Leon Kossoff

A rare exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by Leon Kossoff. This show featured the first works to leave the artist's studio since his major exhibitions at the British Pavilion, Venice Biennale in 1995 and the Tate Gallery retrospective in 1996. Born in 1926, Leon Kossoff has been described as one of the greatest British artists of the past four decades. He grew up in the East End and has lived in London all his life. The changing face of London's urban landscape has been a recurring subject of his work, as he has returnned to paint and drawparticular places from the metropolis where he was born. Key locations include Christ Church, Spitafields, Willesden, Killburn and Embankment Underground Stations. More recently he produced a powerful new series on King's Cross station and Pentonville Road, which was featured in the exhibition.

The human figure also continues to be a major preoccupation and the exhibition contained two of the largest double nude figure paintings Kossoff has produced. For over forty years the artist has painted a limited range of subjects, mostly members of his own family, close friends and a smell number of models of long acquaintance. These works are deeply moving moving evocations of the human presence. He is an artist who enjoys working directly with his material building up his thickly layered, almost sculptura, paintings in a deep emotional response to the real and visible world as he experiences it.

This exhibition was organised with the co-operationof the L.A. Louver Gallery, Los Angeles, and was recently shown at the Mitchell-Innes Gallery in New York, where it attracted a record number of visitors.

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Leon Kossoff