Anne Madden (born 1932) is an English-born painter, who is well known in both Ireland and France where she has divided her time since her marriage to Louis le Brocquy in 1958.
She also lost her sister and brother-in-law in a plane crash, which left Madden as guardian to three young children.
The techniques employed included palette knife and paint flows and soon involved the use of multiple canvases as a means of creating pictorial interactions.
The Irish Times reviewer commented,"Anne Madden paints landscape with a quite remarkable power to dredge away the soft clothing which covers the land.
She reveals the bones, the skeleton, not in the sense that such forms conote decay but rather to recall the simple grandeur which remains in winter snows or when wind has ripped away the foliage.
"[11]In the mid 1960s on, their comparatively reclusive life in Carros village was changed by the opening of the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul, where over the years they were constantly meeting painters, sculptors, writers, poets, and musicians forming friendships resumed in Paris and elsewhere.
[1] From the 1960s she began to paint a series of abstract landscapes influenced by her time as a young girl in the west of Ireland, near the Burren in County Clare.
Madden stated that they were an overt reflection of The Troubles in Northern Ireland,"They tended to be dark tonally, reflections of grief, of the Irish landscape, of an instinctive search to find or extract light from darkness; elegies of personal grief but also to the terrible and tragic events in Northern Ireland.
[3] A self-portrait of Madden was amongst 15 new exhibits inaugurated to the National Self Portrait Collection of Ireland in a show at the Kneafsey Gallery, Limerick, in spring 1987.
She continued to develop and produce a large body of work which was presented in an Arts Council of Ireland retrospective in 1991, at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin.
Madden who was a naturalist had grown vines and olives in France, which led her to present a collection entitled The Garden of Love at the Taylor Galleries in 2002.
[22] Madden showed once more with the Hugh Lane Gallery in 2017 in Colours of the Wind, a series of new works referencing Ariadne's golden thread, which the mythic figure gave to Theseus when he went into the Minotaur's labyrinth.