Christopher Le Brun emerged in the early 1980s as the leading exponent of a new style of British art that moved away from postwar American abstraction and toward an approach more in continuity with the European tradition of painting. After graduating from the Slade School, Le Brun had a formative fellowship in Berlin, where exposure to both German romantic art and contemporary German painting set him apart from most of his British contemporaries. After producing powerful symbolist paintings in the 1980s and 1990s, Le Brun’s most recent paintings are seemingly abstract, typically relying on intense color and richly textured passages, yet retain an ambiguous quality as if an underlying form is in the process of being unveiled. He was elected president of the Royal Academy in 2011, the youngest artist to be elected to the office since Lord Leighton (whose work is shown nearby). Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2020
