Enrique Juncosa

Shortly after the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown, Iran do Espírito Santo, in São Paulo, contacted Enrique Juncosa, in Mallorca, proposing to collaborate on a book. It so happened that Juncosa had started some poems in prose related to travels based on personal memories and imagination, and which referred to a way of life that was suddenly suspended. He wrote 40 poems, suggesting the idea of quarantine, encompassing quarantine, encompassed under the title Pangolin, an animal pointed out as the initial propagator of the virus. Do Espírito Santo made 40 watercolours, one per poem, related to the text, although not always in an evident way, suggesting an inner journey. Floating images in a white space, abstract and geometric in origin, with the delicacy of oriental miniatures. Text in English and Spanish.

First published to accompany major retrospective exhibitions at West Cork Arts Centre and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), this full-colour illustrated monograph explores William Crozier’s whole career, taking in the second half of the twentieth century – a key period in the development of British and Irish art. The catalogue is furnished with essays presenting brand new research by renown art historians and curators, Illuminated by unpublished sources and personal memoirs. What emerges is a picture of the continuum that runs through all of Crozier’s work, revealing a fascinating narrative that, far from a story of transformation from darker, earlier imagery into the apparent hedonism of later landscapes, is one of continuity of purpose in Crozier’s mind-set that connects 1950s Britain and Ireland with the concerns of the new millennium. Profoundly affected by post-war existential philosophy, Crozier consciously allied himself and his work with contemporary European art throughout the 1950s and 1960s, towards painters such as Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Nicolas de Staël. The landscape became the source of visceral paintings: For Crozier, ravaged landscapes symbolised the torment and fear of the post-war condition at the heart of existentialism. Only ten years separate these images of traumatized humanity from the luxuriantly colourful works inspired by the landscape of West Cork. His early skill as a colourist reaches its zenith in paintings that capture the essence and appearance of the West Cork landscape in ways immediately recognisable to the viewer, but they are also concerned to capture a landscape during a period of great physical and social change. Crozier believed that when painting the Irish landscape he must, “Tell the truth. Say it simply.”

"Out of the Dark Room" comprises a selection of more than 150 works drawn from the exceptional collection of modern and contemporary photographs of Irish-American collector David Kronn, which he has pledged to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in its entirety. As diverse as photography itself the collection traces some of the key developments in twentieth century photography's approach to architecture, landscape and portraiture whilst also engaging with the unexpected ways contemporary artists have experimented with the medium.

Enrique Juncosa is one of the foremost curators of contemporary art in the twenty-first century, and a lifelong champion of international art in Ireland. During his nine years at Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Art, this Spanish director’s energetic, sometimes controversial style secured this relatively small museum a place in the pantheon of postmodernism as one of the most vibrant and innovative venues in Europe. Featuring an extended full-colour photographic essay and an introduction by Colm Toibin, this volume of Juncosa’s writings, published by IMMA (in Boulevard Magenta, the Museum’s literary magazine) and elsewhere around the world, includes literary texts (short stories and long poems) and essays on Irish and international artists as diverse as Howard Hodgkin, Terry Winters, Anne Madden, Bhupen Khakhar and Willie McKeown, as well as filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The Irish Years illustrates Juncosa’s unusual or unorthodox exhibitions: pairing, for example, Hans Christian Andersen and William Burroughs; staging an exhibition on Morton Feldman in relation to the visual arts, an opera by Gerald Barry or a concert of electronic music by Ryochi Ikeda. Assembled for the first time, this collection of writings will fascinate readers and students of all disciplines and interests, providing a luminous record of a particularly vibrant period in Irish art history.