London Calling

Bus Stop, East London, 1974

Michael Andrews

Michael Andrews (1928-1995) was born in Norwich and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. He was a central figure in the circle around Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and the infamous Colony Room Club in Soho during the 1950s and 1960s. More than the other painters of this group, he was interested in existential questions and

human interaction. Like Bacon, he was inspired by reproductions of paintings, photographs and memories but he also combined his own observations with a dreamy imagination, giving some of his paintings a mysterious quality, as if they depict an impossible reality.

Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff (1926-2019) was born and raised in London. In addition to his classes at Saint Martin’s School of Art, he and fellow student Frank Auerbach attended evening classes with the painter David Bomberg, who encouraged his students to use all their senses to understand their materials.

For Kossoff it was not perception that dictated the handling of paint: for him the act of painting was perception. He developed a method in which paint became matter: encrusted and heavy. He painted over his canvases time and time again, only then to scrape the paint away again until eventually an exciting and compelling image remained.

David Hockney

David Hockney (1937) studied at the Royal College of Art in London in the late 1950s, where he was part of a new generation of British artists who incorporated abstraction, playfulness and irony into their work. He befriended fellow student R.B. Kitaj, who encouraged him to focus on subjects

close to him, including his homosexuality. In the mid-1960s, he exchanged grey London for sunny California, where he developed his hallmark visual language: bold canvases with large areas of bright colours and graphic lines.

Denzil Forrester

Denzil Forrester (1956) was born in Grenada in the West Indies and moved to London when he was ten years old. He found his subject matter in the 1980s in the reggae and dub subculture in multicultural Hackney and the ever-present threat of police violence. He captured the dynamism of the dance floor in vibrant colours and expressive angular forms.

Forrester has incorporated various influences from Western art history into his work but has also developed his own method: making sketches in the dance clubs – each one lasting the duration of a single track – and later working them up into monumental paintings, depicting an urban experience that is unmistakably rooted in London.