With a major show still running at IMMA, Hughie O'Donoghue begins the year with another one, this time at the RHA Gallagher Gallery, which will display the monumental Passion works which have been gifted (by an anonymous patron) to the State. The opening of the Jack B. Yeats Museum at the National Gallery of Ireland in February is another early highlight. For the first time, it provides an opportunity for the Gallery to display the full range of its unrivalled collection of Yeats's work, from large paintings to tiny sketchbooks.
Photographer Perry Ogden's Pony Kids, images from the Smithfield horse fairs, will be on show at the Hugh Lane Gallery in February. The Douglas Hyde's major show in the first half of the year is by the highly-regarded Belgian painter Luc Tymans, whose quiet, eliptical style of representation has been influential. For some years German artist Joseph Beuys was the brightest star in the art firmament, but in the 1990s his brilliance seems to have dimmed somewhat. The master of fat and felt will be the subject of IMMA's centrepiece exhibition for the first half of the year, when Joseph Bueys: Multiples, comprising several hundred works, opens in May. The Gallagher, meanwhile, features a small-scale retrospective of the work of painter Evin Nolan and, at the end of June, a retrospective by sculptor Melanie le Brocquy. Later in the year major events to look forward to include a double retrospective featuring the work of two great outsider artists, Cornish fisherman Alfred Wallis and Tory Islander James Dixon, at IMMA, which winds up the year with a showing of Kathy Prendergast's city drawings.
The Gallagher features work made in Ireland by the German neo-expressionist Karl Horst Hodicke and a survey show of contemporary Irish art. Further afield, it's worth mentioning several retrospectives of interest: Sculptor Richard Deacon at the Liverpool Tate, Monet in the 20th Century at the Royal Academy in London, Mark Rothko at the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris, all three opening in January. Then there's the big Jackson Pollock at the Tate in March.
