Frank Auerbach is known for his dynamic use of line and impasted paint. Based in Camden Town, where he has worked for over 60 years, Auerbach paints portraits and city scenes in a highly expressive manner. He returns to the same objects or sitter, attempting to capture the essence of his subjects; this drawing revisits the ‘To the Studio’ works of the 1970s and 1980s.

Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931, but moved to Kent in 1939 as a refugee from the Nazis. In 1947 he moved to London and began taking lessons from David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic, which he continued alongside attending St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art. During this time Auerbach became friends with Leon Kossoff whose studio in Camden Town Auerbach took over in 1954.

This studio inherited from Kossoff is the subject matter for Auerbach’s series ‘To the Studios’ which depict the view looking down towards the entrance to his studio. Robert Hughes in the 1990 monograph described Auerbach’s studio: ‘a brown cave in north-west London... It is one of a line of three studios in an alley that runs off a street in Camden Town, a rootedly lower-middle-class area between Mornington Crescent and the park of Primrose Hill... You enter the alley through a wicket gate, set between a liver-brick Victorian semi-detached villa on the left and on the right a decayed block of 60s maisonettes. A roughly lettered sign says TO THE STUDIOS.’ This 1990s ink drawing is a revisiting of theme prevalent in Auerbach’s work in the 1970s and 1980s.

Auerbach is often associated with a circle of figurative painters known as the School of London, but has said that he does not feel part of this or any group. Lucian Freud was a close friend and had the biggest private collection of Auerbach’s work; after his death in 2011, this was distributed to museums throughout the UK.

In 2015-16 the Tate held a retrospective exhibition of Auerbach’s work, featuring paintings and drawings from the 1950s up to the present. His work is held in many established public collections including Pallant House Gallery, Walker Art Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, British Museum, Contemporary Art Society, Courtauld Gallery, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery and The Hepworth Wakefield.