Leon Kossoff

London Landscapes

A major exhibition of works by Leon Kossoff focusing on the artist’s drawings and paintings of London will go on show at Annely Juda Fine Art from 8 May - 6 July 2013.

The exhibition is curated by Andrea Rose, Director, Visual Art, British Council and curator of Kossoff’s Venice Biennale exhibition in 1995.

London is the city where Leon Kossoff was born and grew up, and which he has mined with extraordinary invention throughout his working life.

The exhibition includes over 90 drawings and 10 paintings, many rarely shown before, and spanning the artist’s career: from City bomb sites of the early 1950’s to recent drawings of Arnold Circus, a community of redbrick buildings off Shoreditch High Street that were London’s most radical experiment in social housing when they were unveiled in 1900. Kossoff’s London opens up between these two poles to reveal his feel for quickness and change: buildings on the point of demolition; the railway network as the process of electrification begins; swimming pools swarming with children; streets; schools; grand London churches that serve successive waves of immigrants (Huguenot, Jewish, Bengali); stations; back gardens, and trains - overground and underground - carrying millions of Londoners in and out of the city, day after day, as the city transforms itself around them.

Kossoff has said: “London seems to be in my bloodstream. It is always moving - the skies, the streets, the buildings. The people who walk past me when I draw have become part of my life."

The exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see Kossoff’s drawings and related paintings in such a historic sweep, and to inhabit the London that he has made peculiarly his own.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Following its exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art, it will travel to Galerie Lelong, Paris; Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York and L.A. Louver, Los Angeles.