Christopher Le Brun UK, b. 1951

Sir Christopher Le Brun is one of the most important British painters of his generation, internationally recognized since the 1980s for an artistic practice that encompasses painting, sculpture, and printmaking, including both figurative and abstract works.

Born in Portsmouth in 1951, Le Brun studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Chelsea School of Art in London. Early recognition came with two awards at the John Moores exhibitions in 1978 and 1980, alongside his participation in the Venice Biennale in 1980 and the influential Zeitgeist exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 1982.

Le Brun has played a leading role in British cultural and institutional life. He has served as a Trustee of the Tate, the National Gallery, and the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and was a co-founder of the Royal Drawing School. In 2000, he was elected the first Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts. He subsequently held the office of President of the Royal Academy from 2011 to 2019. In recognition of his services to the arts, he was knighted in the 2021 New Year Honours.

Le Brun's career has been marked by a sustained commitment to the possibilities of painting and its capacity to generate meaning through colour, gesture, materiality, and visual imagination. His work draws on a deep knowledge of art history and a broad range of visual, musical, and literary sources. However, his approach remains rooted in the intuitive and physical experience of painting itself: in the poetry, pleasure, and freedom of the medium, pursued for its own sake and resistant to any external justification.

An acute awareness of the material process of creation—particularly the tension between revealing and concealing—has remained a defining feature throughout the different phases of his work. In recent years, his exploration of painting's formal possibilities has led him to increasingly ambitious modular compositions, ranging from single works to complex large-scale canvases, triptychs, and monumental multi-panel paintings. These works push the boundaries of abstract pictorial composition while maintaining the immediacy of gesture and the expressive potential of colour.

Le Brun's works have recently been the subject of exhibitions in international galleries and institutions—including Almine Rech in Paris, Albertz Benda in New York, Lisson Gallery in London, Beijing, and Shanghai, the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Southampton Art Gallery, and Colnaghi in London. 

His works are included in the collections of numerous museums, including the Tate in London (UK); the Museum of Modern Art in New York (USA); the Museum of Contemporary Art & Urban Planning (MoCAUP) in Shenzhen (China); the British Museum in London (UK); the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (Australia); The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (USA); the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (UK); the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (Scotland); The Whitworth in Manchester (UK); the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing (China); the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven (USA); the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (USA); and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford (USA). His public sculptures include Union (horse with two discs) at the Museum of London; City Wing on the site of the original London Stock Exchange; and The Monument to Victor Hugo in St Helier, Jersey.