2021 Programme

Following on the new Sir Hugh Lane Bequest Agreement with the National Gallery, London, (see www.hughlane.ie) a new display of paintings by Corot from the collection will go on exhibition this winter. It will include the superb Avignon from the West one the Bequest paintings which, as part of the new agreement, will be in Dublin for next five years following on its return from exhibition in Australia.

Maud Cotter: a consequence of – a dappled world
May 5–July 25, 2021

Solo exhibition by Irish artist Maud Cotter of a body of work developed from 2015 through to 2021. Cotter begins her inquiry by taking as reference point Nancy Cartwright’s book The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cotter builds an original and thoughtful relationship between objects and space, through which an original aesthetic language is revealed for the nature of things or, rather, what things want to tell us.

Cecil King: Present in Time Future 
May–August 2021

This exhibition marks the centenary of the birth of Cecil King, one of Ireland’s most significant modern artists. The artist had a close association with the Hugh Lane Gallery; his first retrospective was held there in 1981, and he was Vice Chairman of the ROSC exhibition’s Executive Committee when the gallery hosted ROSC ’77. This exhibition is drawn from the collection and reveals the artist’s fine, taut use of line and intense depths of colour to convey mood and movement and to distil his experience of place.

Joseph Beuys: From the Secret Block to ROSC  
June–October 2021

This exhibition is centred on three blackboards that Joseph Beuys created in 1974 in the Hugh Lane Gallery. They were made during a lecture on the occasion of his exhibition in the gallery, The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland. The blackboards will be shown alongside a wealth of archive material to illuminate and reflect on Beuys’s relationship to Ireland, his thinking around energy, healing and the Celtic world and the place of teaching and dialogue in art practice.  

Hiwa K: Do you remember what you are burning?
October 7, 2021–February 13, 2022

Conceived as a three-venue collaboration by Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai with Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, and the Iraqi-Kurdish artist Hiwa K.

Central to the artist’s work is his use of horizontality and verticality when applied to knowledge systems, power structures and lived experiences. Hiwa K explores ideas of estrangement, collectively, histories of neoliberalism and the long shadow of the multiple conflicts waged on and in Iraq—particularly in his home city of Sulaymaniyah.

Studio and State: The Laverys and the Anglo-Irish Treaty  
November 2021–November 2022

The Hugh Lane Gallery and the National Museum of Ireland are collaborating to produce an exhibition marking the centenary of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The exhibition will take place at Collins’s Barracks and feature Sir John Lavery's portraits of the signatories to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which will hang alongside items from the National Museum’s collections. The London studio and home of John and Hazel Lavery served as a meeting point during the negotiations and Lavery’s paintings serve as a unique record of this significant historical event.