Dalston Junction

This evocative and richly worked urban landscape epitomises Kossoff’s fascination and preoccupation with his beloved city of London. Born in East London, where his father, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, had a bakery, Kossoff returned to London after being evacuated to King’s Lynn during the Second World War, to study at St Martin’s School of Art and subsequently at the Royal College of Art. On his return, inspired by the teachings of David Bomberg during a series of evening classes, he immersed himself in the gritty reality of London’s fractured landscape.

Along with his friend and fellow student Frank Auerbach, Kossoff scoured the city’s streets for suitable subjects, seeking to reveal what Bomberg described as ‘the spirit in the mass’ (D. Bomberg, quoted in R. Hughes, Leon Kossoff, London, 1995, p. 12). Championing physical intuition over studied precision, Kossoff captured the living essence of his London haunts: Mornington Crescent, Christ Church Spitalfields, the disused railway lands behind King’s Cross, St Paul’s, Kilburn, Willesden and his beloved Dalston Junction. For over six decades, Kossoff rigorously chronicled many of the physical and social changes which took place across the city, capturing street scenes, markets and stations, rendering his landscapes with highly expressive thickly layered impasto, and his drawings with rapid, heavily worked surfaces.

Frequently returning to the same subjects through the changing seasons, the artist would obsessively revisit his pictures, excavating and rebuilding them like archaeological fragments. For Kossoff, drawing was essential, an obsessional and indispensable aspect of his practice. He always begins his paintings, whether landscapes or portraits, with an exploration of the subject through drawing from life, which for him is the only method of truly conveying what he sees, feels and perceives. He explains, ‘The subject, person or landscape, reverberate, in my head unleashing a compelling need to destroy and restate. Drawing is a springing to life in the presence of the friend in the studio or in the sunlit summer streets of London from this excavated state and painting is a deepening of this process until, moved by unpremeditated visual excitement, the painting, like a flame, flares up in spite of oneself, and, when the sparks begin to fly, you let it be’ (L. Kossoff, 1986, quoted in exhibition catalogue, Leon Kossoff, London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1988, n.p.). With its visceral, painterly charge, Dalston Junction is a powerful illustration of this statement.

A gift from the artist to his friend, Frank Auerbach, and Auerbach's then girlfriend, the present work has remained in the same collection since it was executed.