Frank Auerbach

Colourful exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the work of Frank Auerbach and partly curated by him.

The show was arranged in decades but Auerbach had tried to pick work which also assessed the themes in his work across the decades.

I love the early works with the really thick paint just layers on to almost create an object rather than a picture. I did want to know how much some of them weigh. They are strange as at first impression they are a mess of paint but then you set back and see the image but I also love the surface of them and the great swirls of colour sticking out from the canvas.

I hadn’t realised that in his later work he still paints and repaints an image but now scrapes down the whole surface every time rather than layering images. I love the fact he paints the same scenes over and over again so as well as the layers of paint there is a layering of image in your imagination over time. I particularly like the Mornington Crescent pictures and the pictures of his studio.

Definitely pictures which need seeing in the flesh as a printed image doesn’t give the sense of them as an object or the way an image seems to appear or disappear depending where you stand.

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