‘I didn’t find actual formal components of my head all that interesting when I was younger, smoother and less frazzled. Now that I’ve got bags under my eyes, things are sagging and so on, there’s more material to work with’.
– Frank Auerbach
Frankie Rossi Art presents an exhibition of self-portraits by Frank Auerbach (b. 1931), one of the greatest living painters of our age. The first presentation of new work by Auerbach since 2015, the exhibition will be on view from 18 April – 14 July 2023. Renowned for his portraits of a small group of people who have sat for him for decades, self-portraits are a rare aspect of his oeuvre, and the exhibition will feature twenty paintings and drawings ranging from 2018 to the present day.
Auerbach has previously acknowledged the difficulty of ‘chasing one’s own shadow’. Prior to these recent works he made only one oil-over-charcoal on paper and two self-portrait drawings, one in the late 1950s and other in 1965. It would be another 36 years before he chose to draw himself again, and it was not until 2021 that he began a self-portrait in paint from the start. ‘I’m rather glad that I didn’t do self-portraits before (…) in the last few years I’ve been working from myself, and in fact I find it endlessly interesting. It’s different every time you do it’.
Auerbach arrived in England in 1939 as a refugee from Nazi Germany and was enrolled at Bunce Court school in Kent. There he met Michael Roemer, the award-winning filmmaker and Yale professor, and a life-long friendship began. In a touching account in the exhibition catalogue, Roemer recalls their first meeting and writes eloquently of his compulsion to collect his friend’s drawings and paintings: the first acquired in 1953, was a charcoal drawing of Auerbach’s close friend Leon Kossoff drawn when the artist was just 19. More works followed, and Roemer says of the early works, ‘with almost no exceptions everyone who came to our house in those years thought the pictures were too dark – the very darkness seemed beautiful to me’. He goes on to say, ‘At the time I had no idea why I was compelled to collect them. I just knew I needed them’. There is a beauty in the counterpoint between two old
friends late in life – Auerbach with these remarkable self-portraits and the self-examining writing of Roemer.
Frank Auerbach, Twenty Self-Portraits is presented in affiliation with Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert.
Frankie Rossi Art
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street, London SW1Y 6BB