Enrique Juncosa is one of the foremost curators of contemporary art in the twenty-first century, and a lifelong champion of international art in Ireland. During his nine years at Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Art, this Spanish director’s energetic, sometimes controversial style secured this relatively small museum a place in the pantheon of postmodernism as one of the most vibrant and innovative venues in Europe.

Featuring an extended full-colour photographic essay and an introduction by Colm Toibin, this volume of writings by Enrique Juncosa, published by IMMA (in Boulevard Magenta, the Museum’s literary magazine) and elsewhere around the world, includes literary texts (short stories and long poems) and essays on Irish and international artists as diverse as Howard Hodgkin, Terry Winters, Anne Madden, Bhupen Khakhar and Willie McKeown, as well as filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The Irish Years illustrates Juncosa’s unusual or unorthodox exhibitions: pairing, for example, Hans Christian Andersen and William Burroughs; staging an exhibition on Morton Feldman in relation to the visual arts, an opera by Gerald Barry or a concert of electronic music by Ryochi Ikeda.

Assembled for the first time by Vivienne Guinness, this collection of writings will fascinate readers and students of all disciplines and interests, providing a luminous record of a particularly vibrant period in Irish art history.