Because, while it is true that Anne Madden is the wife of one of the most important Irish artists of the latter half of the 20th century, the statement makes no mention of the fact that Madden is, herself, one of the most cerebral and evocative painters still working in Ireland.

Madden's retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which brings the viewer on a journey from the 1950s to the present day, is a timely reminder of the subtle impact that this Irishwoman, born in Chile of Irish, English and Chilean heritage, has had on the Irish artistic landscape. It also allows the viewer to witness the genesis of a new style of Irish art, spearheaded by Madden . . . while much of the painting in the 1950s was academic and nationalist, here was an artist looking both outward at the world and looking inward at herself to produce a new style of abstract art little seen in the emerging Ireland of the middle 20th century.

Anne Madden's early career began, as much as any but the most self-assured artist, with a sense of frustration at her own ability, coupled with a feeling that there must be more taking place in the artistic world.

"I was very frustrated as a younger artist, looking at books of Old Masters . . . so it was inevitable that I would feel that I had no skills as a painter, " she says. "And, if fact, I still have that feeling. But I was not exposed to any of the new movements in 20th century art. This was Ireland, and the War was still going on, so I don't think that anyone was exposed to anything very much. But I did see a Van Gogh exhibition, of his last works, which I found very exciting.

And, as soon as I left school, I started going around the museums of Europe, in Italy, France and Spain, and began looking at a lot more painting."

Even with this exposure to the great museums of Europe, Madden found herself somewhat unenthused by European art.

"As a student, I didn't feel that there was a lot going on of an exciting nature in the contemporary world . . . whether that was Paris, London or Dublin, " she said. "It wasn't until I saw my first exhibition of American Abstract Expressionism in London that I felt that there was a way forward.

And that was at the end of the 1950s."

Particularly inspired by the work of Canadian painter JeanPaul Riopelle, as well as Americans Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell, the 1950s represented a period of liberation for Madden. But this coincided, perversely, with a time of great physical constraint, as a riding accident in 1950 resulted in a series of spinal operations. It was during the 1950s, and during her convalescence, that her relationship with Louis le Brocquy flourished, and they were married in Chartres Cathedral in 1958. This was immediately following a major operation which had left her in a full body cast for eight months.

"In the intervening years, I was unable to walk, or do anything really, until I emerged from a chrysalis, stumbling not flying, " she says. "And it took me a long time to become strong enough to paint. It even took me a month to walk across a room after I was released from my sarcophagus. It was years before I was up, and I was painting as soon as I was strong enough."

The physical nature of Madden's painting is evident throughout her work. Canvases are large, and she paints "as big as herself", which caused the years of confinement to have a somewhat disproportionate impact upon her work.

But equally evident throughout her paintings are the internal elements, informed by the external events of her life, where tragedy and loss touched her from an early age, including the death of her father in a car accident when she was 14 years old.

"Experience always teaches you something, " she says. "All art is to a large extent autobiographical, and those experiences are used - emotions are digested, wild at first, then maybe transformed in paintings. Sometimes there are certain things, when you are young, that you have to go through which make you think of things that other people don't question when they are very young . . . such as the actual nature of existence. Things like infinity bothered me when I was 10 or 11 years old because of deaths in the family. Trying to understand what infinity could actually be is quite disturbing for a child. There is a lot of my life in my paintings, but I think that the paintings transcend the original."

At least a part of this extraordinary life is encapsulated at the IMMA exhibition, beginning with a self-portrait executed in 1950 (the only truly representative work in the collection), moving through her "Burren" period of the late 1950s/early-1960s and on to her experimental works (the "poured" paintings) of the mid1960s. It traces her work with her megalithic series of the 1970s, the more formal grid structures of her Pompeii and Garden series in the 1980s, and the vastness of the Icarus and Odyssey series, whose great canvases speak eloquently of flight and fall, light and dark, and solitude and freedom.

The new millennium opened with a poignant series by Madden, inspired by Blake's lines "I went to the garden of love/and I saw it was filled with graves", where shimmering surfaces barely conceal layers of crosses. But the final series of paintings, which are part of an ongoing series of Aurora paintings, are a more exuberant collection of magenta, green and oranges (colours which Madden had never before used), featuring "snakes of light", which have been interpreted as life's constant flux.

"Where paintings come from, how painting happens, is a very mysterious thing, " says Madden. "It's a process that I can't really explain. Because if I knew, there would be a recipe, and I don't know what that recipe is.

My painting is very instinctive, intuitive, and it is not planned out like a lot of painting. But the exuberance of my most recent works has excited me. It's something that I hoped I would be excited by, and I was, but I was also quite surprised by them.

And it's a very difficult thing, to surprise oneself."

The Anne Madden retrospective will run at IMMA until September 30.