Photographer wins Glen Dimplex artists' award

An English artist, Catherine Yass, won the 1999 Glen Dimplex Artists' Award last night at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. She is a photographer, and at the current exhibition in the IMMA she is showing photographs of unoccupied capsule hotel rooms for businessmen in Tokyo and of empty urinals.

The annual award to a contemporary artist is worth £15,000. Ms Yass was competing against three other shortlisted artists: Wexfordborn Orla Barry, Susan MacWilliam, Belfast, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, who is Japanese.

Another award, for a sustained contribution to the visual arts in Ireland, went to the painter Tony O'Malley.

Based in London, Ms Yass attended the Slade School of Art and received an MA degree from Goldsmiths College, where many new stars of the British art world studied.

The prize-winning work shows "contained male spaces" which, the artist says, "both make room for private experience and seem to deny or repress them".

By printing negative over positive images, and displaying the resultant prints on bright boxes, she gives her colour photographs an eerie appearance.

The Glen Dimplex Awards began in 1994. They aim to raise the profile of contemporary art in Ireland and of contemporary Irish artists. They are open to Irish artists for work exhibited at home or abroad within the previous year, and to non-Irish artists who have exhibited in Ireland. Previous winners include a multi-media artist, Alanna O'Kelly, video and photographic artist Willie Doherty, and a photographer, Paul Seawright.

Ms Brenda McParland, head of exhibitions at the IMMA, chaired this year's six-member jury, which included three other professional curators: Mr Andrew Nairne, Scotland, Ms Catherine de Zegher, Belgium, and Mr Hugh Mulholland, director of the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast; besides Dr Margaret Downes, chairwoman of BUPA Ireland, and an IMMA board member, Dr Paula Murphy. All the artists shortlisted work in photography or video or both.

Last year Glen Dimplex made its first sustained contribution award to Louis Le Brocquy. This year's recipient, Tony O'Malley, is one of Ireland's best-known artists.

A gifted, remarkably industrious painter whose career extends over 50 years, he was born in Callan, Co Kilkenny. He worked as a bank clerk before starting to paint seriously while recuperating from tuberculosis in 1947. After visiting St Ives in Cornwall, a renowned artists' colony, he moved there in 1960 and blossomed as an artist.

Mr O'Malley was based in Cornwall for 30 years and married a Canadian painter, Jane Harris, in 1973. In 1990 the couple settled in Physicianstown, close to Callan. The late Patrick Heron, who also lived in Cornwall, described Mr O'Malley as "one of the most profoundly gifted painters to have come from Ireland".

Sensitive to the layers of history in landscape, his work has a tremendous sense of place, whether describing the King's River, Enniscorthy, where he worked as a bank clerk, or Clare Island, where he has family connections.

He has also painted much farther afield. For many years he and his wife visited her family in the Bahamas each winter, and the tropical light and colour inspired him to create some of his best works.

He was elected a saoi by Aosdana in 1993, and in 1994 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College, Dublin.