'When one is young, one is excited by drama and when one's old, truth is exciting'- Frank Auerbach
Auerbach made two self-portrait drawings in the late 1950s, and in 1965 an oil over charcoal on paper. It was another 36 years before Auerbach chose to draw himself again and it was not until 2021 that he began a self-portrait in paint from the start. 'I didn't find actual formal components of my head all that interesting when I was younger, smoother and less frazzled. Now that I've got bags under my eyes, things are sagging and so on, there's more material to work with'. The eleven drawn and nine painted self-portraits are all recent. As William Feaver says: 'Self-portraits have the implication of self-regard and there's absolutely nothing of that in these. They show all sorts of frustrations and irritations and breath held- all the things we feel if we look in the mirror.'
'Frank Auerbach and I were thrown together in the late 1930s', begins a very personal introductory essay. Michael Roemer, award winning film maker, Yale professor and author, writes a touching account of a first meeting and the friendship that endured. Roemer meditates on the bearing the friendship has on his life and his intellectual thinking. He discusses a fate that spared them the Holocaust and death, had they not been evacuated from Nazi Germany, and writes eloquently of his compulsion to collect Auerbach's drawings and paintings. There is a beauty in the counterpoint between two old friends late in life- Auerbach with these remarkable self-portraits and the self-examining writing of Roemer.
- Geoffrey Parton Preface, Frank Auerbach: Twenty Self-Portraits
The accompanying exhibition catalogue featuring an introductory text by Michael Roemer, will be available to purchase at the gallery from 19 April 2023.
