Looking and Experiencing: A Tribute to Leon Kossoff features paintings, drawings and etchings representing the artist’s major themes and motifs spanning his long career, including portraiture (particularly of his family and close circle), the urban – particularly the railway – landscape of London, responses to the old masters, and the nude. Works have been drawn from both public collections including the Schlee Collection, Southampton; and Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, as well as Ben Uri’s own collection, and selected important private collections. Kossoff’s enduring engagement with the old masters, in general, and Poussin, in particular, is represented by his response to Poussin’s Cephalus and Aurora (c. 1603, National Gallery), of which he commented on the 'difference between looking and experiencing. Paintings of this quality, in which the subject is endlessly glowing with luminosity, can, in an unexpected moment, surprise the viewer, revealing unexplored areas of self’* - a description which can be applied equally to Kossoff's own work.
A support display also includes works by Frank Auerbach, David Bomberg, Albrecht Dürer, Lucian Freud, R. B. Kitaj, John Lessore, Rembrandt and Chaïm Soutine.
Curated by Sarah MacDougall, Head of BURU and Ben Uri Collection.
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