(Icarus) Plummet, 1997

Artist Anne Madden (b. 1932)

Date1997

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions194 x 114 x 3 cm

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Donated by Anne Madden (the Artist), 1998. © Anne Madden.

Object number1915

DescriptionAnne Madden is a central figure in the story of Irish abstract painting. Although she spent her early years in Chile she became familiar with the Irish landscape particularly the Burren in County Clare, where she spent her teens. Greatly influenced by place especially ancestral and ancient sites, this inspiration is a conduit for a unique articulation of light colour and form. In the 60's following a period at Chelsea Art School, her light filled fluid paintings of rock and land formations won her critical acclaim and in 1964 she was the first recipient of the Carroll's award at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. In the following year she represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale.

Following on her megalithic paintings of the 1970s Anne Madden embarked of a series of Pompeiian inspired works in the 1980s. This was after a visit to Pompey which moved her deeply, not only the evident destruction of the people but also the particular shapes and sensations of the ruined spaces frozen in their time.

In 1997 Anne Madden held her first solo exhibition in the Hugh Lane. Trajectories consisted of two sequences of paintings Odyssey and Icarus. Using a rich palette including gold a colour that was recently adopted by the artist, the quest for adventure and discovery is played out on different levels. A mythological desire to transcend existing limits in a search for new experiences finds sympathy with the artist who wrestles with the discovery of the painting within the composition. In Plummet, the gold is wayward, surface bound creating balance and tension between surface and colour, the depths of which create limitless expanses of sky realised in vivid blues, through which the fallen Icarus hurtles to his inevitable demise.

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