Review

Frank Auerbach: Unseen

Newlands House Gallery, Petworth

02 April to 14 August 2022

Last weekend I travelled to Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, home of the great house and deer park, to visit an exhibition of the work of Frank Auerbach.

The show extends over multiple floors of the 18th century townhouse and is a remarkable collection of paintings, prints and drawings from one of the 20th century’s most compelling painters. The gallery itself is a wonderful setting filled with period features and differing sized domestic spaces that provide the perfect backdrop to Auerbach’s work.

The nine paintings are the stars of the exhibition and would, even without accompaniment, make a fascinating show. The paintings are, however, bolstered by more than fifty smaller works on paper. Prints and drawings add context, and space, between the main events and give further insight into the process of a man whose approach is so much a part of how he is understood.

The show is presented chronologically, covering a period from the 1950s to the present day and a journey through the galleries is bookended by the two stand out pictures in the collection.

The first painting (Head of E.O.W. I, 1960) is extreme even by Auerbach’s standards; sitting within a deep, unembellished box frame (that brings to mind a shipping crate or curio cabinet) is a wooden board supporting a mountain of paint. The container likely serves as much as a workable solution to moving such a precarious object as it does a considered method of display. When I lift my phone to the eye-level of the portrait the camera app automatically suggests the ‘FOOD’ filter, the A.I at once misinterpreting (as it is prone to do) while also offering a fitting simile for what has been served up before me.

Any exact likeness of E.O.W., if it ever existed, has long since been lost beneath an unstable mass of gestural brushstrokes. What remains is the evidence of industry and intent. There are stiff peaks and deep troughs, a dimpled skin sits atop a, quite probably, still liquid centre. The viscous pigment an active magma layer beneath a significant, contested landscape.

Auerbach’s paintings are hard won. A dogged determination to confront his chosen medium head on makes his output so convincing. He engages with process and materials in an uncompromising way, and it pays off.

The last painting you see before exiting through a fire door is Auerbach’s 1971 version of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne. If you are interested in a narrative reading of the painting you will almost certainly need to know the title because gods, satyrs and a chariot drawn by cheetahs are pretty much impossible to discern. What you do get in Auerbach’s painting is a sense of a charged landscape, a space where something exciting is happening. For me that event is not Bacchus falling in love with Ariadne at first sight but rather the relationship between marks and gestures, colours and textures and how they tie together to produce a unified image. The surfaces of Auerbach’s paintings have their own narrative, they collectively tell the story of a man questing for something that cannot simply be described in an allegorical tableau.

Neill Clements, 18/04/22