LCGA Exhibitions 2022

Richard Slade, Darwins Voyage,  1998,  oil on board, 91 x 122cm, purchased for the Collection. 

John Aiken, Michael Canning, Williem de Kooning, Blaise Drummond, Rity Duffy, Sarah Durcan, Neva Elliott, Mary Fitzgerald, Tom Fitzgerald, Liam Flynn, Joe Hogan, Ronnie Hughes, Ciaran Lennon, Christine Mackey, Alice Maher, John McHugh, Nick Miller, Tina O'Connell, Siobhan Piercy, Richard Slade, Paki Smith, Amelia Stein, Cindy Cummings, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Katherine West.

Limerick City Gallery of Art is pleased to present Personal Taste, the first in a series of exhibitions exploring the gallery's Permanent Collection.

Invited curators Alan Counihan (Visual Artist and Curator), Paul Mosse (Visual Artist and Aosdana) and Ann Mulrooney (Manager and Curator, National Craft Gallery) present a series of rooms which reflect their taste of a selection from the permanent collection. Drawing, painting, print, photography and sculpture offer a flavour of the diversity and richness of artistic practice over the last forty years.

The energy and chemistry between these practitioners, working from various disciplines, was harnessed by a group process to explore and navigate through the collection. Their preferences, insights, expertise and excitement, relating to particular works, are reflected in the exhibition. This provides a framework within which to appreciate some of the hidden gems from the collection and a context from which to build in the future.

Neva Elliott's image, Without Breaking, of peeling and paring back, placed in the central foyer, may be read as a metaphor for this curatorial process, in which over two hundred artworks were considered in relationship to one another and to specific spaces. The final result offers subtle dialogues, conversations and whispers between the works.

The exhibition is the fruit of personal choices, which are born of personal taste. The personal tastes of many lives, which lie at the root of this collection, have been further filtered through the eyes and personal tastes of three curators.

The selected works breathe a new life into the clean, open spaces of the newly renovated Carnegie Building and this exhibition allows individual pieces to sing in isolation within these spaces, encouraging the viewer to discover surprising common threads and relationships between the works and the disciplines from which they were born.

The LCGA Collection began in 1936, when a committee was formed to collect artworks for the gallery. In 1948 a municipal gallery building was constructed to house the collection, as an addition to the Carnegie Free Library and Museum situated in the grounds of the People’s Park, Pery Square. LCGA is now celebrating the Permanent Collection by undertaking a series of exhibitions by invited curators, art historians, artists and groups to allow for a number of interpretations and narratives to be presented.

With thanks to the National Craft Gallery.