Christopher Le Brun

Christopher Le Brun is one of the leading British painters of his generation, celebrated internationally since the 1980s, making both figurative and abstract work in media including painting, sculpture, watercolour and print. He was also an instrumental public figure in his role as President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 2011 to 2019. Le Brun employs a mastery of touch and colour alongside a profound understanding of art history and a wide range of visual, musical and literary sources to engage with the major existential, aesthetic and formal questions of painting. His works are notable for their layered, complex, scintillating surfaces, which he describes as ‘non-ironic, primary’ responses to the act of painting.

Le Brun has remained consistent in adhering to what he feels to be the essential poetry of painting led by intuition and visual imagination. Recent work shows the development of modular compositions from single pieces through to large and highly complex canvases, triptychs and monumental multipart paintings, extending the limits of abstract pictorial composition. Le Brun’s heightened awareness of the painting process with its dramatic tension between revealing and covering, has been a central feature of his work that unites all its phases whether abstract or figurative. His idea is to make a painting less fenced or surrounded, but one which feels for its boundaries organically, playing out its appearance in front of you.