DUBLIN.- IMMA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art announced today a series of important new acquisitions to the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art. These works represent a vital expansion of the Collection, ensuring that IMMA’s Collection continues to reflect the richness, diversity, and innovation of modern and contemporary practice.

IMMA’s Director, Annie Fletcher, has brought a renewed focus to the Collection, recognising it as the keystone to establishing IMMA as a Global Learning and Research Centre for the study of Modern and Contemporary Art outlined in IMMA’s Strategy 2024-2028. Despite the absence of a dedicated annual acquisitions budget, IMMA’s Collection has grown considerably over the past twelve months, acquiring 67 artworks thanks to a combination of donations, bequests, assisted purchases and support from the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport.

Philanthropy has played a central role in this most recent group of acquisitions. IMMA is continuing to build its capacity to collect through initiatives like the IMMA Collectors Circle, a philanthropic community dedicated to transforming IMMA’s ability to proactively purchase important works through an annual donation or by acquiring works on behalf of the museum under Section 1003 of the Taxes Consolidation Act (1997). This philanthropic community has enabled IMMA to proactively acquire works of exceptional artistic, cultural and institutional importance, enhancing the breadth and depth of the Collection, ensuring that Ireland’s cultural heritage continues to grow in meaningful ways.

IMMA Director, Annie Fletcher, said: “Being in a position to collect significant contemporary Irish practice like Eimear Walshe’s ROMANTIC IRELAND alongside a textile by Leonora Carrington is quite extraordinary. Not only are all of these works significant, but they are also all central to IMMA’s story. They contribute to the legacy of exhibitions past, and amplify our ability to explore important narratives and practices into the future. I am so proud to see these works come into the National Collection. It is a rich resource to lend and share with other galleries and museums across the world and for the Irish public to enjoy for generations to come.

Many of these new acquisitions demonstrate the transformative power of philanthropy. We are deeply grateful to our donors, the IMMA Collectors Circle, and of course Minister O’Donovan and the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport, for their belief in the importance of collecting contemporary practice and their commitment to building a National Collection that reflects the richness and complexity of our times.”

New Acquisition Highlights

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)

Leonora Carrington was one of the few women artists associated with the Paris Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Although largely marginalised during her lifetime due to her gender, she is now recognised as a key figure in twentieth-century art. Born in England in 1917 to a family of Irish descent, Carrington’s imagination was shaped by stories of Irish myth and legend told by her mother and grandmother. These narratives informed her lifelong exploration of metamorphosis, spirituality, and the female imagination. IMMA’s major 2013 retrospective, The Celtic Surrealist, reframed her work through her Irish heritage and re-established her significance in Surrealist history.

The newly acquired High Queen of Ireland (1945) and Untitled Tapestry (c. 1948–1955) epitomise Carrington’s interest in Irish mythology and her distinctive cross-cultural symbolism. Woven with references to Irish, Egyptian, and Aztec traditions, the tapestry exemplifies what scholar Susan Aberth has described as Carrington’s “uncanny ability to absorb cross-cultural influences into her unique symbolic universe.” These works represent a profound strengthening of Ireland’s connection to one of the most important Surrealist artists of the twentieth century.

Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948)

Internationally renowned artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña, recipient of major honours including the Gold Lion for Lifetime Achievement (Venice Biennale 2022), the 2025 Roswitha Haftmann Prize, and the inaugural Art Basel Awards Icon Artist Gold Medal (2025), enters the National Collection with two deeply resonant paintings: Fethard Sheela Na Gig (2025) and Mother Shadow (2024–25). These works reflect Vicuña’s lifelong engagement with indigenous knowledge, ancestral memory, and the precarity of ecological systems. They also echo her personal connection to Ireland, developed during her 2006 visit and explored in IMMA’s current exhibition Reverse Migration, a Poetic Journey (7 November 2025 – 5 July 2026), her first solo show in Ireland.

Hilary Heron (1923–1977)

In 2024 IMMA presented Hilary Heron: A Retrospective, the first major exhibition of Heron’s work since 1964. The pioneering Dublin-born sculptor was renowned in the mid-20th century for her technical innovation, unmatched by any artists working in Ireland at the time. She enjoyed considerable success in her lifetime and co-represented Ireland at the 1956 Venice Biennale alongside Louis le Brocquy. Dicky Bird-Cage (1960) is a welded copper sculpture which featured in IMMA’s acclaimed retrospective. Like Carrington, this exhibition sought to bring Heron’s work back into public focus and correct the ways her work has been overlooked in Irish and international art histories. This acquisition further cements the legacy of this significant modernist figure.

