But she need not have worried.

This exhibition is a revelation, particularly for those who are more aware of Anne Madden through her marriage of almost 50 years to the artist Louis le Brocquy. At this stage, it has become a cliche to say Madden has always worked in the shadow of her husband. If anything, though, were to debunk such an assumption, it is this full-scale retrospective, initiated and curated by Imma director Enrique Juncosa. What it reveals is an accomplished, inventive and individualistic painter who, at the age of 74, is now at the height of her creative powers.

The highlight of the exhibition is a new series of works, never exhibited before, based upon the aurora borealis. Monumental in scale, these paintings are a stunning burst of undulating colour: an expression of wonderment, a celebration of life itself. Previous work by Madden has always had a dark undertone . . . a sense of fragility, pain or threat . . . whereas this new series revels in the momentary beauty of the auroras. But even though these paintings are an energetic display of joie de vivre, there is also an underlying, poignant awareness that such a vision is inevitably fleeting and elusive. As she says: "I think that the subject of my painting is light, on which colour depends of course . . . and therefore also darkness."

Interestingly, as a representation of the northern lights, they are also a response to her return to Dublin from the south of France, where she and le Brocquy had lived for some 40 years. She has acknowledged that this move was painful for her . . . a traumatic rupture in her life.

Indeed, around the time of the move, in 2001-2, she began the Garden of Love paintings, a series of gorgeously hued, seemingly paradisiacal paintings, out of which emerge cross-like, gravestone shapes. These works are based on a line from a William Blake poem that she came across while packing to leave France: "I went to the garden of lovef And I saw it was filled with graves".

Madden, whose work has always had an autobiographical undercurrent, has experienced a great deal of tragedy in her life.

Born in 1932 to an Irish father and Anglo-Chilean mother, she spent the first four years of her life in Chile, before the family moved back to Europe, where they divided their time between Ireland and England. Her parents sent Madden and her sister to a convent school at Harrogate, which she hated. "We felt abandoned, " she recalled.

Later, however, she persuaded them to let her attend a liberal school in Oxford, where she became something of a rebel. But then, when she was 14 years old, her father was killed in a car crash.

In 1950, at the age of 18, Madden was involved in a riding accident while hunting in Ireland, and suffered a serious spinal injury. What followed, from 1953 to 1957, were three years of operations, and months spent immobile in plaster casts and steel braces. It was during this time, in 1956, that she met Louis le Brocquy by chance at a party, an occasion he later described as love at first sight.

On doctors' advice, the couple moved to the south of France.

There, in the remote countryside, they brought up their two children, made their own wine and olive oil, grew their own vegetables, and worked in the same studio together. During the summer months, they socialised with the French artistic elite, mingling with such figures as Jean-Paul Riopelle, Joan Miro, Antoni Tapies and Eduardo Chillida. While spending time in Paris, they also came to know Samuel Beckett.

However, Madden experienced further tragedy when her beloved sister and her sister's husband were killed in a plane crash in Peru in 1967. Their three children were orphaned, and Madden became their coguardian. In 1984, her younger brother Jeremy also died, following an accident in which he slipped and broke his pelvis.

In the wake of Jeremy's death, Madden couldn't paint for more than a year. Eventually, on Beckett's urging that she "tackle her dark", Madden returned to the studio with a series of paintings based on her garden in France. "It was nature that brought me back, " she recalls. "I was able to work and use nature. . . to try to get back, literally, to the box of light which was my studio."

Madden's life and art are inextricable, although her paintings are in no way confessional. The Imma retrospective reveals a remarkable versatility in her work, tracking the many changes in her paintings over some 50 years, and demonstrating the way in which her oeuvre is divided into several distinct series of works. However, it also reveals a striking coherence and consistency of approach. While influenced by the style of the abstract expressionists, her works always have some relationship with or basis in landscape, nature or the figurative. "I see figuration in my work as a metaphor: the mountain as a symbol of the spiritual journey, the road as a symbol of life's journey. The doorway is a formal metaphor for the threshold . . . of life and death, interior and exterior space, dark and light, open and closed space, thought and being, mind and matter." Her works are thus metaphorical representations of states of being and inner consciousness . . . representations of a conceptual, inner space that integrates the personal and the mythic, the abstract and the figurative. As Madden says, she is "trying to make visible the invisible aspects of life".

Her early paintings in the 1950s were inspired by the landscape of the Burren, while in the 1960s she developed a method of pouring paint to create abstracted evocations of the land. Around this time, she also began to create works consisting of several panels rather than just one canvas. "I felt that it's impossible to make a definitive image on a single surface, " she says.

Madden began the Megalith/Elegy series in the 1970s, following her sister's death. Like lone standing stones, these dark, meditative works evoke a palpable sense of grief, both for her sister and for the Troubles in Northern Ireland that were raging at the time.

In the 1980s, once she had returned to painting following the rupture caused by her brother's death, the infusion of Mediterranean colours became increasingly evident. The Odyssey series from the 1990s, depicting a tiny boat in vast blue, red or golden seas, reflects an interior journey. "The boat is probably myself setting out once more into the unknown . . . always dangerous territory, " she says.

Following this, the Icarus series emerged; also based on a Greek myth, these works depict a flying form surrounded by an expanse of sky or the bright, bursting effusion of the sun. "I see him as an artist figure reaching for the out-of-reach, that which always escapes him and lies beyond the parameters of reason and logic. And the outcomes of Icarus's endeavour I see as much the same as the artist's . . . inevitable shortfall in his or her own eyes."

For Madden, the artist is on a never-ending quest . . . a journey for enlightenment and selfdiscovery that never reaches its end. Perhaps this is why, over her long career, she has been driven to paint "by some compulsion beyond reason", always seeking new avenues of discovery and fresh approaches to her exploration of light, time, space and colour. Her latest, joyous, Aurora Borealis series revels in the elusiveness of this quest for enlightenment. As she says:

"This artist attempts to seek the sun, the light, enlightenment, all too aware of the impossibility of reaching that place . . . knowing, as well, that there is nowhere else for her to go."