Mira Godard Gallery Artists: Lucian Freud

LUCIAN FREUD
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“My work is purely autobiographical,...It is about myself and my surroundings. I work from people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I know... When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.”

- Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in 1922, the grandson of Sigmund Freud. In 1933, the family moved to London, England. By the early 1940's, Freud had begun painting full time. To this day, London is Freud's permanent home from which he rarely leaves. The Australian art critic, Robert Hughes, has described Freud as “the greatest living realist painter.” More recently, others have called him “the greatest painter of our time.”

Over the past twenty years, Lucian Freud has produced an impressive body of highly contemporary and powerful classical etchings. Craig Hartley, who wrote the Catalogue Raisonné on the Freud etchings wrote this about the work:

“This is a case neither of a painter comfortably dabbling in graphics, nor of a specialist printmaker playing with easy effects; this is a great etcher making uncomfortably powerful and demanding prints.”

Lucian Freud's work can be found in museum and private collections throughout the world. Recently, he was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition that opened at the Tate Modern, London, England, and travelled to Barcelona and Los Angeles.

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