President honours 'genius' of Imogen Stuart

PRESIDENT MARY McAleese paid tribute to the “genius” of sculptor Imogen Stuart yesterday, presenting the McAuley Medal to “a wonderful human being as well as an exceptional artist”.

Mrs McAleese said in Limerick that the German-born artist’s 60-year career in Ireland had created a “canon of work that synthesises our complex past, present images and possible futures”.

“Catherine McAuley would be nodding her head in vigorous approval at today’s recipient,” said Mrs McAleese after presenting the medal named after founder of the Catholic Sisters of Mercy.

Among the attendees at the ceremony at Mary Immaculate College were Mayor of Limerick Cllr Maria Byrne and German ambassador H E Busso von Alvensleben.

“I hope the German ambassador won’t mind that we lay claim to Imogen too,” said Mrs McAleese. “She is as an intrinsic part of the narrative of modern Irish art, of Ireland.”

Ms Stuart was born in Berlin in 1927. She studied sculpture in Bavaria after the second World War, where she met Ian Stuart, son of Francis Stuart and Iseult Gonne. The couple moved to Ireland and had three children but separated in the 1970s. She is best known for her religious works throughout the country, including in Burt, Co Donegal, the doors of Galway Cathedral, Ballintubber Abbey stations of the cross and, most recently, striking bronze angel on the facade of St Theresa’s Church on Dublin’s Clarendon Street.

Yesterday's event marked the unofficial opening of a new campus building housing one of her works, Window on the World.

She expressed her thanks to Mary Immaculate College for the award and for commissions going back to the 1950s.

“I feel desperately honoured and deeply moved,” said Ms Stuart, a member of Aosdána and the Royal Hibernian Academy.

In his citation, Mary Immaculate College president Prof Peadar Cremin described Ms Stuart’s work as a “remarkable fusion of early Christian imagery, German Romanesque art and 20th century European Expressionism”.

“For more than half a century Imogen Stuart has been a torch-bearer for all that is innately good in human endeavour,” he said. “She is one of the few outsiders who have come to call Ireland their home who have managed to command such a grasp of this complexity or win such high regard.”

The first, inaugural recipient of the medal in 2008 was Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver.