"The Real London of Leon Kossoff" by Tom Teicholz

Leon Kossoff, one of the leading figures in Post-World War Two figurative art in Britain passed away in 2019. LA Louver in Venice, CA is now exhibiting the largest gallery show and first posthumous survey of Kossoff’s work, Leon Kossoff: A Life In Painting (on view until April 9, 2022). Organized in collaboration with Annely Juda Fine Art in London and Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York, the show was curated by Andrea Rose, the former Director of Visual Arts at the British Council.

Kossoff is often grouped in “The School of London” Painters, a nomenclature suggested by the painter R. B. Kitaj in the 1970s that included Kitaj, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, a generation of painters who attended British Art schools and made representational and figurative work that confronts the existential grimness of post-World War Two Britain. Ironically, of all the painters mentioned above, Kossoff was the only one actually born in London, in Islington in 1926, the child of Jewish immigrant parents from Lithuania and Ukraine.

The greatness of Kossoff’s work is revealed in how his images emerge from the impasto – the accumulations of thick layers of paint — forcing the viewer to negotiate and cycle back and forth between the image depicted and the paint itself.

Read full article at forbes.com.