Anne Madden was born in London in 1932 and studied at the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts in 1950. While travelling through Europe she met the painter Louis le Brocquy and in 1958 they married and settled in the small village of Carros, France. Madden lived in France for many years before returning to Ireland where she now lives and works.
Anne Madden’s early work was preoccupied by the Irish landscape and archaeological remnents of our cultural heritage, and has evolved to encompass various reflections on life and death communicated through an idiosyncratic pictorial language that combines figuration and abstraction. More recent work has focused on an exploration of the Northern Lights, representing the visual phenomenon in large polyptychs on linen and more intimate works on paper. These paintings vibrate with colour as turquoise, lilac and yellow shapes snake across the picture plane to create ambiguous spaces depicting layers of light.
Anne Madden represented Ireland at the 1965 Venice Biennale and in 1986 she was elected to Aosdána. In 2004 she was conferred with an honorary degree by University College Dublin as part of its 150thanniversary celebrations and in the same year she was made an Officier Des Arts et Des Lettres by the French
Government. Throughout her career she has had over 50 solo exhibitions. Two major retrospectives of her work were held in 1991 and 2007 at the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Irish Museum of Modern Art respectively. Her work is included in the public collections of the Arts Council of Ireland, the National Portrait Collection, Muséee du Louvre, IMMA, the OPW /State Art