The veteran London painter Frank Auerbach is not one for resting on his laurels. A fortnight after Tate Britain’s blockbuster opens this autumn (9 October-13 March) comes a display of paintings and drawings at Marlborough Fine Art in London (23 October-21 November), including “seven or eight” works fresh from the studio, a spokeswoman says. The show features portraits of some of the artist’s most diligent models, too. Working tirelessly in the same Camden Town digs since 1954, Auerbach has painted Catherine Lampert, the curator of the Tate exhibition, once a week for the past 37 years. But given his Groundhog Day-style method of reworking the canvas at every sitting—scraping away the surface to start anew until inspiration strikes, months or even years later—is it any wonder that for his new self-portrait he downed the brushes in favour of graphite and pastel?
