Art in Town - Freud the painter

One of the foremost figurative artists working today, Lucian Freud (born Germany 1922) is a British painter who has redefined portraiture and the nude through his psychological penetration, and his discomfiting examination of the human form and of the relationship between artist and model.

Freud's subjects are often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. As he has said 'The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement really'.

Lucian is the son of an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst Ludwig Freud, an architect, and a German mother, Lucie née Brasch. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. After moving with his family to England in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism he studied briefly at the Central School of Art in London and, to more effect, at Cedric Morris's East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham.

Although best known for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, etching has become integral to his practice.

The current exhibition at Galerie Daniel Blau presents the full scope of Freud's achievements in etching. Freud is not a traditional printmaker. He treats the etching plate like a canvas, standing the copper upright on an easel. He typically depicts the same sitters in etching as in painting, always working directly from his models and demarcating their forms through meticulous networks of finely etched lines.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Lucian Freud Portraits. Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich May 5, 2011 - Jun 5, 2011