Leon Kossoff Exhibition
Mitchell-Innes & Nash (534 W 26th St.)
This event has ended.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash presents an exhibition of recent work by British painter Leon Kossoff. The exhibition will feature paintings and drawings from the past decade: Kossoff’s first new body of work to be exhibited since 2000. Following his 2009 exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash of works from the 50s and 60s, it will show how Kossoff’s painting has evolved over the past several decades. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the show.
The exhibition will include a series of landscape paintings centering on an old cherry tree in the artist’s garden. This leaning tree, propped up with two wooden stakes, has become an ongoing subject in Kossoff’s painting. Weathered, falling-down, but lovingly preserved, the tree comes to represent the passing of time and the artist’s lifelong investment in painting. Also included in the exhibition are a number of portraits and a selection of drawings. Kossoff’s drawings are known for their intensity and directness, and offer a counterpoint to the texture and tone of his paintings.
Kossoff regularly draws and paints the same subjects again and again: the environs of London, his immediate family, and a trio of loyal studio models. His approach combines a methodical investigation of form through paint, with emotionally resonant subject matter. Using slow and measured observation of his subjects, he often works and reworks his paintings for years. The surfaces of the paintings mirror the passage of time in the outside world, as signs of age and weather become evident. In this recent work, he has lightened his palette as well as his trademark heavily impastoed surfaces, for an overall effect that is painterly yet more pictorial.
[Image: Leon Kossoff "Cherry Tree, Autumn" (2002) Oil on board 46 by 58 in.]
Media
Schedule
from May 05, 2011 to June 18, 2011