Title

About Men: Lucian Freud.

Collective title

Newcastle Region Art Gallery touring exhibition.

Venues

Bendigo Art Gallery (3 November 2007 – 2007)

Date

(2007)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (VIC). Prints.

Curator

Stone, Brett.

Web address

https://www.bendigoregion.com.au/bendigo-art-gall…

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

This exhibition which has been co-curated by Brett Stone, Rex Irwin Gallery, highlights the work of celebrated British artist Lucian Freud. In his work Freud reveals the depth of human experience in his depictions of the male nude. This exhibition consists of eighteen etchings representing male subjects drawn from private and state gallery collections.

Freud was born in Berlin in December 1922, and travelled to England with his family in 1933. He studied briefly at the Central School of Art in London and later at Cedric Morris’s East Anglican School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham.

Freud’s subjects are often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Sebastian Smee notes ‘Many of Freud’s subjects happen to be men. These men do not appear in his pictures to illustrate some overriding idea about masculinity, or male sexuality. They are there because Freud knew them, felt some kind of interest in them, and wanted to make a picture from them. And yet contemplating Freud’s portraits of men on their own, as this exhibition gives us the rare opportunity to do, might yet be illuminating.

As Freud himself has said ‘The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement really. I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.’

[Bendigo Art Gallery media, 2007].

Last Updated

31 Oct 2024