Re-Examining Form, Portraits and Nudes, With The Painters OF The London School
Abstract
The London School is the name given to a heterogeneous group of contemporary painters linked to the British capital, in whose works two relevant characteristics come together: faithfulness to painting as an indisputable medium for creation and the prominence of the human form as a dominant subject. The works of these painters (Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff, Andrews and Kitaj), are used to provide ideas for reflecting on the applicability of the nude and the portrait in contemporary painting. The text looks at some of the fundamental changes that these constantly disaccredited genres have suffered during the second half of the 20th century, and considers the consistent common elements that run through the work of other contemporary artists that have dealt with these themes. Ultimately, this work attempts to provide a summarised journey through contemporary pictorial representations of the body. The portrait and the nude as sites of identity expression and construction, as means of human self-definition through art.
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