Christopher Le Brun: The Speech of Light, Paintings 2013-2024

One of Britain’s most influential living artists, Le Brun emerged as a significant rising star in the British art scene during the 1980s and continues to create works that are a celebration of light, depth, and the expressive potential of paint. This book presents an in-depth exploration of a discrete and compelling body of work over the past ten years.

Le Brun’s large-scale paintings are characterized by their lyrical abstraction and often reference myth, history, and literature using a rich palette and expressive brushwork. Each page of this sumptuous book reveals the artist’s dynamic use of color, texture, and form, capturing the essence of his creative process and the emotions embedded in his canvases, some light in touch and some involving dense accretions of paint.

Featuring an extensive plates section of full-color reproductions, including five expanding foldouts, a critical narrative by art historian Matthew Holman, and a reference section of illustrated footnotes that shed light on Le Brun’s inspirations, this book provides a comprehensive look at one of Britain’s most beloved artists.

Sir Christopher Le Brun (b. 1951, UK) is one of the leading British painters of his generation, making both figurative and abstract work in painting, sculpture, and print. He was an instrumental public figure in his role as president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 2011 to 2019. Since 1990 he has served as a trustee of major British institutions and was awarded a Knighthood (Knight Bachelor) for services to the arts in the 2021 New Year Honours. Matthew Holman is the Terra Foundation for American Art postdoctoral fellow at the Courtauld. He writes regularly for The Times Literary Supplement, Frieze, The Art Newspaper, Apollo, and The White Review.