PBA Galleries

Screenprint in gray and black. 31¼x22¾" (image size) on 39¾x27¾" sheet, TH Saunders wove paper. Signed and numbered 68/70 in pencil in lower margin. Dated in the screen.

From the series "Heads and Figures". Printed in the Kelpra Studio, London. Tate P04010.

Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931. His Jewish parents sent him to school in Kent in 1939, which was the last contact he had with them. In 1948 Auerbach attended the Borough Polytechnic Institute before entering St. Martin’s School of Art, where he met Leon Kossoff and Phil Holmes. In 1952 Auerbach studied at the Royal College of Art. “Throughout his career Auerbach’s art was highly regarded in Britain in the context of such painters as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, who also document the physical by extreme measures. His international reputation grew during the 1980s. … For his portraits he always found it most challenging to take as a subject a person he knew well. At first he laid brushstrokes on top of one another, whereas from the late 1960s he scraped down the impasto after each session; as a final step he allowed the relatively soft paint to form spontaneously a geography of peaks, channels and merged colours, corresponding to facts and feelings about the subject” (Grove Dictionary of Art). In 2000, the newly-opened Tate Modern displayed a room of his pictures. In 2001, the Royal Academy had a retrospective exhibition of his work.