13 Nov Frank Auerbach, Paint-bending Portraitist, Dies at 93

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/frank-auerbach-paint-bending-portraitist-dies/

Striving for deeper meaning in his portraits of close friends, Auerbach is best known for instinctively guiding thick swirls of paint in his works.

Painter Frank Auerbach died on Monday at his home in London. His death was reported on Instagram by Frankie Rossie Art Projects.

Geoffrey Parton, the gallery’s director, said, ‘we have lost a dear friend and remarkable artist but take comfort knowing his voice will resonate for generations to come.’

Born to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach escaped Nazi Germany to England in 1939 as one of six children sponsored by author Iris Origo. His parents were killed at a concentration camp in 1942.

Auerbach studied at St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London from 1948 to 1955. He soon began showing at Beaux Arts Gallery and, from the early 1960s, taught at Camberwell School of Art.

Frank Auerbach. Courtesy Frankie Rossi Art Projects’ Instagram.

Auerbach has described his practice as ‘sloshing away’, adding impasto and scraping it back. He described a breakthrough he made when painting actress Estella Olive West where he mustered ‘enough courage to repaint the whole thing, from top to bottom, irrationally and instinctively’.

The resulting portrait, E O W Nude (1953–4), is so dense it resembles roadworks.

In the 1970s, at a time when minimalism and abstraction were more fashionable, Auerbach was named among the School of London painters alongside peers persisting with figurative work including Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud.

Auerbach presented his first solo museum show at the Hayward Gallery in 1978 and was awarded the Golden Lion for best artist at the Venice Biennale in 1986 alongside Germany’s Sigmar Polke. Other major institutional shows took place at Madrid’s Reina Sofia in 1987, London’s National Gallery in 1994, and Tate Britain in 2015.

The exhibition Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads showed at the Courtauld Gallery from 9 February to 27 May 2024, demonstrating the artist’s effortful process of drawing, erasing and reworking an image.

In anticipation of the show, Ocula’s advisory team said, ‘the portraits are mesmerising, melancholic, and moving.’

Auerbach is survived by his son Jacob Auerbach. —[O]

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/frank-auerbach-paint-bending-portraitist-dies/