Collection > About the Collection

The Permanent Collection
The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection
The Madden Arnholz Collection

The Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which comprises some 4,500 works, has been developed since 1990 through purchase, donations and long-term loans, as well as by the commissioning of new works. The guiding principle behind this process is that the Collection is firmly rooted in the present. The Museum’s acquisitions policy is to concentrate on the work of living artists, but it accepts donations and loans of more historical art objects with a particular emphasis on work from the 1940s onwards. The Museum’s Collection is made up of the Permanent Collection and a number of loan collections which include the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection and the Weltkunst Foundation Collection of British Art from the 1980s and '90s. The Madden Arnholz Collection of some 2,000 old master prints also forms a part of the IMMA Collection.

The Permanent Collection

The permanent Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art comprises some 1,650 works. The collection reflects some of the most exciting trends in Irish and international art with lens-based work by Gilbert and George, Marina Abramovic, Willie Doherty and Paul Seawright, installations by llya and Emilia Kabakov, Rebecca Horn and sculpture by Dorothy Cross, Kathy Prendergast, Juan Mũnoz, Damien Hirst and Stephan Balkenhol; also paintings by Francesco Clemente, Tony O’Malley, Peter Doig, and Peter Halley. Major donations include a wide variety of modern and contemporary art, including paintings by Sean Scully , a large sculpture by Barry Flanagan and a film by Neil Jordan. Recent Heritiage Gifts include Dorothy by Sean Scully and 50 works from the PJ Carroll & Co. Ltd. Art Collection.

If you would like to search for works in the Permanent Collection please follow the link to

The Permanent Collection Database

Donations and Loans to the Collection

Works that have been donated or loaned to IMMA’s Permanent Collection can be found through a search in the Permanent Collection Database.

To find out more information on donating a work to IMMA please follow the link to

Making a Donation


Acquisitions Policy

To find out more information on the Museum’s Acquisitions Policy please download the Acquisitions Policy Document.

Acquistions Policy Document (Word doc. 2000 - 28.5KB)

The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection

The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection on loan to the Irish Museum of Modern Art consists of over 600 works. Outsider art was first recognised and collected by the French artist Jean Dubuffet whose Collection de l'Art Brut can be seen in Lausanne, Switzerland. Victor Musgrave, writer, filmmaker and director of the former Gallery One in London, was a member of Dubuffet's Compagnie de L'art Brut and organised the now legendary Outsiders exhibition held in 1979 at the Hayward Gallery, London. Announcing the Hayward exhibition, Musgrave proclaimed,

"Here is an art without precedent. It offers an orphic journey to the depths of the human psyche, filled with amazing incident, over spilling with feeling and emotion yet always disciplined by superlative technical resources"

The success of the exhibition encouraged Musgrave to establish the Outsider Archive and begin to build a collection that could be accessible to the public. Since Victor Musgrave's untimely death in 1984, his companion, Monika Kinley, has continued to add to the collection and expand our knowledge and understanding of Outsider art and the extraordinary individuals who create it.

The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection includes such well known names as Aloise, Carlo, Henry Darger, Madge Gill, Hauser, J.B. Murry, Sekulic, Oswald Tschirtner, Van Genk, Scottie Wilson, Wölfli, Zemankova and numerous known and lesser-known artists most of whom are also represented in the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland. Outsider artists do not belong to movements or schools and are rarely influenced by Art History. From positions outside the artistic mainstream, they create work that exists beyond the limits of convention. As Monika Kinley has described, are '… artists who are untrained and work for and by, themselves. They know little of cultural history or the tradition of Fine Art'. From artists who suffer from psychiatric conditions, to those driven by an inner spirit, this disparate collection of international artists share a compulsion to create powerful, unmediated expressions of the self.

In 1998, the Irish Museum of Modern Art held Art Unsolved, the first major exhibition of Outsider Art. This exhibition was followed by Art Without Precedent (2000) and The Tail that Wags the Dog (2003). The Collection will remain at IMMA until January 2010.

The extended loan of the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection to the Irish Museum of Modern Art empowers IMMA's vision of a new way of looking and thinking about art that is open and inclusive. Its presence endorses the museum's founding principle that it must engage in a renegotiation of standing definitions of artist and non-artist and the role of the contemporary art museum. IMMA is committed to showing Outsider works alongside more mainstream artwork in all Collection displays as well as through our access, education and National Programme exhibitions.

For more information on the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection at IMMA please contact Marguerite O'Molloy, Assitant Curator: Collections, email: marguerite.omolloy@imma.ie

Related Links

Inner Worlds Outside

 Outsider Art - Wikipedia free encyclopedia

The Madden Arnholz Collection

In 1988 approximately 1,200 Old Master prints were donated to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (now IMMA) by Clare Madden. The collection includes works by Dürer, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Goya and many other innovative European printmakers from the Renaissance onwards. Following the death of Clare Madden in October 1998 the collection was augmented by the addition of a large collection of books containing prints by the English printmaker Thomas Bewick and his family bringing the total range of printed images to 2,000. Related items in this bequest include unusual versions of the prints on silk and one of Bewick’s printing blocks.