STALLION BY DAPHNE WRIGHT

Visit The Photo Gallery: Stallion Sculpture By Daphne Wright

Stallion: Vulnerability and the Art of Playing Dead

I visited the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin today, and this sculpture, Stallion by Irish artist Daphne Wright, immediately caught my attention.

Wright is known for her multi-narrative installations, often utilising surprisingly fragile media such as plaster, tinfoil, or unfired clay. Here, she presents a life-sized horse cast in plaster, lying on its back with its legs in the air—a posture that is simultaneously vulnerable, awkward, and oddly dramatic. The piece profoundly explores themes of fragility and the vulnerability of life.

Seeing this powerful animal in such a compromising position brought back a vivid memory from my childhood:

When I was young we had a horse called Captain, a beautiful white stallion who would only allow my mother to ride him. If anyone else approached him carrying a saddle, he had a theatrical routine: he would lie on the ground and play dead. He was completely committed to the performance, and it worked without fail!

Perhaps that memory is why Wright's Stallion resonated with me so much. Is this horse truly vulnerable, or is it putting on a magnificent, albeit desperate, performance to avoid an unwanted duty? Either way, the sheer scale and delicate material make it a truly arresting piece.

IMMA Collection: Art as Agency

IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is a major three-year display celebrating IMMA’s Permanent Collection as a source of agency and knowledge. Featuring over 100 artists, from the 1960s to the present, it highlights key works, including many recent acquisitions. This ambitious exhibition invites engagement and research over time, allowing for a rich durational experience of Ireland’s Modern and Contemporary Art Collection.

Through thematic, chronological, geographical, and media-based approaches, the exhibition examines how artworks connect across time and contexts, fostering new interpretations and relevance. Works from the 1960s to the 1980s evoke the foundational story of the Irish art world. While acknowledging the context of the modernist, predominantly male dominance of that era, the exhibition also spotlights the material innovation and socially engaged practices of others who persisted despite the relatively conservative status quo.

The exhibition also presents more recent practice that explores urgent global themes such as:

• Gender
• Hybridity
• Cultural histories
• De-colonialism
• Diaspora
• Migration
• Food injustice
• Climate, and ecological change

Memory, imagination, and storytelling play pivotal roles in these works, offering generative ways to process fragmentation, dislocation, and survival in unfamiliar spaces. New and existing works in the IMMA grounds will extend these themes.

The exhibition includes a specially created ‘white cube’ gallery space inspired by Brian O’Doherty’s renowned series of essays Inside the White Cube – The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976), that critiques the auratic, market-driven effects of the white cube gallery format. Likewise the choice of works curated for this space pushes back by highlighting works by Post-War American women, pioneering conceptualist artworks by Marcel Duchamp and Brian O’Doherty as well as a contemporary feminist response by Andrea Geyer.

By interweaving historical and contemporary narratives, Art as Agency invites audiences to reflect on the evolving meanings and possibilities of art in shaping our understanding of and action in the world.