German-British Painter Frank Auerbach Dies at 93

Frank Auerbach, the German-British painter whose expressionist portraits captured the beauty and pain of human experience, has died at the age of 93. Frankie Rossi Art Projects Director Geoffrey Parton said in an email announcing the news: ‘We have lost a very dear person. a friend and a remarkable artist, but take comfort in knowing that his voice will echo for generations to come.’

Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach came to England in 1939 as a refugee from the Nazi regime. He was one of six children sponsored by the British writer Iris Origo, who was a friend of the artist’s parents. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1947.

Auerbach worked in St. Petersburg from 1948 to 1955. He studied at Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, where he lived and worked for most of his life. The presentation of his paintings by Frankie Rossi Art Projects at Frieze Masters in 2024 highlighted the importance of a stable space for this artist who began life in such turmoil. Dating from the early 1970s to 2021, the works were vivid and colorful reminders of the extraordinary diversity of an artist known for his deeply psychological portraits, especially those that sit repeatedly.

“It’s probably true that our deepest experiences are with other people,” he said Guard In 2023. ‘I think the issue is important. And it seems that the only things worth using for one’s art are one’s deepest experiences.’ He added that drawing and painting helped him understand his relationship with people, including his friends and peers. Auerbach was also painted by artist friends; most notably Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud created portraits of the artist in 1964 and 1974-75 respectively.

After holding a series of solo exhibitions at the Beaux Arts Gallery and Marlborough Gallery in London from the 1950s and 1960s, Auerbach’s first retrospective exhibition opened at the Hayward Gallery in 1978. It was a great success. William Packer writes for Finance Timeshe described it as ‘an intense, heavy and ultimately triumphant spectacle of painting at its most intense and profound’. ‘No one can claim to be seriously interested in the art of our time and yet not know that it is on the air and want to see it.’

The dense and uneven surfaces of Auerbach’s works often fail to translate into photographs. Jason Farago wrote: “Blurry, fuzzy, up close these images are definitely not the kind you’ll love at first sight.” New York Times In 2021, on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at Luhring Augstine, New York, ‘but it is so rewarding to understand these in person.’

Acclaimed by his colleagues in the United Kingdom, Auerbach’s international reputation grew over the years with major exhibitions dedicated to the artist at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut; Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; and Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid; among others. He represented England at the Venice Biennale in 1986, sharing the Golden Lion with Sigmar Polke. In 2015, Tate Britain and Kunstmuseum Bonn organized a joint retrospective of the artist’s work.

The artist, who is said to have worked non-stop every day in his studio and rarely participated in socializing in the art world, maintained a certain mystery throughout his life. ‘He stays alone every evening of his own free will,’ said curator and art historian Catherine Lampert. This was enough to attract the interest of the famous novelist WG Sebald. immigrants Dating from 1992, it contains a thinly disguised portrait of the artist. Sebald describes how Auerbach (credited as Max Ferber) applied paint, then scraped it away, creating portraits of ‘wonderful liveliness’ that also ran the risk of deterioration and destruction.

This destruction, the possibility of failure, the possibility that everything could fall apart, drove the artist to work constantly. ‘I paint pictures over and over again,’ he said Possibility ‘I think there is a hidden underlying structure to things and I’m trying to reach it, I’m trying to move towards it.’