Crawford's closure and the €5m banana... 10 talking points in visual art in 2024
Pictured clockwise: A woman poses for a photo next to a banana attached with duct-tape that replaces the artwork 'Comedian' by the artist Maurizio Cattelan; Jack B Yeats’ painting in oils O’Connell Bridge; and the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork ahead of renovation works.
On February 22, Jeff Koons’ Moon Phases became the first sanctioned artwork to land on the moon, when the unmanned American spacecraft Odysseus touched down after a seven-day journey. Koons’ sculpture features 125 miniature spheres, each one inch in diameter, depicting 62 phases of the moon as seen from Earth, 62 as seen from space, and one lunar eclipse.
Some might quibble with Koon’s achievement, as Fallen Astronaut, a 3.5 inch aluminium sculpture by the Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonck, was left on the surface of the moon by the crew of Apollo 15 on 2nd August, 1971, next to a plaque listing the 14 astronauts and cosmonauts who had died in service up to that point in time.
One could argue to infinity and back over who was actually first, the only difference being that the crew who planted Van Hoeydonck’s work on the moon did so in secret, while Koons’ artwork had prior approval.
A different kind of journey, that of St Brendan the Navigator to the Isle of the Blessed, is commemorated by a well-known sculpture in the Square in Bantry, Co Cork. The piece is a collaboration between the German-born artist Imogen Stuart and her husband Ian, the son of Iseult Gonne and the writer Francis Stuart.
After the couple settled in Ireland in 1949, Imogen Stuart found her niche producing artworks for Catholic and Church of Ireland church interiors. Her commissions included the altarpieces and baptismal font in the Honan Chapel at University College Cork. Stuart taught sculpture at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin and was elected a Saoi by Aosdána in 2015. She continued working up to her death, aged 96, in March this year.
In July, the pioneering American video artist Bill Viola died in Long Beach, California. Viola’s work was heavily influenced by Catholic mysticism and Zen Buddhism, and was showcased in St Paul’s Cathedral, London in recent years, where two pieces - Martyrs and Mary – were each screened daily. The first showed four individuals being martyred by the elements – earth, air, fire and water - while the second features different representations of the Mother of Christ.
Viola had many exhibitions in Ireland, including at St John’s Priory at Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2007, and the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda in 2012. His works screened at the latter included Silent Life, in which his camera focused on a succession of newborn babies in an American hospital, capturing their first extraordinary moments of existence.
Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th century mural The Last Supper, commissioned by the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy, is one of the most famous artworks in existence. The monumental painting depicts Jesus’ final meal with the Twelve Apostles before his crucifixion.
In July, the opening ceremony of the Olympics on the River Seine in Paris included what was taken by many as a parody of The Last Supper, featuring a troupe of drag queens, a transgender model and a semi-naked singer in a fruit bowl. There was – bien sur – an outcry among Christians and the far right.
The Olympics organisers apologised, but Thomas Jolly, who designed the opening ceremony, was more circumspect, insisting his intention had actually been to throw “a big pagan party linked to the gods of Olympus.”
The Canova Casts are among the 3,500 artworks being removed from the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, following its closure in September to facilitate a €29 refurbishment. The 25 casts, based on masterpieces in the Vatican collection, were produced by Antonio Canova at the behest of Pope Pius VII, and were gifted to the city of Cork in 1818. They include Laocoon and his Sons, The Bathing Venus and Discobolous at Rest. This is the first time in 140 years the casts have left the building.
The Crawford’s redevelopment is expected to take 2.5 years. The project, designed by Grafton Architects, will include the addition of a five-storey extension, a new restaurant, and 50% more exhibition and storage space.
Among the Irish artists exhibiting internationally in 2024 was the Cork-born Aideen Barry, who represented Ireland at the prestigious Bangkok Art Biennale in October. Barry’s work, an installation called Oblivion/Seachmalltacht, featured what she describes as a “15 minute 36 second Gothic Dance Apocalyptic Electronica Artwork combining Irish harp and Inuit throat singing,” and showed at the National Gallery of Thailand.
Barry collaborated on the project with the Inuit singer/songwriter RIIT, Irish harpist Aisling Lyons, composers Cathal Murphy and Stephen Shannon, and costume designer Margaret O’Connor. The piece was originally commissioned by the Irish Traditional Music Archive and Music Network in response to the work of the musicologist Edward Bunting, who is credited with saving the Irish harp from extinction.
In November, Amanda Dunsmore, who lectures in Fine Art at Limerick School of Art & Design, won the AIB Portrait Prize for a work on video called Lydia. Her subject, Dr Lydia Foy, is an Irish trans woman who undertook reassignment surgery in 1992, and applied to Ireland’s Office of the Registrar General for a new birth certificate to reflect her gender the following year. When she was refused, there followed a 22-year legal battle with the State before she became the first person to be legally recognised by the Gender Recognition Act in 2015.
Dr Foy also has the distinction of being in the Guinness Book of Records for having grown the tallest foxglove in the world, at 3.29 metres. Dunsmore’s video was filmed in her garden.
The most that has even been paid for a work of art is the $450.3 million lavished on Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in 2017. That record remained unbroken in 2024, when the only artwork to sell for more than $100 million was Rene Magritte’s The Empire of Light.
The Empire of Light dates to 1954, and was one of seventeen versions of the same scene painted in oils by Magritte, with a daytime sky above, and a nighttime suburban scene below, featuring a house, some trees and a single streetlight. The dreamlike scene is typical of the Surrealist art being produced in this period, when artists such as Magritte sought to comment on the weirdness of post-War western society.
The Empire of Light was the crown jewel of the late interior designer Mica Ertegun’s collection. It was bought for $121.2 million by an anonymous collector in November.
Also in November, Jack B Yeats’ painting in oils, O’Connell Bridge, became the only Irish artwork to break the million euro mark in 2024 when it sold for £886,000 (€1,063,210) at Christie’s, London.
O’Connell Bridge depicts a handful of anonymous pedestrians crossing over the Liffey. It was purchased directly from the artist by Dr E MacCarvill of Dublin in 1945, and was eventually acquired by the Monaghan-born Mary Hobart née McKenna and her husband Alan. The couple ran the prestigious Pyms Gallery in London, and invested heavily in Irish art. Alan Hobart died in 2021, and Mary in 2023. Around 150 pieces from their collection, including works by Wiliam Orpen, John Lavery and Mary Swanzy, sold at the Christie’s auction.
The Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian is surely one of the most talked-about artworks of recent years. The piece, in an edition of three, comprises a fresh banana stuck to a wall with duct tape, exactly 1.6 metres above the floor. Comedian was first shown at Art Basel Miami Basel in 2019, when two copies were sold for $120,000 each; the third was donated to the Guggenheim Museum.
One copy of Comedian is now in the possession of the artist Damien Hirst, and was shown in the Dominion exhibition at his Newport Street Gallery in London over the summer. The other made the news again in November, when it came up for auction at Sotheby’s, New York with an estimate of $1,000,000 - $1,500,000. The piece was purchased by the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun for $5,200,000. A week later, at a press conference in Hong Kong, Sun ate the banana.
