Back to search

Anne Madden1932 -

Categories: Painting

Request a valuation

Follow Artist

To add this artist to your Personlised Lot Alerts click the Follow Artist button

Follow Artist

To add this artist to your Personlised Lot Alerts click the Follow Artist button

Hammer Price: €0.00

Biography

Madden was born in Chile. Her father was Irish, her mother Anglo-Chilean, and they moved to England when she was about four. Ireland became important as she visited her fathers relations in Co. Clare with him, discovering and spending time in the Burren, thereafter a landscape of central imaginative importance to her. In 1950, she seriously injured her spine in a riding accident, necessitating serious surgery. When she and Louis le Brocquy (they married late in the decade) moved to France, it wa

s largely because the climate was more amenable to healing her bones. From the 1950s onwards, Maddens exceptionally ambitious paintings fuse elements of the extraordinary Burren environment, its vast skies, limestone pavement and stone monuments, with the techniques and scale of American abstraction. Gradually her range of reference diversified to encompass the city of Pompeii, some classical mythic narratives, Odyssean voyages and the Aurora borealis. If mortality and mourning have been consistent underlying concerns, so too is a sense of creative possibility and wonder, and a rapt appreciation of beauty.