Self-portrait with Christ Church, 1986
Leon Kossoff (1926–2019) was a leading figure of postwar British art, who was celebrated for his deeply expressive paintings and drawings of the people and places that shaped his life. Born in London, Kossoff studied at St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Frank Auerbach, and others, he is closely associated with the School of London, a group of artists united by their commitment to figurative painting at a time when abstraction, minimalism, and conceptual art were increasingly prominent.
Working primarily from life, Kossoff developed a practice grounded in close observation and sustained engagement with his subjects. His portraits of family members, friends, and longtime sitters, as well as his self-portraits, reflect an intimate and ongoing dialogue with the people closest to him. Equally central to his practice were the streets, railway stations, schools, building sites, and neighborhoods of North and East London. Returning repeatedly to familiar locations, Kossoff recorded the changing urban landscape and the rhythms of everyday life. For Kossoff, drawing was an essential means of encountering his subjects, while painting offered a deepening of that experience. His paintings are distinguished by their densely worked surfaces, vigorous brushwork, and structural rigor, capturing the immediacy of lived experience through an intensive process of drawing, painting, scraping away, and reworking.
Christ Church, Summer Afternoon, 1994
Kossoff represented Great Britain at the XLVI Venice Biennale in 1995. His work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Tate Gallery, London; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museum of Art, Lucerne; and the National Gallery, London, among others. His paintings and drawings are held in numerous public collections worldwide, including Tate Gallery, London; British Museum, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and Art Institute of Chicago, among many others. A catalogue raisonné of his oil paintings, authored by Andrea Rose, was published by Modern Art Press, London in 2021. In 2026, Luhring Augustine, in partnership with the Leon Kossoff Estate, presented a major exhibition of the artist’s paintings spanning his career at its Chelsea gallery in New York. The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a specially commissioned essay by acclaimed critic Hilton Als.
For more information, please contact Leah Horowitz at leah@luhringaugustine.com.
