The US dealer Max Levai is bringing a group of 12 paintings by the nonagenarian German-British painter Frank Auerbach to Venice later this month. Auberbach last exhibited in the Italian port city in 1986 when he was awarded the Golden Lion for his presentation in the British Pavilion.
It is the first exhibition outside of the US staged by Levai, who has been running an art space in Montauk, Long Island since he was ousted as president of Marlborough Gallery in June 2020. The firm announced last week it will be closing its spaces in New York, London, Madrid and Barcelona in June after nearly 80 years in business. The timing of the Venice show is “a complete coincidence”, says Levai, adding that he has had “no involvement” with Marlborough since he left.
Auerbach was formerly represented by Marlborough Gallery, though The Art Newspaper understands he left around the same time as a number of directors who resigned in May 2022 and is now represented by Frankie Rossi Art Projects in London. An Auerbach show had been slated to open at Marlborough in New York in May 2020 but never came to fruition.
Titled Frank Auerbach: Starting Again, after an interview with the artist broadcast on Radio 4 in January, the Venice exhibition will be installed in the still-inhabited 15th-century Palazzo da Mosto, designed by the same architect of the Rialto Bridge.
Spanning five decades of the artist’s career, from 1969 to 2016, the works have been sourced from private collections, according to Levai. “Each of the paintings show how Auerbach continuously pushed boundaries, how he reinvented himself within the constraints of the canvas,” the dealer adds. Many of Auberbach’s frequent sitters are featured—including his wife Julia and the businessman David Landau—as are scenes of Mornington Crescent in north London, where the artist has had a studio since 1954.
Levai declined to say whether the works are for sale, noting that the impetus for the show is to open a dialogue about Auerbach outside of his associations with the School of London. Though he was friends with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud and others in the loosely grouped school, Auerbach maintained a distinct independence. Nonetheless, Levai has one eye on Art Basel, which opens two weeks before the Venice show closes on 28 June. “A lot of Americans are not travelling to Venice for the opening [of the biennial] but will be in Europe later. We’re expecting an international audience in June,” the dealer says.
As for Auerbach’s market, Levai notes how the very early works “tend to be favoured, but my position is that he really came into his own as a painter at the break of the 1970s”. He adds: “One could argue that his best paintings were made in the 2000s.”