This is Francis Bacon year at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery. In 1998, Bacon's sole heir, John Edwards, donated the complete contents of the artist's studio to the gallery. A certain mystique surrounds the studios of great artists, and Bacon's modest mews room, with its famously chaotic jumble of paint and personal effects, is no exception. In November 2000 the studio, meticulously recorded, disassembled, packed, transported and reconstructed in the Hugh Lane, will go on view to the public.
Around this event, the gallery has organised an extensive programme of related exhibitions, the highlight of which is Francis Bacon in Dublin. This will be a major retrospective, curated by the leading authority on the painter, David Sylvester, spanning his entire career and including many of his most important works.
The studio at No 7, Reece Mews was documented in superb colour photographs by Perry Ogden, and they will form an exhibition, Organised Chaos, opening in September. Finally, when the studio goes on view in November, The Private Diary of Francis Bacon will feature the artist's drawings, collages, photographs and other materials. A database documenting the studio contents will eventually be accessible in a Francis Bacon study centre at the gallery, and already the indications are that it is likely to contribute significantly to our understanding of his sources and working methods.
In a piece of scheduling that has raised some eyebrows, the Irish Museum of Modern Art is planning its own Francis Bacon show at the end of February, thereby stealing a march on the Hugh Lane. Based on Barry Joule's controversial archive of hundreds of works on paper attributed to the artist (Joule was a neighbour), the show promises to let viewers make up their own minds. It will go on display with Picasso: Working on Paper in IMMA's newly refurbished 1,000 square metre gallery space in the Deputy Master's House. The Picasso will be an archive-style show of newspaper-collages, drawings and painted-on photographs.
IMMA's major summer show, opening early in July, is a retrospective of the work of American painter Leon Golub. The Chicago-born artist is best known for his huge, confrontational paintings about the underside of global politics, depicting torturers and mercenaries, joshing and joking in a Quentin Tarantino-like way as they go about their business. These works invite associations with religious art of the past. As a politically engaged figurative artist - he also made a series of works on the Vietnam War - he was for many years outside the mainstream, but a resurgence of interest in figurative painting in the late 1970s worked in his favour. Some years ago the Douglas Hyde Gallery held a substantial joint show of his work, together with that of his wife, Nancy Spero.
This should be a momentous year for the Chester Beatty Library. In possession of stunning, diverse collections of Western and Eastern books, manuscripts, miniatures, prints and objects, until now it's been tucked away in a secluded premises in Shrewsbury Road, a little off the beaten track.
But all that is due to change at the beginning of February, when its specially refurbished new home in Dublin Castle opens to the public for the first time.
Besides featuring galleries for displaying sections of the permanent collection, there will be a temporary exhibition space for thematic and visiting shows. This will be the venue for the original manuscript of Ulysses in June and, later in the year, for an exhibition of Biblical material from the Vatican. The new Chester Beatty will be visitor-friendly, with an imaginatively stocked shop and a restaurant. Given the sheer quality of the library's holdings, it clearly has the potential to become one of the city's major attractions.
In Cork, the Crawford Gallery is still undergoing an extensive refurbishment and expansion programme. Currently, the plan is that both the revamped and the striking new gallery spaces will open in April. The idea is that 0044 will be the opening exhibition. A major Crawford Gallery project curated by the Peter Murray, it is an ambitious group show of work by 20 contemporary Irish artists living and working in Britain - hence the title, which is the dialling code from Ireland to Britain.
The show has already toured in the US, and it includes an impressive line-up of artists, including Kathy Prendergast, Paul Seawright, Cecily Brennan, John Gibbons, Andrew Kearney, Eilis O'Connell, Mark Francis and Daphne Wright. The latter, an outstanding installation artist, has a show of her own at the Douglas Hyde scheduled for April. Originally, the idea was that 0044 move into the Crawford just in advance of January. When that proved impossible, it found another home in the meantime, at Belfast's Ormeau Baths Gallery, where it can be seen from late January.
Other highlights of the Ormeau Baths programme include an exhibition of artists' responses to the work of Samuel Beckett, Not I, which originates in Amsterdam with Peter Hensen as curator. Much later in the year, for the Belfast Festival, the gallery will feature renowned Canadian video artist Stan Douglas and painter Peter Doig, whose spectacular landscape-based work exploits our familiarity with popular film narratives. As it happens, he is also the subject of a Douglas Hyde Gallery exhibition earlier in the year, during June and July.
In conjunction with the Ormeau Baths, the RHA Gallagher Gallery is holding a major millennium exhibition in February. It will feature 100 significant works spanning the last century of Irish art, together with 100 artists' self-portraits. In November IMMA casts its glance backwards over the last 50 years of Irish art with an exhibition which currently has the working title 50/50, in which five curators deal with a decade apiece. Just to prove that Francis Bacon isn't going to monopolise the Hugh Lane, this month the gallery will host a major one-person show devoted to the work of Brian Maguire, including his Casa da Cultura project for the Sao Paolo Biennale 1998.
And it's worth noting that The David Crone retrospective, recently opened at the Ulster Museum, runs through until March and is essential viewing.