About the Exhibition

The Gallery at Windsor presented Christopher Le Brun: Composer, a major two-part exhibition of renowned British painter and then President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Christopher Le Brun. Part of a concurrent show exhibiting at Albertz Benda’s New York gallery, the exhibition opened in February 2017 and displayed a body of work drawing from the connection between painting and music. Together, the works encompassed a completely new cycle of Le Brun’s paintings.

Composer featured 16 works, including new large-scale paintings and important private loans. The second part of the exhibition, which opened a week later in New York, featured 12 new paintings, demonstrating the breadth of scale that characterizes the artist’s most recent work.

Music and its relationship to composition have always been central to Le Brun’s creative process, and the importance of this dialogue became more explicit in 2015 when British composer Richard Birchall produced a new piano piece inspired by one of Le Brun’s paintings, Cloud, which debuted in a solo exhibition of his work in London in 2015. Chords, texture, tone, rhythm, layering: much of this language speaks equally to painting and music.

The title of these exhibitions, Composer, deliberately highlights the aesthetic and essential qualities of painting – shape, scale, texture and color – and the artists’ role in their arrangement. Under the hand of the painter and composer the raw material of noise becomes sound and visual chaos becomes form. Whether Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, or Philip Guston and Morton Feldman, historically there have always been strong relationships and critical exchanges between composers of paintings and of music.

A fully illustrated hardbound publication accompanied the exhibitions, with a foreword by The Hon. Hilary M. Weston, an introduction by curator Emile Bruner, an essay by the acclaimed curator and scholar Barbara Rose and a conversation with Christopher Le Brun and the architect David Chipperfield, moderated by Tim Marlow, former Artistic Director of the Royal Academy London.

The exhibition was held over by popular demand and closed on May 12, 2017.

About the Artist

Christopher Le Brun is a painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was President of the Royal Academy of Arts, London for eight years from 2011-2019. He was the 26th President since Sir Joshua Reynolds and the youngest to be elected since Lord Leighton in 1878.

Born in Portsmouth in 1951, Le Brun trained at the Slade and Chelsea Schools of Art, London. In his early career, he was a double prize-winner at the John Moores exhibitions, 1978 and 1980, also showing in the Venice Biennale in 1980, and the ground-breaking Zeitgeist at the Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin in 1982. His work can be found in many major museum and private collections, as well as in the public realm with sculpture in London and Saint Helier in the United Kingdom.

He served as a trustee of Tate 1990-1995, The National Gallery 1996-2003, and Dulwich Picture Gallery 2000-2005, and as a founding trustee of the Royal Drawing School 2003-2016, and trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 2011-2019.

Le Brun is represented by Lisson Gallery, London and Albertz Benda, New York.