Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London

Offer Waterman and Francis Outred present ‘Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London’ - the first survey dedicated to the artist’s London landscapes.  Uniting works from important private and public collections, the twenty-five paintings on display span the artist’s seven-decade career, a journey through Auerbach’s artistic process and the evolving landscape of post-war London. The exhibition explores the urban bustle of Oxford Street, St Pancras and Euston, and the scenery of Primrose Hill, Hampstead Heath and Regent’s Park, in addition to Mornington Crescent and Camden Town – situated in the vicinity of the artist’s studio. 

Above: Installation image from 'Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London', at Francis Outred /Offer Waterman, © Frank Auerbach, Courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Project. Photographer: Prudence Cuming Associates.

London has proven an enticing subject to artists throughout the years (think: Turner, Sickert, or Monet – whose spectacular portraits of the city are currently on view at The Courtauld – among many others). There are, however, few more significant artists of the post-war generation – and even fewer among them who have so fervently dedicated their practice to capturing the city, season by season, year upon year – than Frank Auerbach.

Auerbach came to Britain from Germany in 1939 as an unaccompanied refugee at just seven years old. Of his solitary teenage years in London, where he moved in 1947, he commented: “My life was very much of the streets. I went around London; I took bus rides. This became one’s physical and mental terrain, which stimulated me to try and paint it, slightly impelled by the feeling that gradually it would be tidied up and disappear. I remember in those days going to places where I was scared to stand...On these planks, people wheeled wheelbarrows totally confidently; I would sit down and edge my way along them in order to do my drawings” (2009). Immersed in and encapsulated by the ever-evolving landscape of the city, Auerbach frequented these locations to sketch, using his observations as the basis for his paintings. His signature impasto technique lends itself to the topography of change which was occurring in the contemporary climate: accumulations of thick paint, applied in gestural sweeps, attack the canvas, not only recalling the idiosyncrasies of the hand that made them but the chaos of the rapidly growing urban landscape they so depict. Each work is constructed layer upon layer and scraped away if the artist is dissatisfied at the end of the day; as such, a tension emerges between generative and erosive processes, one which mirrors the evolution of bombed sites. In the words of his contemporary and friend, Lucien Freud, "It is the architecture that gives his paintings such authority. They dominate their given space: the space always the size of the idea, while the composition is as right as walking down the street" (1995). Mimetically enacting the rebuilding of these once-destroyed sites, a double-allusion forms within the three-dimensionality of his finished surfaces, which stand (quite literally) as monuments to construction and situate an interpretation of Auerbach’s work not only within the poetics of space but time.

Owing to their physical structure, which offers varying perspectives by which they can be viewed, Auerbach’s paintings may at first seem to more closely align themselves with the tenets of sculpture. Yet, his deconstruction of form into shifting fields of colour, light and space, the rhythmic fluidity of his marks, which seem at times to defy the very borders of the picture plane, and the layers of memory embedded into these iconic locations imbue the works with a ‘psychological impact’ (David Sylvester, 1956) that one can only obtain from the most accomplished of painters.