Bomberg - Auerbach

The Daniel Katz Gallery presents an exhibition of the work of David Bomberg and Frank Auerbach. Representatives of two quite different generations, they nonetheless overlapped when Auerbach as a young art student was looking for a teacher to further his studies. Enrolled in Bomberg’s classes at the Borough Polytechnic in 1948, he encountered a remarkable individual and artist whose own life and career had taken a complex and much-travelled path since his emergence as a leading member of the British avant-garde in the years before 1914. Now in his early nineties and one of the most esteemed painters in Britain, Auerbach once traced his painting lineage back, from Bomberg, via Sickert, to Whistler to Degas to Ingres and all the way back to Raphael. More recently he ponders Picasso a great deal, as well as Rembrandt and Michelangelo. He talks of these greats as being in the room with him: they’re his community, his conversation. His experiences and connection with Bomberg at a time when he was defining his own artistic practice are explored in this exhibition, offering insight into how artistic vision is passed from artist to artist. Their paintings and drawings hung side-by-side will reveal a visual synergy, however beyond that this exhibition hopes to elucidate how a shared attitude to artistic creation and a devotion to process has produced some of the 20th and 21st centuries most powerful British painting. Focussed on a small selection of twenty rarely seen paintings and drawings loaned from private collections, we see how this shared spirit harnessed over seventy years ago continues into the present with Auerbach’s continuing career.