Dorothy Cross to Gilbert & George... 10 art exhibitions and other projects to watch out for
L-R: Dorothy Cross; Gilbert & George
Born in Montmartre, Paris in 1865, Suzanne Valadon was many things; a waitress, a circus acrobat, and a model. She also taught herself to paint, and her portraits and landscapes were greatly admired by contemporaries such as Georges Braques and Pablo Picasso. This retrospective brings together over 200 of Valadon’s drawings and paintings, and will be one of the last major exhibitions at the Pompidou before it closes for a five-year refurbishment.
Dorothy Cross’s Kinship project involved the return of a 2,000 year old Egyptian mummy – long part of UCC’s antiquities collection – to the Museum of Cairo, a mission that was finally accomplished in early December. Cross’s book on the project, featuring essays by President Michael D Higgins, Max Porter and Edward de Waal, amongst others, will be published by Lilliput in February.
Dorothy Cross will also be one of the guest speakers at the annual MAKE conference, hosted by Crawford College of Art and Design Contemporary Applied Arts Department at Cork School of Music in March. This year’s conference has Art/Interspecies as its theme, and will also feature appearances by performative filmmaker Marcus Coates, Dark Ecology author Timothy Morton, and Slovenian artist Sasa Spacal.
Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone were both from Dublin, and met while studying art in London. They went on to study in Paris in the early 1920s. The two are often credited with introducing Cubism to Ireland. Along with Louis le Brocquy, Jack Hanlon and Norah McGuinness, they helped found the ground-breaking Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1944. The Art of Friendship will feature 90 drawings, paintings and works in stained glass.
Do Ho Suh is best known for creating elaborate installations replicating the houses he has lived in, in his native South Korea, America, and the UK. Fabrics are his favoured medium. This survey will cover the past 30 years of his career, and will also include mosaics compiled from thousands of photographs.
Jenny Saville was one of a loose group of Young Brit Artists championed by Charles Saatchi in the early 1990s. She stood out for her devotion to classical figurative painting, and particularly her studies of the female nude, imbued with a decidedly contemporary spirit. The Anatomy of Painting is her first major museum exhibition, and brings together 50 of her charcoal drawings and paintings.
Dublin-born and London raised, Seán Scully is one of the most successful artists in the world. Though best-known for his epic abstract paintings, he also works in sculpture and print, and has also explored figuration in recent years. Scully’s 80th birthday in June coincides with the opening of this major retrospective, featuring work from throughout the past 60 years.
Emily Kam Kngwarray, an Aboriginal Australian woman from the Utopia region in the Northern Territory, only began painting in her 70s. By the time of her death, aged 86 in 1996, she had produced over 3,000 works in acrylics. Her exhibition at Tate Modern is the first major survey of her oeuvre in Europe.
The 41st EVA International will see Irish and international creatives occupy spaces all over Limerick city, in what remains the largest biennale visual arts event in Ireland. This year’s edition will feature a guest programme curated by Eszter Szakacs, along with new artist commissions selected by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais and Roy Claire Potter.
The London art world’s most loveable eccentrics opened their own museum in Spitalfields in 2023. This autumn, the Hayward Gallery will assemble a collection of Gilbert and George’s major photographic works from the past 25 years, all in a garish palette of colours. Represented will be series such as New Horny Pictures (2001), The Beard Pictures (2016) and The Corpsing Pictures (2022), exploring the themes of sex, religion, corruption and death.
