Seven Paintings by Anne Madden (b.1932) is a series made during the Covid-19 pandemic. It follows a sixty-year international career, during which the artist has produced a powerful and distinctive body of work.  Madden’s themes explore the transformative forces and cyclical nature of life and experience.  Ideas of the empyrean, the subterranean and of the emergence from darkness to light have informed all of her work; from her earliest canvases of the glaciated Burren landscape, her series of Megaliths, Monoliths and Doorways from the 1970s, the Elegy, Pompeii, Odyssey and Garden series of the 1990s, and since 2003 atmospheric phenomena such as the Aurora Borealis.

Madden’s present series continues to excavate the human imprint through themes of death, rebirth, liminality and hubris, and draws on ancient forms and mythologies that give potent shape and expression to the anarchic forces and uncertainties of today.  The paintings reference Antigone, Ariadne and Daphne, archetypal women whose voices are not silenced, in spite of their fate, and who connect with existential, feminist perspectives today.  In their midst is Ann Lovett – a young girl of our time. Death of Ann Lovett (1968-1984), recalls the teenager’s tragic death in childbirth in a religious grotto in rural Ireland and the surrounding hypocrisy, silence and the failure of the social system, an event which continues to resonate in Irish society. Painting more figuratively than in the past Madden continues to be “in thrall to the infinite possibilities of the transformative power of paint”.