On the Town: All talk centred on the unmade beds of French artist Sophie Calle. Curious eyes peered at the writings and images on view at a show by the internationally acclaimed artist at the Irish Museum of Modern Art this week.
Calle's work "insists on the power of the imagination as a forensic power, examining, pulling apart, watching, detailing", said Colm Tóibín, when he introduced the artist's first exhibition in Ireland this week.
"She is direct and sharp in the view that . . . the personal, the insistent and relentless examination of the self, is supreme," he said. "The bed for her is privacy and comfort, but also a site of pain." Her work is "the product of an immense and transgressive wilfulness", he said, adding, "Her mind and her experience, in all their mixture of vast comedy and utter pain, sheer brazenness, mad pursuits and confused beauty, make their way into words and images, stark and sharp, stripped bare of concealment, raw and emotionally awkward."
Ailbhe Smyth, head of UCD's department of women's studies, artist Katie Holten, who is off to Cornell University on a Fulbright Scholarship for the next two years, Carmel Kelly, secretary of the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, architect Dermot Boyd who viewed Calle's work in the Centre Pompidou earlier this year, sculptor Barry Flanagan with his muse Jessica Sturgess, and art critic Ciarán Bennett, were all at IMMA to enjoy the first viewing in Ireland of Calle's work.
Martine Moreau, arts officer with the French embassy, said she especially loved the themes in No Sex Last Night, a work from 1992. Another work, Exquisite Pain, 1984-2003, is based on the artist's recollection of a break-up she considered at the time to be the most painful experience of her life.
Sophie Calle continues at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until August 15th