IMMA, Dublin

Dark Mirror: An installation by Mexican artist Carlos Amorales at IMMA

The first showing in Ireland of Dark Mirror, 2005, a double video projection by the leading Mexican artist Carlos Amorales, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 27 February 2008. Dark Mirror, acquired by the Museum in 2005, is the result of a collaboration between Amorales, German graphic designer André Pahl and Mexican composer José María Serralde. In Dark Mirror Amorales draws us into a world of menacing fantasy, in a nightmarish animation depicting man and beast in apocalyptic scenes. The imagery of the ominous landscape is rooted in contemporary popular symbols and Mexican icons. Black and white graphics of animals, humans and machinery dissolve from one entity into another, merging and separating, creating a sense of ambiguity and thereby deliberately thwarting any chance of identifying with one central character or engaging with a linear narrative.

André Pahl and José María Serralde were asked by Amorales to respond to his Liquid Archive, a collection of digital drawings began in 1999 which now comprises more than a thousand drawings. Pahl selected specific drawings from the archive which he sequenced into a silent animation. Serralde, a silent movie pianist, also worked on a selection of images and, without seeing Pahl’s animation, composed music to accompany it. The animation and music were then united by Amorales to form Dark Mirror. The two are combined as a double projection on a two-sided screen – one side a video of Serralde performing his composition on a grand piano, and the other, Pahl’s soundless animation.

Liquid Archive’s silhouetted drawings of wolves, monkeys, birds, humans, planes, guns, and particularly the ubiquitous imagery of skulls lend themselves to Amorales’s world of dark fantasy. The drawings are made from a technique similar to rotoscoping - widely used in the animation industry -which uses live-action film to develop animated films. Amorales makes the drawings from photographs he has taken of objects or appropriated images and graphics. The result is highly malleable digital vector drawings of objects and components which are then archived and categorised. Even if an entry is left unused, it is never deleted from the archive. This stock of component elements can be reconfigured and recycled repeatedly in different media and used to form the basis of paintings, performances, sculptures, videos and animations.

Amorales first gained international recognition with the performance piece Amorales vs Amorales, 2000 – 2003, in which a fictional wrestling match was staged. A mask representing the fictional character ‘Amorales’ was used as a type of working tool - not dissimilar to the components of Liquid Archive - by different individuals to perform in matches. The mask was continuously emptied and refilled with different ‘contents’ and used to explore the idea of shifting identities within the restricted framework of a mask.

In 2003 Amorales formed Nuevos Ricos with musician Julián Lede, which combines notions of visual arts, performance, and music in the form of a music label and explores the fantasy related to rock music, especially the bootleg culture and idealisation of rock culture that evolved from the onetime ban of rock music and records in Mexico. Nuevos Ricos manages bands and performers from Mexico, Argentina and Europe. In 2005 Amorales initiated the animation collective, Broken Animals, a group of draughtsmen, animators, media researchers and a musician which explores the possibilities of Liquid Archive to make animated films and artworks. The group programmes monthly seminars with guest speakers which have included artists, philosophers, filmmakers, musicians and a traditional animator.

Carlos Amorales was born in Mexico in 1970, and studied in Spain and Holland before returning to Mexico City where he now lives and works. Recent exhibitions include the Moore Space, Miami, 2007; Yvon Lambert, New York, 2007; Daros-Latinamerica Foundation, Zürich, 2007; MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2006, and Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, 2006. His work is featured in many public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; La Colección Jumex, Mexico City, and the Margulies Collection, Miami.

Artist Talk – Lecture Room
On Tuesday 26 February at 5.00pm, Carlos Amorales will present a lecture on his practice and discuss his installation Dark Mirror. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: talksandlectures@imma.ie.

