WHYTE'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 29 NOVEMBER 2021 AT 6PM

88 64 Anne Madden (b.1932) DEEP STREAM, 1990 (DIPTYCH) oil on canvas; (unframed) signed, titled and dated on reverse 102 by 35in. (259.1 by 88.9cm) Frame Dimensions: Provenance: Jonathan Swift Gallery, Carrickfergus; Private collection When Anne Madden delivered the Hermione Lecture at Alexandra College in Dublin in 2001, she spoke about how a “deep stream of consciousness - the creator of myth, of dream, and of God - forms the artist’s conscious interpretation of the world and his relationship to it.” Published as A Quest: Some Reflections on My Experience of Being a Painter, the lecture continues: “This deep stream has its own source of nourishment, like a river whose surface hides and feeds, through infiltration, the underground water table.” Deep Stream was painted towards the end of Madden’s Pompeii and Garden series (1980-1990) and is related to the Portal andWindow series begun in 1982. Blue is a key colour in diptych, polyptych and triptych works from this time. Streams of light, pathways, and apertures predominate. Madden stopped painting on canvas for a time during the 1980s. A period of darkness followed the sudden death of her brother in 1984. After a visit with Samuel Beckett in Paris in 1987, the poet wrote to her, “Don’t be depressed about your dark. It’s it nagging to be said”. Madden has said “it” referred to her feelings about death. Beckett urged her to “tackle her dark”. The paintings she made around 1989 and 1990 record some of that journey. Madden told the 2006 RTE TV Arts Lives documentary which focussed on her work that, “the Garden paintings, the boxes of light, the paths of light are all related in so far as they are all attempts on my part to retrieve the studio, a kind of box of light in itself, after my brother’s death. In many ways it was nature...that helped me to return to the studio.”Deep Stream, with its intimations of fishpond, foliage, open skies, and watery depths, explores some of that natural threshold between dark and light. Madden lived in Chile until she was four and spent time in London and County Clare before moving to the South of France with her artist husband Louis le Brocquy in 1958. Inspired by the landscape of the Burren, by Les Combes in the foothills of the alps, and influenced by Matisse, her work combines figuration and abstraction with a focus on what she has called “the invisible aspects of the world…psyche, consciousness, feeling”. Madden attended the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts. She exhibited at the Irish Exhibition of Living Arts in 1964 and represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1965. She has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin in 1991, Chateau de Tours Municipal Art Gallery, France 1997, the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris in 2005, and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in 2017. Her work is in private and public collections and was the subject of a significant retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2007. She is a member of Aosdána and was made Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2008. She has lived and worked in Dublin since 2000. Cristín Leach, November 2021 €10,000-€15,000 (£8,470-£12,710 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot64