Frank Auerbach
Dicecream Magazine🔳Frank Helmut Auerbach (born 29 April 1931) is a German-British painter.
Auerbach is a figurative painter, who focuses on portraits and city scenes in and around the area of London in which he lives, Camden Town.
Auerbach is not an expressionist painter. His work is not concerned with finding a visual equivalent to an emotional or spiritual state that characterised the expressionist movement, rather it deals with the attempt to resolve the experience of being in the world in paint. In this the experience of the world is seen as essentially chaotic with the role of the artist being to impose an order upon that chaos and record that order in the painting.
This ambition with the paintings results in Auerbach developing intense relationships with particular subjects, particularly the people he paints, but also the location of his cityscape subjects.
This technique has not always been considered positively, with the Manchester Guardian newspaper commenting in 1956 that: "The technique is so fantastically obtrusive that it is some time before one penetrates to the intentions that should justify this grotesque method."
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