DUBLIN, IRELAND.- A major exhibition from the Museum’s own Collection has just gone on show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Eye of the Storm spans the years from the 1940s to date, covering the entire period from which the Museum collects work. Comprising 68 works, mainly by artists with considerable reputations, it presents a wide range of media, including painting, installation, sculpture, film and photography. A number of new acquisitions are shown, including works by Hughie O’Donoghue and Sean Scully, acquired through the Section 1003 Heritage Donation Scheme. The exhibition takes its name from a painting by the distinguished Irish-born painter Michael Craig-Martin, acquired for the Collection earlier this year.

Eye of the Storm does not focus on any particular subject or theme, but rather on the Collection itself, demonstrating its depth and variety and the manner in which it has developed since the Museum’s inception in 1991. A prime mover in that development and one of the Museum’s most important benefactors, the late Gordon Lambert, is remembered in Robert Ballagh’s Portrait of Gordon Lambert, which is shown alongside two other works by the same artist, also commissioned by Gordon Lambert.

The exhibition begins in the Ground Floor Galleries - named in honour of Gordon Lambert - with some of the earliest works in the Collection. These include works ranging in style from expressionistic to surrealist to cubist by Patrick Collins, Mainie Jellett, Colin Middleton, Jack B Yeats and others; abstract paintings by artists such as Josef Albers, Cecil King and William Scott, and more gestural works by Tony O’Malley and Richard Gorman.

In the First Floor Galleries, while some spaces are dedicated to individual artists, such as Charles Brady, Michael Craig-Martin and Neil Jordan, most are structured around groupings of works by different artists. The largest display comprises paintings by mainly Irish artists who came to prominence in the 1970s and ‘80s, including Barrie Cooke, Felim Egan, Ciarán Lennon, Anne Madden, Stephen McKenna, Patrick Scott, Sean Scully and Camille Souter. The exhibition also highlights the international aspect of the Collection with works by Thomas Ruff and Ulrich Rueckriem (Germany), Vik Muniz (Brazil), Gilbert & George (UK and Italy), Gary Hume and Craigie Horsfield (UK), Joseph Kosuth (USA) and Juan Uslé (Spain).

The exhibition is curated by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, and Marguerite O’Molloy, Assistant Curator: Collection, IMMA. A full-colour publication on the Museum’s Collection will be published in July 2005. With essays by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, and Catherine Marshall, Senior Curator: Collection, IMMA, it will feature some 180 work from the Collection.