Christopher Le Brun

This focus is featured in Almine Rech Magazine #39

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Since the 1980s, Christopher Le Brun has been at the forefront of British art. His œuvre spans across mediums; an array of paintings, sculptures, and prints that explore both figuration and abstraction, as well as the fertile ground that separates the two. Le Brun has described his work as investigating “the tension between revealing and covering.”

This interest in liminality gives the artist’s work a rare quality and an ability to speak to the many possibilities of subject, perception, and emotion.

Le Brun grew up in Portsmouth. He began drawing at a young age while also nurturing passions for sports, literature, and music. Poetry and prose were especially informative to his development; at school he discovered writers like William Blake and Virginia Woolf, who would go on to inform his visual vocabulary. 

In 1970, Le Brun enrolled at The Slade School of Fine Art in London. It was a stimulating time to be an art student, full of protests and debates—both political and aesthetic. The constructivist Malcolm Hughes figured among his professors and proved to be a critical teacher for the young artist. Hughes introduced him to the American abstract expressionists, whose exploration of the unconscious and automatism became foundational to the development of Le Brun’s own creative process.

During his studies Le Brun travelled to Europe on several occasions, notably visiting France, the Netherlands, and Italy. He discovered new artists and movements, an important expansion of his artistic horizons. 

Le Brun’s early works can be placed in the return to figuration movement, with key influences that included romanticism and American abstract expressionism, currents that differ aesthetically yet converge in their search for truth through authenticity and emotion.

By the late 1970s Le Brun began to show his work more widely; in 1980 his first solo exhibition was held at Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London. This marked the beginning of a prolific career; Le Brun has since been included in seminal shows, including ‘Zeitgeist,’ Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (1982), ‘Arte allo Specchio,’ Venice Biennale (1984), ‘Avant-Garde in the Eighties,’ Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1987) and ‘Modern art despite Modernism,’ Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005). The artist has received countless accolades, including a Knighthood for services to the Arts in 2021.

To stand in front of a Le Brun painting is to contemplate something both enigmatic and solid. There is a delicacy in his brushstroke, and also an energy. His process is grounded in intuition, a commitment to building each work over time, trusting his own imagination and hand. This process creates an archeological effect; layers of brushstrokes and complex underpainting invite the viewer to excavate. Drawing and printmaking nourish the artist’s compositions; switching between mediums allows him to develop ideas. While intuition informs his process, the artist also weaves in a panoply of references—to literature, music, and art history—while also reveling in the formal aspects of compositions and color.

Le Brun has produced a formidable body of sculptural work, including several monumental sculptures. He made his first sculpture in 1996, bringing a painterly sensibility to the medium. These works, largely in bronze, exemplify the artist’s philosophy; though his sculptures might appear to depict a horse or a wing, to Le Brun they represent an exploration of form rather than pure figuration. 

In 2011 Le Brun was elected president of the Royal Academy of Arts, a position he held for eight years. His tenure is recognized as having transformed the Academy’s reputation amongst artists and the wider art world, being marked by both a respect for tradition and a forward-looking perspective, a fitting description for Le Brun’s personal artistic practice. 

The artist’s recent move from South London to Somerset has brought a fresh context that will surely shape his forthcoming work. As Le Brun continues to mine the depths of what art can express, his focus remains on the primacy of the act of creating itself, bringing to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s The Poetic Principle:

“The simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified—more supremely noble than this very poem—this poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more...”