Carlos Amorales: Dark Mirror continues until 11 May 2008

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Cecil King at IMMA

An exhibition spanning the later career of the highly-regarded Irish artist Cecil King opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 27 February 2008. Cecil King: A Legacy of Painting presents some 40 works, concentrating mainly on the hard-edge paintings for which the artist was particularly well known. The exhibition includes many of the finest works from his celebrated Baggot Street, Berlin, and Nexus series. The exhibition will be officially opened by the writer and broadcaster Emer O’Kelly at 6.00pm on Tuesday 26 February.

Cecil King: A Legacy of Painting sets out to examine King’s contribution to the emergence of Modernism in Ireland. It also addresses his position as a painter working within an international discourse, at a time when contemporary practice in his chosen media was coming under attack from both conservative forces and from the champions of more experimental art forms, giving rise to widespread predictions of “the death of painting”.

Born in Rathdrum, Co Wicklow, in 1921, Cecil King was a successful businessman, who began to paint in his mid-30s, holding his first solo exhibition in 1959. Initially, he worked in a semi-realist style producing a number of lyrical paintings and pastels such as the Circus and Trapeze paintings from the mid-1960s, which were significant in the development of his later work. These early paintings show a reductivist tendency that points unmistakably towards his later work. King was an avid collector and the influence of Hans Hartung and Lucio Fontana, whose works he collected among others, can also be seen in these 1960s works. Like Hartung, King worked in series, repeating a motif until he was satisfied with the balance and tension he had achieved: indeed, he often returned to a motif after some years in the guise of a new title.

Cecil King was also a founding organiser of the legendary Rosc exhibitions, first held in 1967, and through this met many of the most influential artists of the time, who would have a profound influence on his work, among them artists as diverse as Barnett Newman and Joseph Beuys. In 1967-68 an important shift took place in King’s work, with the first of the Baggot Street paintings, in which figurative elements are replaced by plain fields of colour, forms are rendered geometrically and light is represented through the use of a single line. In 1968 King described this watershed: “The Baggot Street series was the break that opened up another world for me. I felt I had found my identity so to speak”.

From the early 1970s onwards King found new and varied forms to explore through different geometric abstractions. Vent, 1972, is imbued with a vigorous energy, as a V shape bisects the canvas which itself has found a new powerful verticality. Following a visit to Berlin in 1970, King began his Berlin series – large-scale colour field works in which a narrow peripheral band creates a tension between figure and ground, in which some commentators have seen references to the Berlin Wall and a city divided. The same wall-like constructions continued in the later Haarlem paintings, begun after a visit to New York. Much of the power of King’s works comes from their meticulous execution. In an interview with Ciaran Carty in The Sunday Independent in 1982, he said: “There is no margin for error. The image has got to be there from the beginning. Colours can change as you go along, lines can be added. But you’ve got to have the basis right. With my type of painting, if you spoil it at any stage you miss out on the whole thing.”

Cecil King was the subject of a major retrospective at the Hugh Lane Gallery, now Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, in 1981. He exhibited widely across Europe and his work is held in the collections of many leading museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Tate, London, and numerous private and public collections. He died in 1986.

The exhibition is curated by Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA.

Lecture: Speaking of Cecil King
On Sunday 9 March at 3.00pm in the Lecture Room, writer and critic Medb Ruane will present the lecture Speaking of Cecil King. Admission is free, but booking is essential on tel: + 353 1 612 9948 or email: talksandlectures@imma.ie.

The exhibition is accompanied by a significant monograph published by IMMA, which includes texts by Seán Kissane, writer and critic Medb Ruane and artist Richard de Marco and a chronology by Oliver Dowling. A selection of poems by major Irish writers, such as Seamus Heaney and Michéal Ó Siadhail, with whom King collaborated are also included.

Cecil King: A Legacy of Painting continues until 18 May 2008. Admission is free.

Image: Carlos Amorales

Irish Museum of Modern Art - IMMA
Royal Hospital Military Road Kilmainham - Dublin
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am - 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am - 5.30pm
Sunday and Bank Holidays: 12 noon - 5.30pm
Monday and Friday 21 March: Closed

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