The Ethics of Scrutiny, featuring Alice Neel, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art

Curated by artist Daphne Wright, this exhibition (15 February – 2 September 2018) examines the complex relationships between artist and sitter.

 

In Lucian Freud's portraits, painted over weeks, months or even years, we see a body of work that examines the complex relationships between artist and sitter. Looking more broadly, we see paintings that deal with the psychology of looking. Curated by artist Daphne Wright, this exhibition takes these specific aspects of Freud’s intimate studio practice as a starting point to explore themes of vulnerability, longing and loss that permeate the painter’s work.

 

Wright looks to other artists who also address the inherent complexities of representation in their work, placing a number of Freud’s paintings alongside the work of writers Emily Dickinson, John Berger and Lydia Davis, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, singer Johnny Cash, and artists Gwen John, Alice Neel, Kathy Prendergast, Wiebke Siem, Marlene Dumas and Thomas Schütte. The Ethics of Scrutiny calls into question how we see ourselves, how our gazes fall onto one another, and importantly how our identities shift over time.