Sculpture exhibitions are notoriously difficult to mount, so it is exciting that another sculptor, Dublin-born Hilary Heron (1923–1977), has been selected for a retrospective at IMMA next summer.
The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) has had an interesting run of monographic exhibitions in recent years, one of the most successful being that of sculptor Gerda Frömel (1931–1975) in 2015. Sculpture exhibitions are notoriously difficult to mount, so it is exciting that another sculptor, Dublin-born Hilary Heron (1923–1977), has been selected for a retrospective at IMMA next summer.
Heron, whose work could be serious or humorous, hovered between tradition and modernity, producing sculpture that was academic (James Connolly, 1946, wood) and modern (Crazy Jane, 1958, welded steel). Widely travelled – initially as a result of winning the Taylor Art Award in the 1940s – her experience of sculpture beyond Ireland is evident. Henry Moore and Elizabeth Frink were notable early influences.
Heron showed in the first Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943 and had her first solo show at the Victor Waddington Galleries in Dublin in 1950, where it was noted that she had ‘all the elements of greatness’. Waddington was a firm supporter of Heron’s work, keeping both her and Jack Yeats in his stable when he closed his Dublin gallery and returned to London.
Described as ‘a leading figure in Irish art’ in ‘The Moderns’ (IMMA, 2010), Heron was regularly lauded in exhibition reviews in her own day and selected in 1956 to represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale along with Louis le Brocquy – a similar existential element had already been noted in their work. Dorothy Walker, writing in The Crane Bag in 1980, credited Heron with being ‘the first artist in twentieth-century Ireland to introduce new ideas of sculpture’ and noted in the National Gallery of Ireland catalogue of Irish Women Artists from the 18th Century to the Present Day (1987) that ‘a retrospective of her work is long overdue’.
Some of Heron’s work has been lost with the destruction of office buildings over time, and much of it is in private collections abroad. IMMA are looking for pieces of hers which may have been sold through the Waddington Galleries in London and Montreal. Anyone who has a Hilary Heron sculpture might get in touch with Seán Kissane, who is curating the exhibition at IMMA in collaboration with Riann Coulter of the FE McWilliam Gallery in Banbridge, Co Down, to where, as with Frömel’s, the exhibition will subsequently travel.
Paula Murphy
