Anne Madden

Anne Madden was born in London of Irish and Anglo-Chilean parentage. Her early years were spent in Chile and then in England. On childhood holidays and as an adolescent living in Ireland she became intimately familiar with the Burren in Co. Clare which was later to be an important source of inspiration for her painting. She attended the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts from 1950 to 1952, but her work was interrupted during the latter part of the decade due to a series of spinal operations. In 1958 she married the painter Louis Le Brocquy and moved to the South of France where she still lives though since 1976 she has divided her time between France and Ireland. During the 1960s she began to paint large scale canvases often in a diptych, triptych or multiple format. These fluid, light-filled organic forms, inspired by rock and land masses, firmly established Madden as one of the leading abstract artists in Ireland. She won the first Carroll's Award at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1964 and represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in the following year. Her reputation, both in Ireland and internationally, has continued to grow and she has had numerous solo shows in London, Dublin, Belfast, Paris, New York and elsewhere. She is represented in public collections in Ireland, and abroad. In 1991 a major retrospective of her paintings and drawings was held in Dublin.