Leon Kossoff British, 1926-2019
Booking Hall, Kilburn Underground Station No.4, 1978
oil on board
122 x 152.5 cm
Kossoff began drawing at Kilburn Underground Station in 1976. It was close to his studio in Willesden Green, and over eleven years he made sixteen paintings of the station – both of the booking hall inside and the entrance outside. The booking hall paintings reveal the changes to the station's fixture and fittings over time (strip lighting replacing the globe lights seen here; hole-in-the-wall units taking the place of free-standing ticket dispensers), the incidental architecture of London's Underground network as subject to the passage of time as the individuals who use it. Here, Kossoff gives weight and consequence to those individuals, and to the ephemeral moments of the daily commute, as people move in and out of the station, to destinations unknown, through the transitional spaces of an underground station.
Kossoff began drawing at Kilburn Underground Station in 1976. It was close to his studio in Willesden Green, and over eleven years he made sixteen paintings of the station – both of the booking hall inside and the entrance outside. The booking hall paintings reveal the changes to the station's fixture and fittings over time (strip lighting replacing the globe lights seen here; hole-in-the-wall units taking the place of free-standing ticket dispensers), the incidental architecture of London's Underground network as subject to the passage of time as the individuals who use it. Here, Kossoff gives weight and consequence to those individuals, and to the ephemeral moments of the daily commute, as people move in and out of the station, to destinations unknown, through the transitional spaces of an underground station.
