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Juan Downey

The Artist's Eye

The Douglas Hyde Gallery is pleased to present a series of invited solo exhibitions in Gallery 2, titled ‘The Artist’s Eye’. Acknowledging the crucial role artists play in influencing and shaping other artistic practices, this series asks those exhibiting in Gallery 1 to invite an artist of significant influence to present work in Gallery 2. In the third instalment in this series, Sven Anderson and Gerard Byrne have selected Moving (1974) by Juan Downey (1940 – 1993).

A ground-breaking figure in the burgeoning realm of video art during the 1960s, Downey, who had trained as an architect in his native Chile, also worked across drawing, painting, sculpture, performance and installation. Upon finishing university, and after spending some years in Paris, the artist moved to the US, eventually settling in New York. Across all media, his practice opened up for a future generation of artists the possibilities inherent in working with new technologies and methods of communication. His work in video blurred the lines between the subjective and objective, weaving a search for personal identity into the documentary narrative, while also looking at the link between organic and inorganic modes of existence.

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About the Artist
Credits

Upcoming Exhibitions

Amanda Coogan in collaboration with Alvean Jones and Lianne Quigley with Dublin Theatre of the Deaf and the Centre for Deaf Studies
Freude! Freude!

The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art is excited to present a new work by renowned performance artist Amanda Coogan, Deaf artists Lianne Quigley and Alvean Jones with Dublin Theatre of the Deaf (DTD) and students from the Centre for Deaf Studies (CDS) at Trinity College Dublin. Freude! Freude! is a live exhibition, an embodied performance and installation which translates Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ode to Joy chorus into Irish Sign Language (ISL) and reinterprets the entire symphony through the lens of the Deaf experience. Using ISL as a choreographic language, Coogan, Quigley and Jones have worked with DTD and students from the CDS to produce an aural, visual and immersive feast that will be presented through a series of performances and exhibition installation.

Art & Ideas

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