About the Artists

Born of the original Chicago/Paris company Gare St Lazare Players, Gare St Lazare Ireland was formed by Judy Hegarty Lovett and Conor Lovett when they began producing their Beckett monologues in 1996/97. Some 20 years later, the company’s body of work includes over 17 productions of Samuel Beckett’s prose, radio drama and plays, as well as work by Conor McPherson, Will Eno and their own adaptation of Moby Dick. The company has toured to over 80 cities in 25 countries worldwide and has become synonymous with Beckett’s work.
 

BRIAN O’DOHERTY (Visual Artist). Born in Ireland in 1928 and trained as a medi­cal doctor, Brian O’Doherty has been a significant figure on the international art scene for over fifty years as an art­ist, critic, arts administrator and writer. His extraor­dinary career has changed the way we look at art, the artist and means of display. Based in New York since the 1960s he first became known as the pre­senter of two arts and culture television shows and as critic for The New York Times. In the 1970s he was editor of Art in America as well as publishing the seminal critique of the modernist gallery, Inside the White Cube in 1976. As director of the NEA’s Visual Arts & Media programme, he promoted alter­native forms of art including video art. From the 1960s he was one of the pioneering artists of the conceptual era whose work explored language, per­ception and identity. He produced the groundbreak­ing conceptual issue of the avant-garde multimedia exhibition in a box, Aspen 5+6 (1967) which, among many highlights, had a recording of Beckett’s Text for Nothing #8 by Jack MacGowran. The Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1966), a tracing of his heartbeat, stands as the first conceptual portrait. Assuming multiple personae throughout his career, Patrick Ireland from 1972–2008 became an early installa­tion artist with the unique series of Rope Drawings, of which there have been 127 to date. He has had over forty solo exhibitions and several retrospec­tives, the most recent in 2006/07 in Dublin and New York. He is a prize-winning novelist with The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P (1992). The Deposition of Father McGreevy (1999) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000. His latest novel, The Crossdresser’s Secret, was published in 2014.

Brenda Moore-McCann is an art historian, medical doctor, writer and Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of the first monograph on the artist, Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Between Categories (2009/2010 Lund Humphries/Ashgate), ISBN 9781848220140 which is available to buy in the lobby.

MUSICIANS

CHORUS