Brian O´Doherty. Beyond the White Cube

Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane will inaugurate its new extension and gallery refurbishment with a major retrospective of the work of Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland opening 5 May and running until 27 August 2006. The exhibition will travel to the Grey Art Gallery, New York in 2007.

O’Doherty/ Ireland is amongst the most complex and controversial figures emanating from the American Art scene of the 1960's. His seminal writings (Inside the White Cube; American Masters: The Voice and the Myth) are now standard texts. A qualified medical doctor and emerging artist when he left Dublin, O’Doherty moved to New York in 1957 where he became a pioneering figure of Conceptualism. He is renowned in particular for his Labyrinths and Rope Drawings and in the words of George Segal has created “one of the great post-war drawing oeuvres”. Since 1972 he has exhibited his work under the name Patrick Ireland "until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland."

This exhibition will feature work spanning 60 years of the artist's career including painting, sculpture, installations, drawings, and three new site-specific works: Golden Door, a magnificent example of his unique Rope Drawing works, a 9ft square wall painting Song of the Vowels; and a life-size Labyrinth.

A major catalogue will be published by the Hugh Lane to accompany the exhibition with texts by leading critics and writers such as Hans Belting, Hubert Damisch, Mark Rosenthal, Brenda Moore-McCann, Mary-Ruth Walsh, David Moos, Barbara Dawson, Alex Alberro and Norah Alter, Anne-Marie Bonnet, Ingmar Lahneman and Thomas McEvilley.

O’Doherty/ Ireland is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and at the international exhibitions Documenta, in Kassel, Germany, and Rosc, Dublin. The author of three books on art and two novels (one of which was shortlisted for The Booker Prize), O'Doherty essays published as "Inside the White Cube" have made the phrase "white cube" part of the everyday international discourse on museums and galleries.

BEYOND THE WHITE CUBE
a retrospective of Brian O´Doherty / Patrick Ireland