Trisha Donnelly

“Donnelly’s works exist at the threshold of possible experience or understanding and require, if not optimism, at least suspension of disbelief.” Art Review

Modern Art Oxford presents a new exhibition of San Francisco-based artist Trisha Donnelly. Born in 1974, Donnelly is one of a new generation of artists to have emerged in recent years. The exhibition will be the first major public presentation of her work in the UK.

Donnelly works across just about every possible medium, using drawing, the photographic image and sound, to create installations and events that propel us into playful and unsettling worlds. For her exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, Donnelly plans to create an architectural equivalent of the building’s sounds. Donnelly will transform the three interconnecting upper gallery spaces into an enclosed ‘audio form’ within which she produces traces of the galleries’ multiple frequencies.

Suzanne Cotter, curator of the exhibition, comments: “Donnelly has an extraordinary capacity to disrupt our normal way of seeing and thinking about the world, be it through the uncanny solidity she gives to her drawings and sphinx-like forms, or the boisterous energy of her proposals and interventions. Donnelly captivates us in her suggestion that everything doesn’t always have to be the way we think it is.”

Donnelly recently participated in this year’s acclaimed Manchester International Festival, contributing a new performance piece to Il Tempo del Postino at the Opera House, Manchester in which a group of the world’s leading contemporary artists attempted to defy accepted notions of the exhibition.

Born in San Francisco, California in 1974, Donnelly graduated from Yale University School of Art in 2000. Since then she has exhibited in numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Donnelly’s work is also represented in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Tate Modern, London.

Group exhibitions include: Uncertain States of America at Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; The Serpentine Gallery, London; Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland and The Herning Art Museum, Herning, Denmark (2005-7); The Secret Theory of Drawing: Dislocation and Indirection in Contemporary Drawing, The Drawing Room, London (2006); Day for Night, The 2006 Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006) and Of Mice + Men: 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2006). Donnelly is one of sixteen international artists included in the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Modern, The World as a Stage, which explores the historical relationship between visual art and theatre.

The artist has presented solo exhibitions at Art Pace, San Antonio (2005), Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland (2005) and The Wrong Gallery, New York (2004). Forthcoming solo exhibitions are planned for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and The Renaissance Society, Chicago, both in 2008.

The exhibition at Modern Art Oxford is accompanied by a series of events, including an evening listening to some of Trisha Donnelly’s favourite music by Fats Waller and others, and a series of screenings of Dirk Bogarde and John Ford films.

To coincide with the exhibition, Modern Art Oxford, in association with The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, is publishing a limited edition artist’s book containing texts written by Trisha Donnelly and designed by M/M (Paris).

The exhibition is curated by Suzanne Cotter, Senior Curator at Modern Art Oxford. A sister exhibition of Donnelly's work is planned for The Douglas Hyde Gallery in July 2008.

Trisha Donnelly will be in conversation with Suzanne Cotter on Thursday 15 November at Modern Art Oxford.

Trisha Donnelly