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Lot Essay
'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' (Leon Kossoff cited in Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London 1996, p. 36).
Capturing the atmosphere of a warm, dank and overcast spring day under Hungerford railway bridge in the centre of London, The Flower Stall, Embankment Station (Stormy Spring) is a classic example of Kossoff's art. Painted in 1994 it, like many of Kossoff's works, belongs to a series of paintings and studies executed in a specific and seemingly unremarkable London location. Drawn, in what he describes as his 'landscape' painting, to areas of frenetic urban activity, Kossoff's paintings of the London Underground, swimming pools, railway bridges and building sites are pictorial paeans to the city he has lived in all his life.
Kossoff's art is wrought from intense visual study of the world around him. As a former student, along with Frank Auerbach, of David Bomberg's drawing classes, Kossoff learned from the older artist the importance of imbuing the material reproduction of what he saw with a profound sense of personal inner experience. Since the 1950s, Kossoff's art has always sought to convey a sense not only of the artist's own personal response to the scene he is conveying, but also the process and struggle by which such an image comes into being. Emphasising the physicality of his materials and layering thick strokes of paint over one another to build a detailed and heavily worked surface, Kossoff's paintings reflect the actions, instantaneous decisions and instinctive response to the often complex and frenetic scene of city life in front of him.
The Flower Stall, Embankment Station (Stormy Spring) is one of a series of paintings and studies of Hungerford bridge and the Embankment tube station that Kossoff made between 1993 and 1995. Settling down to make a series of studies of the area in preparation for a number of paintings in 1993, Kossoff was returning to the site where he and Auerbach had first drawn and painted together forty years earlier. The Flower Stall, Embankment Station (Stormy Spring) is one of a series of paintings depicting the frenetic and angular rush of people emerging from and disappearing into the tube station at varied times of the year. Dark and dramatic with its deep reds and turbulent overcast sky, the condensed details and angular rush of activity outside the station entrance is made all the more urgent and heavy by the strong contrasting colours of Kossoff's myriad of scrutinous brushstrokes clashing against one another in a variety of directions. In this way the material nature of the work, its surface and the intense energy and study that have gone into its making echo and reflect the intensity and drama of the busy cityscape that the picture itself depicts.
Capturing the atmosphere of a warm, dank and overcast spring day under Hungerford railway bridge in the centre of London, The Flower Stall, Embankment Station (Stormy Spring) is a classic example of Kossoff's art. Painted in 1994 it, like many of Kossoff's works, belongs to a series of paintings and studies executed in a specific and seemingly unremarkable London location. Drawn, in what he describes as his 'landscape' painting, to areas of frenetic urban activity, Kossoff's paintings of the London Underground, swimming pools, railway bridges and building sites are pictorial paeans to the city he has lived in all his life.
Kossoff's art is wrought from intense visual study of the world around him. As a former student, along with Frank Auerbach, of David Bomberg's drawing classes, Kossoff learned from the older artist the importance of imbuing the material reproduction of what he saw with a profound sense of personal inner experience. Since the 1950s, Kossoff's art has always sought to convey a sense not only of the artist's own personal response to the scene he is conveying, but also the process and struggle by which such an image comes into being. Emphasising the physicality of his materials and layering thick strokes of paint over one another to build a detailed and heavily worked surface, Kossoff's paintings reflect the actions, instantaneous decisions and instinctive response to the often complex and frenetic scene of city life in front of him.
The Flower Stall, Embankment Station (Stormy Spring) is one of a series of paintings and studies of Hungerford bridge and the Embankment tube station that Kossoff made between 1993 and 1995. Settling down to make a series of studies of the area in preparation for a number of paintings in 1993, Kossoff was returning to the site where he and Auerbach had first drawn and painted together forty years earlier. The Flower Stall, Embankment Station (Stormy Spring) is one of a series of paintings depicting the frenetic and angular rush of people emerging from and disappearing into the tube station at varied times of the year. Dark and dramatic with its deep reds and turbulent overcast sky, the condensed details and angular rush of activity outside the station entrance is made all the more urgent and heavy by the strong contrasting colours of Kossoff's myriad of scrutinous brushstrokes clashing against one another in a variety of directions. In this way the material nature of the work, its surface and the intense energy and study that have gone into its making echo and reflect the intensity and drama of the busy cityscape that the picture itself depicts.