Eimear Walshe (b.1992)

Artist, writer, and educator, Eimear Walshe uses academic study in Queer Theory and Feminist Epistemology in the production of sculpture, publishing, performances and lectures. ROMANTIC IRELAND (2024) is Walshe’s acclaimed installation for the Irish Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2024. ROMANTIC IRELAND stages soapy, dramatic encounters between character archetypes from the 19th–21st centuries set on the site of an unfinished earth build. These figures occupy an abstracted ruin, a site under simultaneous construction and demolition. The soundtrack is a five-voice opera describing the scene of an eviction, composed by Amanda Feery with a libretto by Walshe. The work confronts the viewer with narratives of empire’s displacement and ruination, the criminalisation of the colonised, and intergenerational conflict and betrayal. ROMANTIC IRELAND was most recently exhibited as part of the 41st EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art, Limerick.

Alex Cecchetti (b.1977)

Alex Cecchetti is an Italian artist, poet and choreographer. He describes his practice as an ‘art of avoidance’ producing specific situations or objects that can exist both inside and outside traditional exhibitions. His work is focused on the construction of specific narratives that are experienced both mentally and physically by the audience.

The journey of one breath (2024), is an immersive installation exploring, how much life is in one single breath? Freediving is the art of fully living and experiencing one breath. Alex Cecchetti’s practice traverses the exploration of the sea and the exploration of plant life through natural dyeing. Video projections are projected on indigo tainted silk curtains. The videos were shot in the Philippines on two separate dives. The first one is a free dive at Luluyuan Lake, one of the holy lakes of the indigenous Tagbanwa people. The second one is a scuba dive in Aapo Reef, a coral site in the Philippines at the Tubbataha Reef. The indigo curtains are dyed by hand in indigo with circular motions that remind the viewer of waves. Other imaginary figures can be spotted in those aleatory shapes. All the images come from the mind; the silk pieces and their motives do exactly what the ocean does sometimes: they listen and welcome transformations and shapeshifters. The journey of one breath was one of the central works shown in IMMA’s recent exhibition Take a Breath (2024-2025).

Elizabeth Cope (b. 1952)

A significant figure among a generation of Irish women artists who sustained rigorous practices outside mainstream institutional recognition, Elizabeth Cope’s inclusion in the Collection is an important addition to IMMA’s ongoing feminist re-evaluation of Irish art. Living and working in Kilkenny, Cope’s career spans more than five decades, during which she has developed a vigorous and distinctive painting practice marked by direct observation, vivid colour, and expressive energy.

The diptych Nest (Positive), Nest (Negative) (2005-2006) was included in IMMA’s 2025 exhibition Staying with the Trouble. The two canvases are directly connected: sections of Nest (Negative) have been cut from the surface and placed into Nest (Positive). Each painting depends on the other, one marked by what has been taken away, the other by what has been added. This exchange gives the pair a sense of movement and transformation, as if the paintings are in continuous dialogue. The cut-out method brings a physical energy and humour to the work. The works hover between the everyday and the fantastic, between memory and invention. In this way, Nest (Positive) and Nest (Negative) extend Cope’s ongoing interest in the cycles of making, unmaking, and remaking that define her practice, transforming ordinary materials and domestic life into something both strange and vital.

Patrick Hennessy (1915–1980)

Patrick Hennessy’s work offers a poignant and coded articulation of queer experience in mid-20th century Ireland. Working within a society where homosexuality remained criminalised, Hennessy developed a unique visual language, blending surrealism, symbolism, and what critics term “Ironic Religiosity.” Pietà (1967) is an oil on canvas, and among the largest ever painted by Patrick Hennessy, completed at the height of his success. It is an important example of his work in the style of Queer Surrealism and in the mode of ‘Ironic Religiosity’. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Hennessy engaged directly with Ireland’s Catholic-dominated culture, appropriating its tropes and values while refracting them through Surrealist strategies of distortion and irrational juxtaposition. On the surface such works may appear devout, but their codes articulate a counter-narrative that destabilises the authority of Catholic ideology.

IMMA collects in line with its Acquisition Policy, which prioritises works that resonate with the Museum’s mission to connect audiences with the most important developments in modern and contemporary art. Each acquisition is carefully considered to ensure it reflects the evolving narratives of art today and contributes to Ireland’s cultural legacy.