Ciarán Bennett
Ciarán BENNETT Born in Dublin and graduated in Fine Art in 1979, postgraduate studies in Bath, Paris, and Florence, lived in Asia for some years. Became art critic for the Irish Architect in 1994- journal of the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland, and joined AICA Ireland, elected president in 2006. Received Pollock Krasner Research Fellowship 07-08, for his project on James Johnson Sweeney. Curated various exhibitions, at museums and galleries, including curatorial panels for European art projects, while being a visiting tutor at SVA in New York.
Art Crit EuropeReports and Interviews From:
Questions by Alan Phelan to Ciarán Bennett
I would like to say that there is a direct line of literary brilliance between Baudelaire as the first modernist art critic and poet, and Derek Mahon, the most significant Irish poet of the second part of the 20th century.
When James Johnson Sweeney curated the first international exhibition of late Modernism here in 1967, which later became known as ROSC, he decided not to include any art from Ireland after 800 A.D. He was attempting to reconnect the island to the ancestral visual civilizations on the continent of Europe, as a different starting point than the late modernism inherited from a contested and all too problematic colonial history.
