Irish Art Auctions - Dublin, April

GORMLEYS ART AUCTIONS - Berkeley Court Hotel, DUBLIN

This auction will take place on Sunday 18th April 2010 at 2pm in the D4
Berkeley Court Hotel in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4 - The Grosvenor Suite.

280 quality works of Irish Art will be offered including: Conor, Middleton,
Blackshaw, Wilks, McDonnell, Murphy, Le Brocquy, Hamilton Vallely and
Campbell feature. 200 lots have a guide price of ?500 - ?3000 including works by
Knuttel , Morris, Sutton, Waldron, Gillespie and Maccabe among others,
contributing to an interesting and exciting sale.
Viewing will be held 16-18th April during the following times: Friday from 5pm to 9pm
Saturday from 11am to 7pm Sunday from 11am to 2pm

WANT TO BID ONLINE?
Once registered you will be able to place bids for items in any of Gormleys
Auctions, take part in Live Auctions and purchase 'Buy Now' items right
away.

GO TO: http://www.gormleysartauctions.com/auction.asp?AuctionID=33 to see
works offered for auction.
GO TO: http://www.gormleysartauctions.com/pg_login.asp to register to bid
Online or Live at the auction.

Entries are now also being accepted for Gormleys May auction.
For more information on selling your works please send an email to
info@gormleysartauctions.com

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WHYTES AUCTIONS - DUBLIN
Next Dublin sales at Whytes is History & Literature on 23 April followed by
an Important Irish Art on 31 May. Contact Ian Whyte (Iw@whytes.ie) or go to
http://www.whytes.ie to take part - selling or buying.

Irish Art To Fetch Top Prices

Influential paintings by two of Ireland's most sought-after artists top the bill when a collection of Irish art goes under the hammer next month reports Independent.ie. And despite the drop in art prices, experts at Sotheby's of London said the works by Sir John Lavery and Louis le Brocquy could fetch more than half a million euro each. Auctioneers said le Brocquy's Spanish Shawl, A Study in White, was hugely influential while Lavery's The Gold Turban was one of his finest art works. Auctioneers put a guide price of 331,000-555,000 euro on the le Brocquy work and 441,000-665,000 euro on the Lavery, both of which are being sold from private collections. The pieces are included in Sotheby's annual Irish art sale on May 6 but will be brought to Dublin, Belfast and Lismore Castle, Waterford for pre-auction displays later this month. http://www.sothebys.com/(Sotheby's). For full source and full article click the Headline).
Irish Art

Allied Irish Bank Owes Us Its Art

AIB’s terrific art collection of art should be handed over to the people of Ireland as a very small and very humble gesture of apology for the bank’s fecklessness, writes Fintan O'Toole for The Irish Times. Since we are impoverishing ourselves, our children and perhaps our grandchildren to bail out the bankers, we may as well get something back. In the case of Allied Irish Bank, which has behaved with contempt for the law and the public for decades, one of the things we should take back is its terrific collection of Irish art. AIB has what is surely the finest collection of 20th century Irish painting in private hands, and one that in some respects rivals the holdings of public institutions. We’ve already paid for it many times over, so we should at least be able to enjoy it. Indeed, if AIB had managed money half as well as it has collected art, we probably wouldn’t be facing another bill of €7.5 billion for its fecklessness and recklessness. The bank adopted, as early as 1980, a coherent and farsighted approach to buying art. At a time when Irish work was still hugely undervalued (both in monetary and in aesthetic terms), AIB took the bold decision that, instead of just accumulating stuff higgledy-piggledy to cover the walls of its new corporate headquarters, it would try to do one thing right. That one thing was to represent the entire history of Irish modernism, roughly from 1890 to the present. In largely fulfilling that ambition, the bank has ended up with something of genuine importance. There may be duds among the 3,000-odd pieces, but if the artworks were loans, the ratio of performing to non-performing assets would be such that there would be no need for an artistic version of Nama. A repository of works could be established, allowing paintings to circulate or responsible groups to borrow particular works for exhibitions, discussions or other events. The living artists whose work makes up the bulk of the collection would surely feel far more honoured to have that work bring a little joy to benighted citizens than hanging in a boardroom where so much harm has been done. For full source and full article click the Headline). Irish Art

Docherty Star Of NI Art Exhibition

Willie Doherty may not consider himself a "professional Derry person", but growing up in Northern Ireland's second city has had a considerable influence on his art, the BBC reports. Since first coming to prominence in 1985, Doherty has gone on to become one of Northern Ireland's most successful artists. He was nominated for the Turner Art Prize in 1994 and 2003 and also represented Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2007, an event which is billed as the world's most prestigious visual art festival.
Ghost Story, the work he created for the festival, is going on display at the Ulster Museum in Belfast for the first time this Friday as part of their exhibition of contemporary Irish art. Doherty has also been asked to curate a series of films for the Queen's Film Theatre to coincide with the exhibition. Born in Derry in 1959, there is no doubt that growing up in a city he describes as being "constantly under surveillance" has had an effect on the work he produces. "I grew up in Derry and certainly at that point in the 70s and 80s we had a level of surveillance that wasn't experienced elsewhere. "I was trying to make work from the perspective of someone who lives there. So for me, the daily grind of the place, the continual presence of surveillance was part of the landscape." Doherty's piece entitled Re-run was nominated for the Turner Art Prize. The centrepiece of the Ulster Museum's Visions exhibition is Doherty's work, Ghost Story. It has been described as a study of Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement and is said to challenge the political desire to bury the past.For full source and full article click the Headline).
Irish Art