Frank Auerbach
1954
Oil paint on canvas
61 x 60.8 cm
Before making his charcoal drawings of Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach produced a small group of remarkable monochrome paintings of him. Like the drawings, this work demonstrates how, using just black and white, Auerbach was able to depict a head as something intimate and familiar but also hauntingly strange. His assured rendering of the form within the thick paint gives the head a strong physical presence. We feel the skull beneath the flesh. In that sense, the painting is not just a portrait likeness, but a work in which mortality lies just below the surface.
Private collection
© the artist, courtesy of Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London.