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Lot Essay
In an interview Christopher Le Brun said:
‘When you talk about horses and riders in my work, it's important to me that they are not seen as real… The motif creates some kind of psychological field, so I think of it as an entrance, or a key, to the place that I want to enter. It’s as if ‘the horse’ enables the journey, rather than providing the final subject’ (C. Le Brun, quoted in C. Saumarez Smith, Christopher Le Brun, London, 2001, p. 224.)
A commission from Madeleine Bessborough of the New Art Centre in 1999 led Le Brun to transform the central image from the painting Union (1984), into his first monumental sculpture - the present work. The hybrid, half San Marco, half romantic charger, huge in the stillness of darkened bronze, restrained by, rather than drawing, the giant discs, straddles the divide between the formal and symbolic, between movement and stasis. The painterly process was reversed. An image that arose intuitively out of the process of painting, where an actual brushstroke had suggested the blaze down the horse’s head, instead began with the image.
In adapting painterly concerns to sculpture Le Brun denied many of the assumptions of modern sculpture. He had always found that he was made restless on the subject of sculpture in that as soon as he began making it people were quick to remind him that it was three-dimensional and not two: ‘In other words I was doing it partly to experience my reaction brought from painting that there was a single pre-eminent view.’ For example, the front view of Union, he maintains, ‘displays a symbolic tension that some other views contradict’ (Le Brun quoted in N. Watkins, 'Christopher Le Brun, painter-sculptor', Sculpture Journal, 2012, p. 85).
Le Brun studied in London at the Slade School of Art and at Chelsea College of Art. One of the leading British artists of his generation, and celebrated internationally since the 1980s, he makes both figurative and abstract work in painting, sculpture and print. He has received numerous major commissions, including from The Royal Opera House, Liverpool Anglican Cathedral and the National Portrait Gallery. Another cast from this edition is displayed on the Barbican Highwalk at London Wall, beside the entrance to the Museum of London.
Please note that this work will be exhibited in St. James's Square for the duration of the pre-sale viewing 3-7 June 2023.
‘When you talk about horses and riders in my work, it's important to me that they are not seen as real… The motif creates some kind of psychological field, so I think of it as an entrance, or a key, to the place that I want to enter. It’s as if ‘the horse’ enables the journey, rather than providing the final subject’ (C. Le Brun, quoted in C. Saumarez Smith, Christopher Le Brun, London, 2001, p. 224.)
A commission from Madeleine Bessborough of the New Art Centre in 1999 led Le Brun to transform the central image from the painting Union (1984), into his first monumental sculpture - the present work. The hybrid, half San Marco, half romantic charger, huge in the stillness of darkened bronze, restrained by, rather than drawing, the giant discs, straddles the divide between the formal and symbolic, between movement and stasis. The painterly process was reversed. An image that arose intuitively out of the process of painting, where an actual brushstroke had suggested the blaze down the horse’s head, instead began with the image.
In adapting painterly concerns to sculpture Le Brun denied many of the assumptions of modern sculpture. He had always found that he was made restless on the subject of sculpture in that as soon as he began making it people were quick to remind him that it was three-dimensional and not two: ‘In other words I was doing it partly to experience my reaction brought from painting that there was a single pre-eminent view.’ For example, the front view of Union, he maintains, ‘displays a symbolic tension that some other views contradict’ (Le Brun quoted in N. Watkins, 'Christopher Le Brun, painter-sculptor', Sculpture Journal, 2012, p. 85).
Le Brun studied in London at the Slade School of Art and at Chelsea College of Art. One of the leading British artists of his generation, and celebrated internationally since the 1980s, he makes both figurative and abstract work in painting, sculpture and print. He has received numerous major commissions, including from The Royal Opera House, Liverpool Anglican Cathedral and the National Portrait Gallery. Another cast from this edition is displayed on the Barbican Highwalk at London Wall, beside the entrance to the Museum of London.
Please note that this work will be exhibited in St. James's Square for the duration of the pre-sale viewing 3-7 June 2023.