Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff is an English painter and draughtsman, living and working in London. A fellow student, colleague and friend of Frank Auerbach, he is considered to be a member of the informal 'School of London' group. Kossoff paints in extremely thick impasto in a style that is more akin to drawing with the brush, picturing people and places he knew well. His figure paintings are often of close friends and family members; and his pictures of nudes are often of his wife, Rosalind, or of his long-standing model Fidelma.

Kossoff also paints, often large, London landscapes, generally of areas where he has lived. These works are generally industrially urban; railway bridges and sidings, churches and other imposing local buildings, building sites from the East End and City to Willesden and Kilburn. Kossoff's early work favoured extremely dark colours of oil paint made in quite unbelievable depths of impasto: inmore recent works he moves towards a more sparing use of paint and a wider range of brighter colours.

Retrospective exhibitions of the artist's work too place at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1972, and at the Tate in 1996.

Kossoff's work is held in the following public collections;

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Arts Council of Great Britain, London
Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway
Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia
Berardo Museum, Collection of Modern & Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham
British Council, London
British Museum, London
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal
Cecil Higgins Art Gallery and Bedford Museum, Bedford
Chrysler Museum, Provincetown, Massachusetts
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
Contemporary Art Society, London
Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston-Upon-Hull
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California
Government Art Collection, London
Guildhall Art Gallery, London
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
The Jewish Museum, New York, New York
The Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds
Leicester Museum and Galleries, Leicester
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
Museum of London, London
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
Museum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland
Museum Würth, Künzelsau, Germany
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
National Portrait Gallery, London
Rochdale Art Gallery, Lancashire
Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo, Sweden
Royal College of Art Collection, London
Rugby Museum, Warwickshire
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton
Peter Stuyvesant Collection, London
Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, Wiltshire
Tate Gallery, London
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland
Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, Manchester
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut