Christopher Le Brun paintings added to collections of Tate, London and MoCAUP, Shenzhen

23 March 2023

Tate in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art & Urban Planning (MoCAUP) in Shenzhen have both announced the addition of important works by British artist Christopher Le Brun to their collections.

Tate's National Collection has enriched its holdings of Le Brun's work with Union (1984), presented by Maryam Diener in 2023. This important piece marks the culmination of a gradual painterly development, combining abstract and figurative elements in a large-scale format, to achieve an active emotional tension between formal and signifying elements.

Following museum and gallery exhibitions in Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen, MoCAUP has acquired Double Diptych (Spring etc.) (2021) – at the time, the artist’s widest, multi-panel oil on canvas painting.

These two pieces together provide valuable insight into Le Brun's five-decade-long career, encompassing his complex artistic language; from his pioneering participation in the ‘New Image’ and ‘Neo-expressionist’ movements, the juxtaposition of abstraction and figuration, to the purely painterly qualities of his recent work which are marked by glowing colour and lyrical freedom.

Christopher Le Brun, Double Diptych (Spring etc.), 2021, Oil on canvas, 150.5 x 602 cm, 59 1/4 x 237 in © Christopher Le Brun