| Christopher Mark Le Brun | |
|---|---|
| Born | 20 December 1951 Portsmouth, England, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Field | painting, sculpture, printmaking |
| Awards | John Moores Painting Prize 1978 & 1980 Gulbenkian Printmakers Award 1983 DAAD 1987-88 University of the Arts Fellowship 2011 |
Christopher Le Brun (born 1951) is known primarily as a painter. He is also a dedicated printmaker, for which he was elected to the Royal Academy in 1996 (category engraver), coincidentally the year in which he made his first sculpture. He studied painting at the Slade School of Art (1970–74) and Chelsea School of Art (1974–1975). Since then he has taught and lectured extensively at art schools throughout the country, in particular until 1984 at Brighton, The Slade, Chelsea, and Wimbledon. In 1982 he participated in the influential "Zeitgeist" exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin. Following this he had many solo exhibitions in galleries both in Europe and the United States, such as Sperone Westwater, Rudolf Zwirner, Nigel Greenwood, LA Louver and Marlborough Fine Art. Le Brun has exhibited in many significant surveys of international art, including "Nuova Immagine", Milan 1981, "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture", MoMA New York 1984, "Avant-garde in the Eighties", Los Angeles 1987 and "Contemporary Voices", MoMA New York 2005. He was one of the five artists shortlisted for the Angel of the South project in January 2008. In 2011 he was the chief co-ordinator of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. 8 December 2011 he was elected President of the Royal Academy. He has studios in London and Suffolk.
One of the best introductions to his work was written by the late Bryan Robertson, former director of the Whitechapel Gallery, for the exhibition Christopher Le Brun Paintings 1991-1994 at Marlborough Fine Art, London.
"In the last twenty years, Christopher Le Brun has created some of the most beautiful and effulgent paintings made by an English artist in my lifetime: strong paintings, often on a grand scale, with highly specific imagery expressed in a modern equivalent to the grand manner and painted with such exuberant panache that one accepts, almost without question, their extraordinary content. On consistent terms which Le Brun has made uniquely his own, he has created a considerable body of work in large or quite small paintings, with drawings and many engravings of inventive refinement which, put all together, makes a visible and credible world of its own. An intensity of visual concept in its broad sense sustains an oddly relaxed, divergent and exploratory tension derived from the calculated and extremely variable deployment of each brushmark in its placement on the canvas. He offers us a feast for the eye demanded by Delacroix as the first requisite of any painting before it has meaning. Some of the ways in which Le Brun deploys pigment appear to stem from early Guston and, before that, from the late Monet that we encounter in the Musee Marmotton - but the world celebrated by Le Brun in this use of paint stems in essence from the romantic past of poetry, myth and legend."[1]
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Le Brun is an experienced printmaker working in etching, lithography, woodcut and monotype. He has had long term collaborations with Peter Kosowicz and Simon Marsh of the former Hope Sufferance Press as well as Paragon Press and Paupers Press in London, Garner and Richard Tullis in Santa Barbara, Michael Woolworth Publications in Paris and Graphic Studio in Dublin.
In 2005 a new and extensive series of prints, the 50 Etchings was published by Paragon Press. Launched initially at Frieze, it has been exhibited in Cologne, New York and the Original Print Fair in London. Sets have recently been acquired by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and the British Museum, London.
His continuing interest in monotype dates from 1986 when during the first of several visits to the Tullis studio in California, he made amongst other works, a 60 part print measuring over 15'x40' in two days. A more recent monotype project inaugurated the Artists International Print Project at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice in 2002, working with the printers Simon Marsh and Michael Taylor of Paupers Press.
Notable publications include Seven Lithographs 1989, 50 Etchings 1990, Four Riders 1993, Wagner 1994, Motif Light 1998, Paris Lithographs 2000, Fifty Etchings 2005.
Aberdeen Art Gallery / Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney / Arts Council of Great Britain / Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo / Berardo Museum, Lisbon / Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery / The British Council, London / British Museum, London / Chester Beatty Library, Dublin / Contemporary Art Society, London / Courtauld Gallery, London / Department of the Environment, London / Falmouth Art Gallery / Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge / Hamilton Art Gallery, Ontario / Harris Museum, Preston / Harvard University Art Museums / High Museum, Atlanta / Ile de France Regional Fund / Isle of Man Arts Council / John Creasey Museum, Salisbury / Liverpool Cathedral / Malmo Doershus, Malmo / Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr / McNay Museum, San Antonio, Texas / Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo / Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego / Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney / Museum of Modern Art, New York / Museum of London / National Portrait Gallery, London / New Art Gallery, Walsall / Power Gallery, University of Sydney / Rooseum, Malmo / Royal Academy, London / Royal Mint, Cardiff / Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh / Southampton Museum and Art Gallery / Southwark Art Collection / Spencer Collection, New York City Public Library / Stavanger Art Gallery, Stavanger / Stirlingshire Educational Trust / Swindon Museum and Art Gallery / Tate Gallery, London / University of Liverpool / University of Tasmania, Hobart / University of Texas, Austin / Victoria and Albert Museum, London / Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool / Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles / Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester / Yale Center for British Art, New Haven