It’s a challenging time for Irish artists.

Now Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery will be able to show them some much-needed support, thanks to a €1 million acquisition fund announced by Catherine Martin, Minister for Tourism, Culture, Art, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

The fund will be shared with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), with €400,000 enabling the Crawford Art Gallery to purchase artworks from contemporary Irish artists or artists based in Ireland.

“With exhibition opportunities and international touring opportunities limited in these Covid times, this acquisition fund will enable Crawford Art Gallery and IMMA to continue to promote artists and their work by adding to the National Collection,” said Mary McCarthy, Director of Crawford Art Gallery.

“It is also a recognition by the Minister and her Department of the value of collections as a significant resource and a sustainable programming reservoir from which we can generate programming conversations across the centuries.”

The Crawford Art Gallery is closed for now due to Level 3 Covid-19 restrictions, but the collection comprises over 3,000 works, ranging from eighteenth-century Irish and European painting and sculpture to contemporary film and photography.

At the heart of the collection are the Canova Casts, which were brought to Cork in 1818 from the Vatican Museums in Rome and are housed in the beautiful blue Sculpture Gallery on the ground floor.