Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
9 April – 29 June 2008
The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin is currently organising an important exhibition focusing on the cut-outs and cut-ups of Hans Christian Andersen and William Seward Burroughs, which is scheduled to take place at the Irish Museum of Modern Art from 9th April 2008 to 29 June 2008 and will be curated by Hendel Teicher. Following its premiere in Dublin, the exhibition will travel to museums in Europe and the United States.
Entitled Cut-Outs and Cut-Ups: Hans Christian Andersen and William Seward Burroughs, the exhibition will be the first to compare these legendary writers and wonderful, but little known, visual artists. Harkening from different origins and different periods, Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) and William Seward Burroughs (1914-1997) nevertheless shared many significant connections. Both were incredibly productive and revolutionary writers, intrepid travellers, larger-than-life personages who developed important collaborative relationships, and visionaries who possessed a deep and long engagement with visual art. Both made beautiful and challenging artworks that are as compelling today as when they were first made. And finally, both were visual thinkers whose writings and drawings are profoundly interconnected.
Key to the exhibition will be their mutual engagement with cutting out images; working with silhouettes, shadows, and stencils; using brilliant colors and metallics; and developing a rich and evocative vocabulary of images closely related to their writings. Loans for the exhibition will come from major public and private collections and foundations. The Andersen material will consist of drawings, cut-outs, picture books of original collages, and related objects including his tools and his phenomenal freestanding screen covered with cut-and-pasted printed illustrations. The Burroughs artworks will include paintings on paper and wood, collaged scrapbooks, stencils, selected manuscripts, and the freestanding, kinetic Dreamachine.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with multiple contributors including notable Andersen and Burroughs scholars.