Christopher Le Brun is one of the leading British painters of his generation, celebrated internationally since the 1980s, making both figurative and abstract work in media including painting, sculpture, watercolour and print. His work can be found in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Tate, the V&A and the British Museum, London; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
Le Brun employs a mastery of touch and colour alongside a profound understanding of art history and a wide range of visual, musical and literary sources to engage with the major existential, aesthetic and formal questions of painting. His works are notable for their layered, complex, scintillating surfaces, which he describes as 'non-ironic, primary' responses to the act of painting. Le Brun has remained consistent in adhering to what he feels to be the essential poetry of painting led by intuition and visual imagination.
Recent work shows the development of modular compositions from single pieces through to large and highly complex canvases, triptychs and monumental multi-part paintings, extending the limits of abstract pictorial composition. Le Brun's heightened awareness of the painting process with its dramatic tension between revealing and covering, has been a central feature of his work that unites all its phases whether abstract or figurative. His idea is to make a painting less fenced or surrounded, but one which feels for its boundaries organically, playing out its appearance in front of you.
Le Brun has served as a trustee of many major British art institutions. Elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1996, he served as President from 2011-2019, overseeing the most significant redevelopment in the Academy's 250-year history and is widely acknowledged as having revitalised the Academy's reputation. Le Brun was awarded a Knighthood in the 2021 New Year's Honours List for services to art.