Other Men’s Flowers

Jeff Wall, Edwin Lutyens, Leon Kossoff, Martin Kippenberger, Patrick Hall, Patrick Graham, Ben Geoghegan, Brian Fay, Michael Farrell, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach

Behind the proclaimed ‘tabula rasa’ of modernism, where Avant Garde artists of the early 20^th Century denied the past and viewed themselves as the original inventors of radical new ways of seeing the world, there lies a more complex truth. Before clearing the way for their theories to emerge these artists had in fact looked intensely at the art of the past through national and private collections and absorbed their lessons well.

Art critic Robert Hughues elucidates how artists by looking at great works of Art extract either lessons of relevance for their own work or by wrestling with the tradition, they ingest it, and transform it into something of their own making. The art of the past has always been a resource for artists. Advancing the ‘new’ and establishing a position in the long history of art requires an inmate knowledge with that tradition.

other men’s flowers includes early drawings and paintings by Frank Aurbach and Leon Kossoff from the Tate collection and some works from our Francis Bacon Archive that have never been publicly viewed before. Also included are works by Jeff Wall and Patrick Graham that reference art history and new works by Ben Geoghegan and Brian Fay dealing directly with the Hugh Lane collection

Taken from a quote by the French moralist Michel de Montaigne – ‘in this book I have only made up a bunch of other men’s flowers, providing of my own only the string that ties them together’ – this exhibition draws on the collections of the Tate and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane as well as the private collections of the artists, and attempts to set up a dialectic discord between diverse artistic approaches. In seeking to address the nature and obligations of working within the art of the past and collections, ‘Other Men’s Flowers’ asks what are the responsibilities to context when bringing such a disparate group of works together? What useful histories can unfold? How might we usefully understand the gaps and discrepancies in art production and dissemination?

The exhibition is less concerned with histories of representation and illusion than with the lived experience or intervention offered by the work of art and with how artists deal with this experience as it somehow transforms their own field of vision.

Curated by Michael Dempsey, Head of Exhibitions