Jake 1990

Curator: Standing before us is "Jake," a 1990 drawing by Frank Auerbach, currently housed here at Tate Britain. Editor: My first impression is… restless. All those furious, scribbled lines – they seem to capture a frenetic energy. It’s a powerful and unsettling image. Curator: I think you've hit upon something vital to understanding Auerbach's practice. The intensity of mark-making is deliberate; it's about pushing the materials to their limit to render a lived encounter, even a social history of that encounter through the laborious making of the art. Editor: Interesting. It’s a drawing, but he’s built up such a thick layer of ink that it almost feels sculptural, wouldn’t you agree? How do you read that level of materiality, so atypical in most works of line? Curator: Exactly! It disrupts the established hierarchy where painting has historically been seen as a "higher" art form compared to drawing or even printmaking. Here, drawing claims its own space through physicality and force. What matters is Auerbach’s process, the sheer labor and intellectual energy visibly impressed into the paper, becoming almost violent at times. The "truth" of this depiction resides within this highly wrought object, it seems to say. Editor: You're right, there is that challenging of hierarchies through that lens. But to broaden it a little, portraits, and how they are received, also have this deeply coded history that relates to power, class and societal expectations. "Jake," through this rough execution, seems to resist these notions, capturing something more fundamental, like a feeling, an essence of humanity removed from rigid conventions of status. Curator: An insightful interpretation. Auerbach, an immigrant from Germany after escaping Nazi persecution, worked from the perspective of the outsider, offering art as a form of resilience. And indeed, these layered marks could speak about building new identities after trauma and rebuilding material realities too. Editor: In its apparent rawness and relentless exploration of the human form, "Jake" encourages us to really consider the act of seeing, interpreting and questioning all that shapes both the work and ourselves. Curator: Yes, the act of making also asks us about our values and perspectives when encountering such potent human form portrayed through an original artistic idiom.