Leon Kossoff

Annely Juda Fine Art, London
L.A. Louver, California
Private Collection, U.S.A.

Paul Moorhouse, Leon Kossoff, (exh. cat.) Tate Gallery, London, 1996, p.37, illustrated fig.50.

Unexamined out of frame. The sheet appears adhered to a backing support within a recessed mount. There is very slight cockling to the sheet, with deckled edges and signs of the artist's handling and working to the sheet, including a small tear to the right side of the extreme top edge. There are isolated areas of fine craquelure and reticulation to some of the areas of thicker white gouache, most prominent in the centre and top left quadrants, and only visible upon very close inspection. This excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition. Housed behind Perspex in a thick silver wooden frame, within a white linen mount. Unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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'London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my bloodstream. It's always moving - the skies, the streets, the buildings, the people who walk past me when I draw have become part of my life.'
(The artist cited in Paul Moorhouse (ed.), Leon Kossoff (exh. cat.), London, Tate Gallery, 1996, p.36).

Beginning in the 1950s and continuing throughout his long ongoing career, Leon Kossoff has repeatedly explored the intimate characteristics of his immediate surroundings and focused his gaze upon the ordinary places that form part of his everyday experience. Continually returning to paint the familiar London scenes around him, the lively stations, flower stalls, churches and the North London railway, Kossoff's work is enlivened by a tangible and wholly unique sense of familiarity with its subject, capturing the private face of long-lived experience in an active metropolis. Although he frequently returns to paint the same scene twice, the changing mood, light, and the passage of the seasons, all of which he is so acutely aware, prevent him from wandering into the realms of repetition.  

His well-rehearsed capturing of the hustle and bustle of London life are brilliantly realized in Embankment Station and Hungerford Bridge I - part of a series of paintings and drawings completed between 1993 and 1995 which examine the area around the Embankment Underground Station. Here the scene is witnessed from above. The viewer looks down on the Londoners in motion, funneling towards the station entrance, perhaps in the rush of their morning commute. Framed on either side by bridges, with a leafy tree rising behind, the station is itself identified by the iconic red circular London Tube symbol, and its distinctive neo-classical architecture, Kossoff placing particular emphasis on the columns which surround the entrance. The work is a full and mature composition that seems to writhe under the energies of the thickly loaded brushstrokes and markings that describe it, and is truly one of the most exciting works on paper by the artist to ever appear on the market.