Portal:Ireland/Selected biography archive/17



Louis le Brocquy (born November 10, 1916) is an Irish painter. Born in Dublin, Louis le Brocquy's work has received much international attention and many accolades in a career that spans seventy years of creative practice. In 1956, he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale, winning the Premio Acquisito Internationale with A Family (coll. National Gallery of Ireland), subsequently included in the historic exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art at Brussels, World Fair 1958. The same year he married the Irish painter Anne Madden and left London to work in the French Midi.

Le Brocquy is widely acclaimed for his evocative "Portrait ‘Heads" of literary figures and fellow artists, which include William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and his friends Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon and Seamus Heaney, in recent years le Brocquy's early "Tinker" subjects and Grey period "Family" paintings, have attracted headline attention on the international marketplace marking him as the fourth painter in Ireland and Britain to be evaluated within a very select group of artists, alongside Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Francis Bacon.

In Ireland, he is honoured as the first and only living painter to be included in the Permanent Irish Collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. To mark le Brocquy's 90th birthday some eleven one-person exhibitions were organised at home and abroad including the National Gallery of Ireland; the Tate; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork; and the Hunt Museum, Limerick. Read more...