Annely Juda Fine Art presents Leon Kossoff: Trains and Stations, an exhibition of paintings and drawings devoted to the stations, trains and railways in the North and East End of London where he lived and worked all his life.
Kossoff drew his first station, Liverpool Street, in 1943 as a teenage evacuee, and he went on to return to train and tube stations as key subjects in his oeuvre for the rest of his life. King’s Cross, Euston, Kilburn, Dalston, Embankment and Willesden Junction all became subjects he revisited across the decades. The 23 works here, made between 1952 and 2006, range from early charcoal drawings to late paintings and drawings of King’s Cross. As the writer Iain Sinclair has observed, ‘the railway was his muse and he was its most potent recorder and supplicant.’
These were all places local to Kossoff, and he saw them as testament to a post-war city under rapid renewal, with the railways, the tube lines and a growing population all reshaping it. Kossoff scraped back and rebuilt his surfaces, so the paintings seem to share in the demolition and rebuilding of the city itself.