Adam's The Deborah Brown Collection 1st October 2024

111 designs for Mary O’Malley at the Lyric The- atre, and exhibiting at the New Gallery in Belfast, which was run by her close friend Alice Berger Hammerschlag. A perhaps unexpected context for Deborah Brown’s work at this time was presented by the remarkable acquisition in the late 1950s and 1960s by the Ulster Museum, where her friend Anne Crookshank was Keeper of Art, of works by contemporary abstract painters including Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. In the mid-1960s she began to introduce glass fibre into her work, and exhibited these in her first exhibition at the Hendriks Gallery in Dublin in 1966. By this stage Deborah Brown was recognised as one of the most significant artists working in Ire- land, and her work was regularly included in survey exhibitions of contemporary Irish art, including a number of major touring exhibitions and at ROSC. Her 1982 retro- spective exhibition was shown at the Ulster Museum, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and the Orchard Gallery, and demonstrated a move away from ab- straction, first in a series of three-dimen- sional environmental works, and then in sculptures of figures and animals, leading to Sheep on the Road (1991), which be- came very well-known when it was located outside the Waterfront Hall in Belfast. Deborah Brown exhibited extensively throughout her career, and in 2005 a cat- alogue of her work with a collection of es- says, edited by Hilary Pyle, was launched with a retrospective exhibition at the Ava Gallery, Co. Down. A third substantial ret- rospective exhibition was held at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Studio in 2012/13, and in the accompanying catalogue, the gallery’s curator, Dr Riann Coulter de- scribed Deborah Brown as ‘a radical and innovative artist, one of the first in Ireland to embrace abstraction, experiment with fi- bre glass and engage with the internation- al avant-garde, including Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana.’ Deborah Brown had moved to Ramelton, in County Donegal, in the early 2000s, and she died there in April 2023. Her work is held in notable public collections, includ- ing the Hugh Lane Gallery, the Irish Mu- seum of Modern Art, National Museums Northern Ireland, and the Arts Council of Ireland. ‘The earlier abstract paintings show her concern with expression through juxta- positioning of shape and encounter on a two-dimensional surface beautiful works that rightly brought her acknowledgement as one of Ireland’s most innovative artists of her generation.’ Barbara Dawson, ‘Foreword’, Deborah Brown: From Painting to Sculpture, Hilary Pyle (ed.), Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005, p.7 ‘The legends are now replaced by a range of colours and shapes which suggest a magic world beyind knowledge where the mind can find a serene and exalted rest.’ James White Deborah Brown, catalogue for two-person exhibition with Alice Berger Hammershlag, 1960, re-printed in Deborah Brown: From Painting to Sculpture, Hilary Pyle (ed.), Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005, p.75 ‘The fluency of her line is quite remarkable, as is her ability to create solid, tangible spaces with the minimum of means, a few brush strokes or a pencil line.’ Anne Crookshank ‘Deborah Brown’, Deborah Brown: From Painting to Sculpture, Hilary Pyle (ed.), Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005, p.45