Louis leBrocquy

Born in Dublin in 1916, Louis le Brocquy is a self-taught artist who has come to be recognised both at home and internationally as the foremost Irish painter of the 20th Century. Le Brocquy left Ireland in 1938 to study the major European art collections in London, Paris, Venice, Spain and Geneva. His return to Dublin signaled the advent of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, which established an effective forum for contemporary art in Dublin in 1943.

In 1946 le Brocquy moved to London and became prominent in the contemporary art scene. He began to exhibit internationally, winning a major prize at the Venice Biennale in 1956. In 1958, he was included in the historic exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art, at the Brussels World Fair. The same year he married the Irish painter Anne Madden and left London to work in the South of France.

His work has received much international attention and many accolades in a career that spans seventy years of creative practice. Widely acclaimed for his evocative heads of literary figures and fellow artists, including W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and his friends Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, Seamus Heaney and Bono, Le Brocquy’s inquiry into the human condition is seminal to his motivation as a painter. Acknowledged by museum retrospective exhibitions worldwide, the artist’s work is represented in numerous public collections, from the Guggenheim, New York to the Tate, London. In Ireland he was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1994 and is honoured as the first and only living painter to be included in the Permanent Irish Collection of the National Gallery.