The Crawford Art Gallery Celebrates Barrie Cooke's 80th Birthday

Written by Shaemus Flannigan Friday, 16 December 2011 01:16

Cork, Ireland.- The Crawford Art Gallery is pleased to present "Barrie Cooke" on view through January 14th 2012. This exhibition celebrates the work of Barrie Cooke’s immense career and prodigious achievements as he reaches his 80th Birthday this year. Karen Sweeney, Assistant Curator at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, curated the Barrie Cooke exhibition. After opening in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in June of this year, a selected group of works have been chosen to tour to the Crawford Art Gallery and then Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris in February 2012. The Barrie Cooke exhibition showcases works, from both private and institutional lenders, that span his entire career as an abstract expressionist painter. The exhibition explores Cooke’s continuous reference of the natural world; from the breathtaking paintings of an ancient Irish elk found in a bog and the bone boxes of the 1970s to the energetic paintings of rural Irish landscape and the famous nude portraits.

Cooke had his first solo exhibition in Dublin in 1955 at the Little Theatre, Brown Thomas Gallery and has since exhibited widely. Major exhibitions include Retrospective at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 1986 and Retrospective: Claocló in the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands, 1992. Cooke is very well travelled and this has contributed to his unique style of work, from visiting places such as New Zealand and Malaya to even Lapland.  This exhibition will recognise the prodigious achievements of Barrie Cooke’s career and an extensive catalogue is available with a foreword by the Irish Museum of Modern Art Director Enrique Juncosa; and essays by poet Seamus Heaney, Karen Sweeney, Brian Dillion and an interview by Dorothy Cross.


Crawford Art Gallery, a National Cultural Institiution and regional art museum for Munster, is dedicated to the visual arts, both historic and contemporary. Located in the heart of Cork city, beside the Opera House, the Gallery is a critical part of Ireland's cultural and tourism infrastructure, welcoming over 200,000 visitors a year. The Gallery´s permanent collection comprises over 2,000 works, ranging from eighteenth century Irish and European painting and sculpture, through to contemporary video installations. At the heart of the collection is a collection of Greek and Roman sculpture casts, brought to Cork in 1818 from the Vatican Museum in Rome. The collection is particularly strong in Irish art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through its temporary exhibitions, publications and education programmes, the Crawford Gallery is committed to fostering recognition, critical assessment, and acknowledgement of historical and contemporary art practice. The Gallery´s programming includes both Irish and international artists, reflecting the position of Ireland as a vital member of the EU and international community. The Gallery serves a wide range of audiences, ranging from local communities in Cork, schools in the Munster region and visitors from Ireland and overseas.

The Crawford Art Gallery´s art collection was formed in 1819, when a set of Graeco-Roman and Neo-Classical sculpture casts were presented to the Cork Society of Arts. This collection was quickly augmented with works by students and teachers of the Cork School of Art, formed that same year: the students included Samuel Forde, Daniel Maclise and John Hogan. In 1825, the collection was moved to its present building, the former Custom House of Cork. The old Custom House provided a home for the Royal Cork Institution, the body that had taken over responsibility for the art collection, between 1825 and 1849. With the founding of a university in Cork, responsibility for the art collection was transferred to the Cork Government School of Design, established in 1850, that continued to occupy the old Custom House. In 1884, a new extension was added to the building, providing purpose-built galleries for exhibiting paintings and sculptures. Renamed the Crawford School of Art, the art collection, used also as an adjunct to the teaching of art, continued to grow, under the stewardship of the Technical Instruction Committee.


The collection was augmented with the purchase of works by Irish artists, many of them staff or graduates of the Cork School of Art. This pattern continued through the twentieth century, although there were several developments, notably the bequest of funds for the purchase of works for the collection by Joseph Stafford Gibson in 1919. This fund was used through the mid-20th century to acquire a sizeable collection of mainly academic paintings. Private donations of works, such as the Seamus Murphy sculpture collection, will continue to form an important part of the Gallery´s acquisition strategy in the future, although such acquisitions need to be guided by this policy document. In 2006, a new company was established by the Minister of Arts, Sport and Tourism to manage the Gallery. Ownership of the building was transferred to the Office of Public Works, and the Gallery designated a National Cultural Institution. The School of Art had long since moved (in 1979) to a different building, and in 2007 the administrative offices of the City of Cork VEC were also transferred to new premises nearby. The Department of Arts Sport and Tourism now provides an annual grant in aid that enables the purchase of a small number of significant works, both of historic and contemporary art. The legislation Section 1,003 of the Finance Act, through providing income tax relief on works donated to the Crawford and other National Cultural Institutions, has become an important avenue for acquisitions to the permanent collection. The permanent collection of the Crawford Art Gallery has grown steadily in recent years. It is strongest in 20th century and contemporary Irish art. In 1990 the collection numbered some 1,500 paintings sculptures, prints and other works of art. These works were listed in the Illustrated Summary Catalogue, published in 1992. Since that date, over 1,000 new works have been added to the collection, which now contains over 2,500 items. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.crawfordartgallery.ie

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