Ann Madden

Anne Madden (born 1932) is one of Ireland’s most celebrated painters. Since the 1960s, she has explored landscape--not through a strict representation of nature but rather through a painterly investigation of its laws. Her earliest experiments involved pouring paint on horizontal canvases to evoke her childhood memories of Ireland’s Burren region. Pressing at her medium’s limits, Madden embarked on a large series of vertical works between 1970 and 1979, whose size was determined by her height and reach, and whose subject matter was inspired by megaliths and other prehistoric monuments. In her quest to unravel the mysteries of nature, Madden has focused on series ranging from the destruction of Pompeii to the glowing Northern Lights. Spanning Madden’s entire artistic career, this publication is comprised of works from the 1950s to the present.