A retrospective of the work of Lucian Freud, one of the world's most celebrated contemporary artists, was among the highlights announced by Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue when he unveiled the Irish Museum of Modern Art's (Imma) 2007 programme at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham yesterday.
The programme also features shows devoted to Georgia O'Keeffe, Alex Katz, Thomas Demand, Joan Miró and Alexander Calder. Among the Irish artists highlighted are Anne Madden, Patrick Hall, Charles Brady, James Coleman and the late James McKenna.
Freud, who was born in Berlin in 1922 and is based in London, is a grandson of Sigmund Freud.
He is known for his intensely observed portraits and nudes, which are highly prized by collectors and museums worldwide. Obtaining them for exhibition is extremely difficult, and Imma has enlisted Catherine Lampert, who has a long association with the artist, as curator.
Similarly, borrowing work by the renowned American painter, Georgia O'Keeffe, who died in 1986 at the age of 98 and was of Irish descent, is a challenge for any institution. The exhibition devoted to her work, which opens in early March, represents a unique opportunity to see about 30 of her landscape, flower and abstract compositions in Ireland.
An exhibition of New York artist Alex Katz's paintings of his family, friends and home city opens at the end of February.
Artists from Europe include Thomas Demand, whose photographs document lifelike, three-dimensional models crafted in paper and cardboard, and Berlin-based painter Thomas Scheibitz.
Polish artist Miroslaw Balka and Indian artist Nalini Malani will have their first solo shows in Ireland.
Exhibitions by Irish artists include retrospectives by Anne Madden and Patrick Hall, a survey of the work of sculptor, writer and activist James McKenna, who died in 2000, and a show devoted to the expatriate American painter, the late Charles Brady.
Mr O'Donoghue paid tribute to Imma director Enrique Juncosa's policy "of identifying significant gaps in the collection and then working tirelessly to fill them". In recognition of this, he said, he had secured an additional €2.16 million in funding for Imma last November, €1.7 million of which was going towards the acquisition of works by Louis le Brocquy, William Scott, Howard Hodgkin and Sean Scully.
The le Brocquy work is a portrait head of WB Yeats, and there are three paintings by Sean Scully, spanning 1979 to 1986. Two large paintings by William Scott will go some way towards filling a gap in the collection, and they have come with a gift of two drawings.