Frank Auerbach is falling apart. He’s melting, sagging, drooping and collapsing right in front of you. He’s getting – has gotten – very old.
Everyone gets old, so it wouldn’t be so unusual if it weren’t for this show of new work being filled with some of the great artist’s only self-portraits. He’s one of the most important British painters of the modern era, part of the same set as Bacon and Freud, but he’s just never really looked inwards before.
Instead, he’s spent his career focusing on the same ore group of sitters, and his now iconic images of North London. But lockdown hit, and suddenly left alone with only his own company, he finally looked in the mirror in his early 90s. These 20 paintings are a diary of ageing, of solitude, of an artist being forced to confront the final thing he has left to confront: himself.
In the graphite works on paper, he combines infinite light grey strokes with just a handful of fierce, thick, black marks. The grey is a miasma of uncertainty, a foggy wash. Then those thick lines scream lip, chin, eye, nose. It makes the face seem to float in that fog, holding on stiffly as everything around it disappears. An unsubtle but powerful metaphor.
But the acrylic on board paintings are even better. Those same black marks now sit against sickly yellow, fleshy pink and gooey green and purple. He strains his head upwards to peer over the canvas at a mirror maybe, or to stretch out the sagging skin of old age. In some, he’s solid and figurative, strong and staunch. In others, he barely comes together, a being fraying into abstraction. He's scrutinising his own image, twisting and searching and morphing. He's pleading with his own face, begging for answers to a lifetime of mark-making, painting and changing.
These aren’t just gorgeous, interesting paintings, they’re a chance to watch a talent finding a new language and absolutely screaming themselves horse in it. It’s deafening, but what a sound.