Raw Truth: Auerbach-Rembrandt, Ordovas Gallery

Frank Auerbach, widely tipped as one of Britain’s greatest living artists, appears alongside Rembrandt at the Ordovas Gallery this month in a one-of-a-kind exhibition entitled Raw Truth. With a reputation for chic, detailed shows that link older artists and Masters with the contemporary, the gallery is now collaborating with the world-famous Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, to present selected portraits and landscapes from both artists side by side.

It’s the brainchild of Pilar Ordovas herself, the former international director and deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s and former director of London’s Gagosian Gallery. It’s these contacts and this expertise that has enabled Ordovas to bring museum-quality works into the gallery.

The shows usually have a strong historical theme, drawing out the influence the older artist has exerted on the younger. Past Ordovas shows have included Painting from Life: Carracci Freud   (2012) and  Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in dialogue  (2013), and have also investigated Francis Bacon’s own debt to Rembrandt in  Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt  (2011). Auerbach, elusive and masterful painter of the post-war ‘School of London’, comes under the spotlight in this latest show, and his decades-long fascination with Rembrandt is unpacked in all its detail.  

The focus in this show will be the artists’ shared use of impasto painting: areas of thick, textured oil paint. Auerbach’s canvases are loaded with it – indeed some of his early work was too heavy to hang on the wall – but Rembrandt is pivotal in the history of the technique. He was the first artist to use it as a way of drawing the viewer’s eye to particular areas of the picture. Rembrandt’s textured paint is not slapped on gratuitously. It is careful, calculated and utilitarian. Likewise, Auerbach’s use of impasto is not just for the sake of it. He practically sculpts his subjects, as well as painting them.

ADMISSION FREE

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