Leon Kossoff

Annely Juda Fine Art, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is lighter throughout and the reds tend towards a raspberry pink in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to convey the rich texture of the impasto and the intense brushwork in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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"London, like the paint I use seems to be in my blood stream. 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: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Leon Kossoff, 1996, p. 36)

Beginning in the 1950s and continuing throughout his long 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 his home, such as well-known landmarks, bustling stations and flower stalls, 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 a bustling 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 capturings of the hustle and bustle of London life are brilliantly realised in Flower and Fruit Stalls, Stormy Day, Embankment - a full and mature composition that seems to writhe under the energies of the thickly loaded brushstrokes that describe it. As if powered by his masterful understanding of light and atmosphere, each bold expressionist gesture is seemingly ploughed into the rich, painterly surface, directly translating intimate visual sensations and a specific seasonal climate onto the surface.
In this work, the viewer is confronted by a large, ascending picture plane encrusted with storms of thick, palette-knifed impasto, whose luscious paint-splatterings and strident, vigorous strokes brilliantly describe and enhance the atmospheric intensity of the scene. Built up in layer upon layer of painterly gestures, the surface is so deeply meshed and blended together that close inspection of it reveals a complex network of spontaneous, emotive outpourings.

At the heart of this magnificently unpretentious depiction of the artist's everyday, London experience, lies a bustling celebration of painting that directs the viewer's gaze around its swirling, impassioned narrative. Kossoff depicts a recognisable scene here as if it were a wild and fantastical landscape whose rushing brushstrokes and accentuated diagonals lunge it hurriedly inward with a unique feeling of great momentum and speed. It demonstrates an interlocking relationship between reality and spontaneity, between paint and image, and the energies that both generate.