Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Frank Auerbach / Tony Bevan: What is a Head?, curated by Michael Peppiatt

Exhibition details

Opening / Event Date:
15 May, 2021
Time:
11:00 am - 7:00 pm
Closing / End Date:
3 July, 2021
Event Category:
, ,

An exhibition featuring two of Britain’s leading figurative painters, Frank Auerbach and Tony Bevan, will open at Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong this May. Based around the philosophical question ‘What is a head?’, this focused exhibition of works ranging from the 1960s to present day explores both the physical and innermost representations of humanity’s most-defining feature.

The exhibition has a particular significance, as it coincides with this year’s celebrations of Auerbach’s 90th (April 2021) and Bevan’s 70th birthdays (July 2021) respectively.

With roots in the meditations of Rene Descartes through to 20th-century existential theorists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, What Is A Head? powerfully demonstrates how Auerbach sought to convey the complexities of the mind by layering paint to create an impressionistic visage, while Bevan suggests the physical aspects of the head, with linear representations of muscle and sinew.

The exhibition’s curator, Michael Peppiatt says: The head serves as a mirror of the whole history of art: its significance and the way it is represented have changed constantly over the ages. However, the head was so radically reinvented during the last century that at one point it vanished altogether, into the white heat of abstraction.”

Though born respectively before and after the Second World War – Auerbach in 1931 and Bevan in 1951 – the two artists share a fascination for all the conceptual and painterly possibilities of reinventing heads.

Auerbach, who came to Britain after escaping Nazi Germany in 1939, is renowned for using rough impasto to make ghostly images of people, a technique he acknowledges is inspired by the likes of Rembrandt, Constable, Rubens and Picasso.

In contrast, Bradford-born Bevan is “more linear than painterly in his practice”, says Peppiatt. “Tony approaches the head through its working parts, its muscles and sinews, exploring its inner structure as an unknown space, an experimental architecture that defies all known rules.”

In a career spanning seven decades, Frank Auerbach is regarded as one of the most influential painters of the 20th century, renowned for his expressionistic portraits – a number of which feature in this exhibition.

In the early years of his career, Auerbach would paint on top of the previous day’s work, hence the thick surfaces, but in the 1960s he began to scrape down the whole surface before the next attempt – a practice he continues to this day.

Ultimately, a finished picture may have actually required 30, 50 or perhaps 200 separate versions, before he judges it to be complete.

Similarly, he would ask his sitters to pose each week, often over many years and would create different portraits of them, as they aged. As he explained: “I find myself simply more engaged when I know the people. They get older and change; there is something touching about that, about recording something that’s getting on.”

Curiously, he often titled his portraits with the subject’s initials and the order in which he painted them. Hence, his 1981 painting of his principal model from the early Sixties, Juliet Yardley Mills, is simply J.Y.M III (1981). Similarly, another frequent sitter, Estella (Stella) Olive West, is often referred to as E.O.W. A portrait of his wife Julia, appears in the exhibition with the more fulsome Reclining Head of Julia II (2011).

In 1983, Head of J.Y.M literally became part of pop culture, when Japan used Auerbach’s painting on the cover of their hit live album, appropriately titled Oil on Canvas.

The human head, and specifically his own, has been one of Tony Bevan’s signature subjects since the 1980’s. The result has been a series of psychologically-charged images that have been likened to “a cross between Lucian Freud and Dennis the Menace… arousing associations of delinquency and social unrest.”

Michael Peppiatt again: When contemplating the heads of Frank Auerbach and Tony Bevan, you are struck by a sense of resurrection: of elements destroyed, recovered from the past and reintroduced into the picture plane. A half-forgotten language has been retrieved, its subtle syntax, its infinite moods and accents brought back into play.”

AUERBACH/BEVAN: WHAT IS A HEAD?

A foreword by Michael Peppiatt

What, indeed, is a head? For us, surely, it’s as big as the world, as existence itself, and just as unknowable. It contains everything we are and everything we can ever know, including our own limits, because whatever we do we can never go beyond its bounds. The head is all, the centre of the universe, as well as in the long term its circumference. Small wonder, then, that heads have preoccupied artists from the very beginning of recorded time and still intrigue them, re-emerging, Hydra-like, as the central symbol of humanity.

The head also serves as a mirror of the whole history of art: its significance and the way it is represented have changed constantly over the ages. One wonders what in fact, after the combined ingenuity of centuries, is left in the subject for contemporary artists to explore, since the head was so radically reinvented during the last century that at one point it vanished altogether into the white heat of abstraction. Hence it is for good reason that, when contemplating the heads of Frank Auerbach and Tony Bevan, you are struck by a sense of resurrection: of elements destroyed, recovered from the past and reintroduced into the picture plane. A half-forgotten language has been retrieved, its subtle syntax, its infinite moods and accents brought back into play.

Bevan and Auerbach are a generation apart, and beyond their shared fascination for all the conceptual and painterly possibilities of reinventing heads, there is as much to differentiate them as to bring them together. In Auerbach, who grew up during the war, one experiences palpable layers of excavation: the buried image rising through stratas of paint to resume its fragmented presence, a memory disinterred that might fade again into the flurry of brushstrokes as swiftly as Hamlet’s ghost. Bevan’s ‘Heads’ are also reconstructions, of a different order.

More linear than painterly in his practice, Bevan approaches the head through its working parts, its muscles and sinews, exploring its inner structure as an unknown space, an experimental architecture that defies all known rules.

For both artists, the head is perceived as the prime vessel of human life, the nerve centre and brain box that controls us and everything we do, not least when it is rife with contradiction and patently out of control, as we, the heirs to a century of psychoanalysis, are ready to acknowledge. That is its greatest fascination, of course, the constant warring it contains – as in a domed boxing-ring – of impulse and restraint, instinct and order, spontaneity and discipline. In Auerbach, it reaches points of incandescence, sparks of a long struggle lapsing into melancholy exhaustion, with the fire burnt indelibly into the muddied colour. A violence of opposites courses through Bevan’s heads as well, black outlines on a hot ground of red, orange or yellow, but the violence is latent, suppressed, and all the more threatening. What has already ravaged Auerbach’s universe like the passage of time is still kept at bay in Bevan’s, where the fractures hint at the explosive strain.

Are two heads better than one? Surely, when they are as searching and perceptive, as committed to revealing the multiplicity and complexity of ourselves in paint as Auerbach and Bevan’s have proved to be. Looking into the ‘Head’ of one reveals more about the ‘Head’ of the other than one might have conceivably imagined. This double vision highlights the differences and similarities inherent in the same subject, setting up a dialogue not only between generations but within painting’s renewed insights into mind and identity.

Venue

Other Events

NADIA AYARI: ABOUT SURRENDER

Nadia Ayari HKAGA

Gallery: Double Q Gallery

Artist(s): Nadia Ayari

Opening / Event Date: 2 Mar, 2024

Closing / End Date: 30 Mar, 2024

Joey LEUNG, Frank TANG, ZHOU Jin: In-between Spaces

In - 2

Gallery: SC Gallery

Opening / Event Date: 6 Mar, 2024

Closing / End Date: 12 Apr, 2024

Joey LEUNG, Frank TANG, ZHOU Jin: In-between Spaces Copy

In - 2

Gallery: SC Gallery

Opening / Event Date: 6 Mar, 2024

Closing / End Date: 12 Apr, 2024