LONDON.- An exhibition of early portraits by the artist Frank Auerbach has gone on display in a special loan show at Offer Waterman Gallery in London from 2 November – 1 December 2012.

Frank Auerbach, Early Works 1954 – 1978, selected by Offer Waterman and installed by independent curator and art historian Catherine Lampert, features eighteen works from private collections, oil paintings and charcoal drawings, some not seen for over thirty years, including portraits of some of the artist’s principle sitters, such as close friend and fellow artist Leon Kossoff, the model Juliet Yardley Mills (J.Y.M.), and Estella Olivia West (E.O.W.)

Born in Berlin in 1931, Frank Auerbach was sent to England to escape Nazism in 1939. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art from 1948 to 1952, the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955 and also attended night classes run by David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic. It was during this period that he developed an enduring friendship with fellow student Leon Kossoff. He had his first solo show in 1956 at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London, where he continued to exhibit regularly until 1963. From 1965 onwards he has exhibited at Marlborough Gallery. His work features in major public collections including the British Museum, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate and the V&A in London, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at the Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh, Amsterdam (1989), National Gallery, London (1995), Royal Academy of Arts, London (2001), V&A Museum (with Lucian Freud) (2006), and most recently at the Courtauld Gallery (2009). He represented Britain at the 1986 Venice Art Biennale. Rarely leaving Britain, he lives and works in London and has had the same studio since the 1950s.

Offer Waterman & Co, established in 1996, is a specialist dealer in 20th Century British art, regularly handling works by Frank Auerbach and many of his contemporaries, including Leon Kossoff and Lucian Freud. The gallery is based in a beautiful Chelsea townhouse, which faces onto an intimate sculpture garden, and regularly exhibits a changing display of paintings and sculpture by prominent British artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and William Turnbull.