Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 30TH MARCH 2022

84 63 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012) Being (no. 44) Oil on Board, 25.5 x 18cm (10 x 7¼”) Signed Provenance: With Gimpel Fils Gallery Ltd, London, January 1958 where purchased by Mrs Anthony Hunter; With Pyms Gallery, London; Private Collection Dublin € 12,000 - 16,000 Being forms part of a series of paintings which Le Brocquy began in 1957, under the umbrella title, Presences . The term, like ‘Being’ is ambiguous, having both a specific and a universal ap- plication. The series is characterized by the dominant use of white, applied thickly, broken only by small, carefully considered areas of brilliant colour, and enriched by their own impastoed textures. Most, like Being , represent a single, haunting figurative presence. The figure appears to emerge, gathering shape and form from the background, and presents itself at the surface of the picture plane. Le Brocquy, like many post-war artists was fearful of the destructiveness of nuclear weapons and his work revealed that sense of human fragility. Being both reflects that widely experi- enced anxiety and a more personal one, for the artist, in the mid-1950s as his fiancée, the young painter Anne Madden, endured three serious spinal operations, spending most of the year 1957 enveloped in a plastercast.