Leon Kossoff was born in the East End of London in 1926 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Evacuated during the war to Norfolk, Kossoff returned to London in 1943 to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art until 1945. Interrupted by national service between 1945 and 1948, Kossoff returned to study at Saint Martin’s (1949-1953), where he was taught by William Coldstream, and then the Royal College of Art (1953-56), whilst also attending David Bomberg’s evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic where he met fellow student Frank Auerbach. Kossoff’s continual subject matter throughout his career has been the city of London, with particular motifs of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the city, Willesden Junction, swimming pools and crowd scenes, Kilburn Underground, Christ Church in Spitalfields and Arnold Circus on the Boundary Estate. Alongside these cityscapes, Kossoff turned to his friends and family to model for him, especially his wife, Peggy, and the painter John Lessore, fashioned nudes from professional models, most famously Fidelma, and also produced works responding to the Old Master paintings he has loved and copied since childhood. Particularly closely associated with Auerbach, Kossoff is one of the so-called ‘School of London’ artists alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews and R.B. Kitaj, and more broadly William Coldstream, Euan Uglow, David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, and Patrick Caulfield. This loosely-formed group has been the subject of substantial exhibitions including R.B. Kitaj’s The Human Clay at the Hayward Gallery, 1976, From London, The British Council with the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1995, The School of London and Their Friends, The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2000, The Mystery of Appearance, Haunch of Venison, 2011-12, and London Calling, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2016. Kossoff himself has had numerous exhibitions including a major retrospective at the Tate in 1996 and an exhibition, Drawing from Painting, at the National Gallery, London in 2007. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1995. He is internationally considered to be one of the most significant living artists and his work is held by all major institutions. Throughout his career, Leon Kossoff consistently returned to making portraits of family and friends. Approaching these familiar faces afresh with each iteration, Kossoff considered his sitters with intensive scrutiny and formulated their visages through arduous processes. Kossoff’s method was intended to capture in paint a truthful replication of a moment of connection. Drawing increasingly gained significance in his practice: working from the sitter, Kossoff drew the model again and again, often for months, until he was satisfied that he had one drawing that accurately matched the mood of the interaction between artist and subject. The painting process was just as onerous: at the end of every day, Kossoff would scrape away all the paint he had spent so many hours applying, starting again anew the following session. Klaus Kertess has written that, “Over and over again he reconstructs his work trying ‘to establish a relationship’ between his paint and the seeing and being of his sensory experience.” [K. Kertess in Leon Kossoff (ex. cat. Mitchell-Innes & Nash and Annely Juda Fine Art, 2000), p. 9.]. Finally, the finished work would be produced in one painting session only, that could be either frenetically short or painstakingly prolonged. Painted at the start of the 1960s, most likely in 1960, ‘Head’ is a portrait of the head, neck and perhaps shoulders of an unnamed sitter. At this time, Kossoff was very close to Frank Auerbach, whom he had met at David Bomberg’s Borough Polytechnic evening classes. They painted one another and painted alongside one another, and ‘Head’ is closely related to Auerbach’s three-quarter profile head-and-shoulder portraits of the 1960s, perhaps most famously those of 'Head of Gerda Boehm', of which a 1965 iteration in David Bowie’s collection made the auction record for an Auerbach work in November 2016. With the face depicted largely in white, set against a darker background of caramel browns and deep purples amongst other murky tones, the sitter’s features are set close together but the skull is sizeable, unnaturally extended to fill almost the entire board. The dark umber tones are readily associated with both Auerbach and Kossoff, but the intensity of the white is unmistakeably Kossoff’s idiom. Layers of paint are built-up such that the work takes on a sculptural quality, augmented by Kossoff’s use of fingers and palette-knife at this stage in his career to physically mould paint. The edges of the board are subsumed by paint – clear lines are elided by the sheer volume of paint that takes on an organic quality at the outer limits. Though the paint is immensely dense, Kossoff equally handles it delicately and with precision. Whilst the ground at points melds into the head simultaneously white tendrils of paint from the face trail over the conglomeration of browns. The face is a mass of swirling, marbled whites as if the surface were melting and viscous – the flourishes of paint suggest vitality, even movement. Kossoff said of the final painting session, “I’m always working to make it more like the sitter, to make the structure more real, more intense – but in the end, at the final minute, something else happens, something overtakes me in his presence, or in the presence of whoever I’m painting… I stop thinking for better or worse” [Leon Kossoff quoted in P. Moorhouse, Leon Kossoff (ex. cat. Tate, 1996), p. 23.]. In ‘Head’, as with Auerbach’s most potent portraits, paint itself becomes the vehicle of emotion and expression. The forceful bulk of paint and its overwrought treatment is a material manifestation of the psychological connection between Kossoff and his sitter.