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237 Lisburn Road, Belfast
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BT9 7EN, Northern Ireland
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Louis le Brocquy
Louis le Brocquy was born in Dublin in 1916. In
1938 he left Ireland and his grandfather's buisness to become a painter. Self-taught, he studied paintings
in museums in London, Paris, Venice and Geneva, then exhibiting the Prado collection during the Spanish
civil war. Returning to Dublin in 1940 he helped found the Irish Exhibition of Living Art(1943) where
his work was later remarked by Charles Gimpel. In 1946 he began his long association with Gimpel Fils
and settled in London, where he worked for twelve years alongside such artists as Ben Nicholson, Victor
Pasmore, William Scott, Patrick Heron, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. During this period he began to
exhibit internationally, winning a major prize at the Venice Biennale in 1956, where he encountered Giacometti
and his sculpture. He commenced his series of Presence paintings in 1957. The following year he married
the young Irish painter, Anne Madden and left London to work with her in the relative isolation of the
French Midi. Following his discovery in 1964 of decorated Polynesian ancestral skulls in the Paris Musee
de L'Homme and of the Celto-Ligurian head cult near Aix-en-Provence, le Brocquy set out upon his long
series of head images. Initally anonymous, these images later depicted specific artists such as Yeats,
Joyce and Samuel Beckett. It was at the latter's request that le Brocquy illustrated his valedictory
book, Stirrings Stil, and designed set and costumes for Waiting for Godot, produced by the Gate Theatre,
Dublin in 1988 and subsequently at the Lincoln Center, New York. Since 1996, in an incisive development
of his earlier Presence series, he has continued to paint interiorised images of the human body. In
1962 le Brocquy was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Dublin and, in 1998, by the National
University of Ireland. In 1975 he was made Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur and in 1996, Officier
des Arts et des Lettres.In 1998 the artist was awarded the Glen Dimplex Prize for his sustained contribution
to the arts in Ireland. He lives and works in Ireland and France.
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