Important Irish Art 30 November 2015

Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)

BEING [734], 2000

oil on canvas

signed and dated [2000] on reverse

…my aim was to reach into their inner being, something merely suggested in the earlier works. From the start these

later works appear to have developed a certain granular surface structure covering the entire canvas. This surface

suggested particles, which I tended to see as another kind of matrix from which the image might materialise, both in the

depths of its shadow and in its emergence to the light. Then, gradually it seems, this granular structure becomes more

structured and pervasive, at once composing and disseminating the image within it. (2)For an example from the earlier

Presences series see lot 75. For further reading see,

:1. Mac Giolla Léith, Caoimhín ‘The

Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy’, le Brocquy Archive, 20022. Louis le Brocquy quoted by Caoimhín Mac Giolla

Léith, ‘The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy’, Notes, le Brocquy Archive, 2002”

Gimpel Fils, London;Solomon Gallery, Dublin;Private collection

‘Human Images’, Gimpel Fils, London, 2001

Artist’s Archive number 734.From around the middle of the 1990s to 2005 Louis le Brocquy returned to his earlier

preoccupation with the ‘Presence Series’ (1956-1966) and developed further this theme in a body of work called ‘Human

Images’. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith has observed:

There are very few artists who have maintained as steadfast

a commitment as Louis le Brocquy has over the past half a century to envisioning what it is to be an embodied human

being adrift in an alienating world the true reality of which is likely to lie forever beyond our comprehension ... The

principal similarity between the early ‘Presences’ and the torsos produced since 1996, according to the artist, is one of

content in that the attempt is still to discover some kind of image of “our inner human reality - that impalpable thing we

call in turn the spirit, the psyche, consciousness.”The most obvious difference, on the other hand, between these two

bodies of work is one of form, in that the ‘phenomenon of whiteness’, to use Richard Kearney’s phrase, no longer exerts

the same fascination. In the recent [Human Image] paintings the intense white grounds have been replaced by what

le Brocquy characterises as ‘grayish backgrounds or ‘environments’, initially composed of minute particles and later by

a fractured texture from which the central figure is derived and into which it in turn diffuses in “a substantial identity of

surface and image”. (1)The artist described his return to the Presences theme thus:

€80000-€100000 (£57600-£72000 approx.)

IMPORTANT IRISH ART · 30 November 2015