FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Patrick Ireland

Drawings Around the Idea of a Book

Wilhelm Moser

Time Capsules, Montserrat

May 26 - July 2, 1999

In conjunction with his newly-released novel, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, Brian O'Doherty's alter ego PATRICK IRELAND has created a new series titled Drawings Around the Idea of a Book. Related to his box drawings and his rope installation drawings, these ink on paper works consist of hand drawn lines of color which loosely define three-dimensional intersecting planes in space. The resulting groups of tightly bunched and undulating lines create an unsettling yet hypnotic effect on the viewer. An early conceptualist and minimalist artist, IRELAND's work owes as much to his contemporaries LeWitt, Hesse, and Smithson (among others) as it does to Fluxus and Dada art. Brian O'Doherty has been creating art as PATRICK IRELAND since his 1972 name change performance, and will do so "until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights." IRELAND's extensive exhibition credits include several retrospectives; the next and largest is being planned by the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin for 2002. His work is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American Art, and the Seattle Art Museum.

WILHELM MOSER presented himself as a visiting scientist in order to obtain access to restricted areas of Montserrat in early 1999. There, he found an island clothed in the soft greyness of volcanic ash. MOSER's haunting portraits of this eerily quiet terrain are on view in Time Capsules, Montserrat, his fourth one-person exhibition at the Charles Cowles Gallery. Black and white photo-transparencies are encased in tinted resin and backlit, illuminating the added color, sharpening the images, and revealing the imperfections in the resin. The resulting works are almost sculptural, having the look and feel of artifacts rescued from the ruins. Born in Germany, MOSER generally splits his time between Dusseldorf and Miami Beach, making numerous trips around the world to photograph regions of interest. The decline of civilization is a common theme in MOSER's work, from fallen Greek and Roman temples to the dark towers of New York. While clearly paying homage to the monuments and landscapes which are depicted, they are somber works, empty of people.

The Gallery is located at 420 West Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets.

The Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am - 6pm.

For further information or photographs please contact the gallery at 212/925-3500.