The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is hosting an exhibition of one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest figurative artists.
Steering away from fiction, Lucian Freud tended to look at subjects to create portraiture in his work, in the world of reality.
“Everything is autobiographical, and everything is a portrait, even if it is a chair,” is how Lucian Freud described his view of art.
A limited amount of props such as a bed, an armchair or even floorboards were used in his studio whilst the intensification of the gaze forced insight into his work.
The vast number of drawings in the exhibition shows how drawing, graphics and painting weave in and out of Freud’s entire artistic thinking about what a portrait can be.
The exhibition features Freud’s creations from the earliest pivotal point in his career to his depictions right before his death.
The exhibition shows the relationship of things closest to himself such as his old mother and himself as an old man, they fall into place as motifs.
The Museum writes “Lucian Freud’s art unfolded in the post-war period, just as geometric abstraction and abstract expressionism were abandoning the figurative. His works do not profess the existentialism that permeated European art until the 1960s, but it is nevertheless impossible to disentangle his art and its unsentimental interest in what the ‘human animal’ contains from that very spirit of the times. For Freud it was about exposing the individual phenomenon – human, animal or plant. A new ‘body’ each time.”
The Everything is a Portrait Exhibition will be displayed 11 June – 27 September 2026. For further information or tickets visit: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
