Annely Juda Fine Art – Leon Kossoff: A Life In Painting

Annely Juda Fine Art, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, and L.A. Louver are delighted to announce Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting, a major touring retrospective of paintings by seminal British artist Leon Kossoff (1926 – 2019) that will open in London in September 2021 and travel to New York and Los Angeles in early 2022. Comprising 58 works, this touring show will be the first posthumous and largest exhibition of Kossoff’s paintings in a commercial setting to date, and coincides with the publication of Leon Kossoff: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings released by Modern Art Press. The exhibition is curated by Andrea Rose, former Director of Visual Arts at the British Council and editor of the catalogue raisonné.

Leon Kossoff is recognised as one of the world’s greatest Post-War figurative painters with an appreciation of life’s everyday activities, finding poignancy and beauty in seemingly mundane urban settings. Born in Central London to a family of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, his childhood was centered in his working class experiences; helping with his father’s bakery, and then serving in the British military in the 1940s. Following his return to London, Kossoff attended St. Martin’s School of Art, though he supplemented his studies attending David Bomberg’s classes at Borough Polytechnic, where he was instructed to focus on experiences rather than just appearances.