Head of Julia

With the bands of paint accumulating to form a head in the centre of the canvas, Head of Julia has all the hallmarks of a classic Auerbach painting. A striking and intimate depiction of the artist's wife, this is the type of portrait, with the head in the centre of the canvas, that has become iconic within his oeuvre, as demonstrated by the appropriation and subversion of this type of Auerbach painting by Glenn Brown. There is an intense gesturality to the application of the paint that shows Auerbach's physical exertions in dragging his brush across the surface, straining the oils to take the form of his sitter. The dark areas that form her mouth and eyes appear almost subsumed by the bulk of the head, by its physicality before the artist, as well as its substance in terms of the accumulation of the oils themselves. In this way, Auerbach has created something that is at once a signature painting and yet utterly unique, the product of sitting after sitting with his wife: 'I do want them [the works] to be alive, and they don't come alive to me in ways that are full of clichés or if they seem incomplete or not coherent... I think the unity in any painter's work arises from the fact that a person, brought to a desperate situation, will behave in a certain way... That's what real style is: it's not donning a mantle or having a programme, it's how one behaves in a crisis' (Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p. 10).