DUBLIN.- A new IMMA exhibition Gaze, presented as part of the IMMA Collection: Freud Project 2016 – 2021, a major five-year initiative where fifty-two works by painter Lucian Freud (1922-2011) are on loan to the museum’s collection by private lenders.

During this unique five-year project, IMMA is presenting a series of Freud-related exhibitions each year in a dedicated Freud Centre in IMMA’s Garden Galleries. The first exhibition IMMA Collection: Freud Project 2016 - 2021 presented the entirety of the Lucian Freud loan. For the second exhibition, The Ethics of Scrutiny, IMMA invited visual artist Daphne Wright to curate an exhibition in response to Freud’s works. The third exhibition in the series, Gaze, continues to actively explore Freud’s practice by positioning works from other artists in the IMMA Collection alongside selected works by Freud.

Showing alongside works by Lucian Freud the exhibition includes work by Marina Abramović, Stephan Balkenhol, Phil Collins, John Coplans, Dorothy Cross, Pauline Cummins, Albrecht Dürer, Ann Hamilton, Edward Hopper, Rebecca Horn, Annie Leibovitz, Mark Manders, Edward McGuire, Danny Osborne, Rembrandt, Thomas Ruff and Hannah Starkey, all drawn from the IMMA Collection.

As the title suggests, the exhibition is concerned with a human gaze; of the artist, the sitter or the viewer of the work. Gaze particularly asks us to examine relationships between the artist and the sitter, and also focuses on the representation of the nude and the often visceral portrayal of the body in art, particularly in Freud’s work. Unfolding over a series of three floors in the dedicated Freud Centre, the exhibition encourages the visitor to journey from room to room, allowing space for reflection, but always considering who is gazing at whom. At times you are sharing the viewpoint of the sitter, at times the artist, but you are always involved in a constant exchange between all three perspectives in the room; the viewer, artist and sitter.

The juxtaposition of works by Lucian Freud, Phil Collins and Thomas Ruff, for example, poses particular questions in relation to the subject of the gaze and the enduring relationship between artist, sitter and the viewer. Young Serbs (2001) is a series of portraits by Phil Collins of young people living in Belgrade. Collins focuses on close-up and sometimes partial views of the faces of young people known to him, as they lie on the grass. Themes of youth and nature are to the fore, while the actual gaze of the young people seems distant and disenchanted. Similarly, Thomas Ruff photographed young people with whom he was familiar. These passport-style portraits are monumental in scale and are startlingly frank. Alongside these photographs, a Lucian Freud portrait of young people is presented, entitled Bella and Esther (1988). This painting is part of a major series of portraits of Freud’s daughters painted in the 1980s. Reclining on a chesterfield sofa, a sense of ease with each other is clear in the work. This selection of works explores adolescence. The young sitters are unfazed by the artistic process of having their portrait captured, while their facial expressions reveal a mixture of individual attitudes; nonchalant, assertive, seductive, vulnerable and distracted states of mind are all displayed.

A key work in the exhibition is Inis t’Oírr: Aran Dance (1985) by Pauline Cummins which presents an alternative perspective to the art-historical treatment of the nude. This slide projection work focuses on a woman’s act of knitting a jumper for her male partner. The Aran sweater is presented as sensuous and strong, made by a woman for a man. The artist has said of the work; “The woman’s voice begins talking about drawing and knitting but becomes more explicitly sexual as the tape proceeds. She describes arousing the man. She does not objectify the man, but she is in control, she is the observer”.

The themes of age and the self-portrait are also examined. Freud’s exquisitely painted The Painter’s Mother Resting, I (1976) is charged with melancholy and beauty. Two self-portraits by Freud are also presented, the earlier from 1949 aged 27 and the later from 1985, when he was 63 years old. In the latter, Reflection (Self-Portrait) (1985), Freud is far from the ungainly nude subject of his many other portraits and self-portraits. While he does not spare the signs of his own aging, Freud directs his gaze beyond the canvas, as if to challenge you, the viewer, in contrast to many of his other portraits. Presented in the same room is a photograph by John Coplans who also documented his ageing male body, in his case using photography from the mid-1960s onwards. His series of direct black-and-white self-portraits challenges the taboo of age. He said in 1994, “I have the feeling that I’m alive, I have a body. I’m seventy years old, and generally the bodies of seventy-year old men look somewhat like my body. It's a neglected subject matter...So, I’m using my body and saying, even though it's a seventy-year-old body, I can make it interesting. This keeps me alive and gives me vitality”.

We know that Freud was familiar with several works by old masters: Freud’s parents had prints of watercolours by Albrecht Dürer on their walls, while his grandfather Sigmund Freud gave him colour reproductions of Pieter Bruegel’s The Months. Included in this exhibition, Dürer’s The Great Horse (1505) is placed in the same room as Freud’s A Filly (1970), in recognition of these early artistic influences and to highlight his deep connection to animals. Animals were a recurrent theme within his portraits, appearing on their own or alongside human sitters throughout his work. Triple Portrait (1987-1988) is an excellent example of this. Freud once confessed, “I am inclined to think of ‘humans’…as animals dressed up.”