Anne Yeats, The Everyday Fantastic has just opened at the National Gallery of Ireland. Anne Yeats, chief designer for the Abbey Theatre, worked in oils and designed for theatre and publication. The daughter of W.B. Yeats, she was raised within the culture of the Irish Gaelic Revival. She moved between traditional and modern worlds, and drew creatively on her observations and her imagination. Anne started working at the Abbey Theatre at 16; founded Graphic Studio, Dublin in 1960; and was a founding member of Aosdána. She managed the Yeats family archive and donated part of it to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1996. Anne Yeats’s own archives and sketchbooks were donated to the Gallery by her brother Michael in 2002.The exhibition highlights creativity, experimentation and process in Yeats’s art practice across a number of decades, demonstrating the importance of artists’ archives and the role they play in an artist’s work – as a location where creativity, experimentation, failure and progress in art practice are documented. The exhibition continues until October 9, 2022.
ESB CSIA Collection at the National Gallery of Ireland. © Estate of Anne Yeats, DACS London/IVARO Dublin, 2021. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland
