Anne Cleary & Denis Connolly
Still life with…
4 June – 20 August 2010
AIB Prize 2009
artgallery [at] limerickcity.ie
Istabraq Hall
Merchants Quay, Limerick, Co.
Limerick, Ireland
Hunt Museum
Rutland Street, Limerick, Co.
Limerick, Ireland
The Hunt Museum
Rutland Street
Limerick, Ireland
Limerick City Gallery of Art Off-Site
Limerick City Council
Istabraq Hall
Merchants Quay
Limerick, Ireland
Special Event
On Saturday 10 July, internationally acclaimed, award-winning choreographer Cindy Cummings will perform within the pictorial space of Cleary and Connolly’s Still life with… at the Hunt Museum. The performance will be followed by an artists’ talk with Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly.
The Hunt Museum
Every year the AIB Prize identifies emerging Irish visual artists and helps them launch their career through the staging of a showcase exhibition in a publicly funded venue. Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly’s project is inspired by Patrick Hennessy’s magnificent Still life painting from the permanent collection of Limerick City Gallery of Art. Still life with… reconstructs the original Still life as a 3-dimensional set, inviting you to step right into the painting. It provides a meeting place for pixels and pigments, for moving and fixed images, for shimmering light and hard matter, for young and old. Depending on the visitor’s reaction, the exhibition can be a drawing exercise, a performance, a dialogue between old and new, a reflection on pictorial space… or simply a game.
Working with young student teachers, the artists hope—through this ground-breaking project—to push the boundaries of educational models for cultural projects. The project will impact not only on the young people directly involved, but will resonate on future generations of children through the experiences and confidence gained by their teachers in working with contemporary art.
Still life with… is as much about what moves as what is still. The interactive video projections study moving bodies – people – and how they interact with the still objects of the installation. Meanwhile easels invite visitors who might prefer a more traditional approach to take up a pencil and draw their own still life.
Limerick City Council, Istabraq Hall
A selection of video works dating from 1998 to 2010 are exhibited at Limerick City Council, Istabraq Hall on Merchants Quay including the award-winning Scenes from the Boulevard (2002), a mixture of real life documentary, performance, choreography and experimentation. Shot from the fifth floor of a Parisian apartment block, the artists consider the world below as the set for a series of scenes to be played out, exploring that fuzzy line between fiction and reality. Also exhibited are extracts from Touchy (1998), Natures Construites (2007) and a selection of videos and photographs from Moving Dublin (2009).
Award winning Irish artists Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly live and work in Paris, where they moved in 1990 following architectural studies in Dublin during the 1980s. Patterns of behaviour, both in cities and within our institutions, are a central preoccupation of their work; and these they examine through narrative and interactive video, installation, photography, and text.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Pourquoi pas toi at the Pompidou Centre; Moving Dublin at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris; Here There Now Then at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland; and Yokohama House Guests at the Yokohama Triennial, Japan. Recent group exhibitions include: Sombras e Luz, Sesc Pompéia, Sao Paulo; Noughties but Nice, 21st Century Irish Art, LCGA, Limerick; TULCA Season of visual art, Galway; Do Something Different, the Barbican Centre, London; Tina –B, National Gallery, Prague; Global Tour, W139, Amsterdam.
For further information on the exhibition and related events www.gallery.limerick.ie
