Anne Madden

Born in London to an Irish father and an Anglo-Chilean mother, Anne Madden spent her first years in Chile.[1] Her parents returned to Europe when she was four years of age to live in Ireland and in London, where she subsequently attended the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts. During this period she was impressed by an important exhibition of American painting at the Royal Academy, particularly by the works of Sam Francis and Jean-Paul Riopelle. It was Abstract Expressionism that opened up new possibilities of experimentation for her at that time. She later met these artists in Paris along with Joan Mitchell and others with whom she exchanged works. The techniques employed included palette knife and paint flows and soon involved the use of multiple canvases as a means of creating pictorial interactions.

She began to exhibit in group shows in London and Dublin from the age of 18. The Burren and her love of lonely places informed these early paintings.[1] Her work was then interrupted for three years by a series of operations on her spine. During that time she met the painter Louis le Brocquy who was then working in London. They married in 1958 and set up house and studio in Carros in the south of France,[1] where two sons were born to them, Alexis and Pierre.

Madden began exhibiting in London in the early 1950s. One of her earliest exhibitions was with the New English Art Club.[2] Since 1954 Madden has regularly contributed works to the Irish Exhibition of Living Art where at the 21st anniversary show, in 1964, she was awarded the painting prize of £150 for Promontory.[3] Madden also showed work at the Oireachtas Exhibition in 1971.[3]

In 1960 Madden had a solo exhibition in the Dawson Gallery, Dublin which was a resounding success with the Irish Times reviewer, who commented,

"Anne Madden paints landscape with a quite remarkable power to dredge away the soft clothing which covers the land. She reveals the bones, the skeleton, not in the sense that such forms conote decay but rather to recall the simple grandeur which remains in winter snows or when wind has ripped away the foliage."[4]

In the mid sixties on, their comparatively reclusive life in Carros village was changed by the opening of the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul, where over the years they were constantly meeting painters, sculptors, writers, poets, and musicians forming friendships resumed in Paris and elsewhere. In 1965 Anne Madden represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale, before regularly exhibiting in that city.[1] From the 1960s she began to paint a series of abstract landscapes influenced by her time as a young girl in the west of Ireland, near the Burren in Co. Clare. In 1966 Madden was one of four invited artists to show at the 9th annual exhibition of the Ulster Society of Women Artists in Belfast.[5] Between 1970 and 1979 Madden painted a large series of vertical works, their size determined by her height and reach. Reflecting on life and death, the works derived from megaliths and other prehistoric monuments. Madden had three solo exhibitions in 1974 -at the Ulster Museum, Belfast, the New Art Centre, London, and at the Dawson Gallery in Dublin.[6] Madden held a further one-man show, at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gallery in 1979.[7]

In the 1980s Madden stopped painting for a time and devoted herself to drawing. This resulted in a series of large works in graphite and oil paint on paper entitled Openings. These works formed the core of an exhibition at the Fondation Maeght in 1983 and were later shown at ROSC '84. Madden held a one-woman show of new works at the Taylor Gallery in Dublin in 1987.[8] In 1990 Madden held a solo show at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin,[2] where she was to return with Drawings of Masters in 1992.[9] Madden returned to painting on canvas. She continued to develop and produce a large body of work which was presented in an Arts Council retrospective in 1991, at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin.

Her book Louis le Brocquy, Seeing His Way was published in 1993 (Gill & Macmillan). A year later she received an important commission from Dr. Ronald Tallon, architect of the O'Reilly Hall at University College Dublin, to paint one of the ten large paintings displayed within the Aula Maxima. In 1999 the hillside village of Carros in the south of France commissioned Anne Madden to paint a large vaulted ceiling painting measuring 900 × 600 cm for its medieval castle, which opened last year as an international contemporary art centre. The artist produced Empyrius in her nearby studio before it was mounted in situ as a permanent installation. The opening will be the occasion of the unveiling of a permanent room dedicated to the artist's work in recognition of her involvement in the artistic life of the region.

In 2000, Madden returned to live and work in Dublin. She has been a member of Aosdána since 1986.[1] In 2005 she was conferred with LL.D., h.c., University College, Dublin, 1988. Her husband Louis died on 25 April 2012.[10]

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