Into the Light, The Arts Council - 60 Years of Supporting the Arts
30th November 2012 - 18th January 2013
Limerick City Gallery of Art
Into the Light The Arts Council – 60 Years of Supporting the Arts
30th November 2012 - 18th January 2013, Limerick City Gallery of Art
James Allen, Robert Ballagh, John Behan, Basil Blackshaw, Tim Booth, Brian Bourke, Charles Brady, Deborah Brown, John Burke, George Campbell, Patrick Collins, Elizabeth Comerford, Barrie Cooke, Frank Lee Cooper, Jack Cudworth, Rosaleen Davey, John Devlin, Gerard Dillon, James Dixon, Conor Fallon, Micheal Farrell, Martin Gale, Tim Goulding, Patrick Graham, Alice Hanratty, Brian Henderson, Patrick Hennessy, Patrick Hickey, Roy Johnston, Michael Kane, Oisin Kelly, Cecil King, Justin Laffin, Louis le Brocquy, Anne Madden, Ernest McDowell, Norah McGuinness, Sean McSweeney, Colin Middleton, Tony O’Malley, Arthur Power, Nano Reid, Alan Robb, Patrick Scott, William Scott, Camille Souter, Jonathan Wade, Alexandra Wejchert and Anne Yeats.
To celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Arts Council is working with four Irish galleries: Limerick City Gallery of Art, Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and The Model in Sligo to produce a series of exhibitions and a major national showcase of works by over 100 artists from its collection. The Arts Council began its collection in 1962 as a way of supporting artists and promoting public interest in the arts. The collection now consists of over 1,000 works by Ireland’s leading contemporary visual artists.
The exhibition in Limerick City Gallery of Art focuses on works, mainly painting, collected by the Arts Council during the 1960s and 70s – a vibrant and fascinating period in the history of Irish art. The earliest work included is The Black Lake (c.1940) by Gerard Dillon and the latest is Green Landscape (1980) by Basil Blackshaw, with over 60 other works representing markedly different trends in painting from the period.
The selection of works for this exhibition has been made by Helen Carey (Director/Curator of Limerick City Gallery of Art), Anne Horrigan (Askeaton Contemporary Arts), Paul Tarpey (MA SPACE programme, Limerick Institute of Technology), John Logan (historian and author) and Baz Burke (visual artist and dancer).
Emmet Kierans, a contemporary artist from Limerick, was commissioned to create a new work for the exhibition. Kierans’ painting, Observer Effect (2012), has been produced in response to the Arts Council Collection: “what struck me after seeing the scale of the collection, it’s passage through time, style and medium, was how it in one sense is a collection of physical art objects but in another represents an archive of ineffable thoughts and concepts, a vast collection of ideas captured in colour, form and process.” Kierans’ work is a playful proposition suggesting the effect that viewing a collection of artworks might have on the mind.
For further information on the exhibition please contact the gallery - +353 61 310633
