Leon Kossoff: London Landscapes, Annely Juda Fine Art - exhibition review

Leon Kossoff was born in Shoreditch in 1926 and has spent 60 years depicting his native city. The London captured in this show of around 100 paintings and drawings is not admired coldly from afar but experienced from within, as if pulled from under the artist's skin.

From the start, Kossoff depicted London with a density and intensity born of relentless looking and profound feeling. It’s a city of landmarks but also of constant movement, of building sites and demolition, of trains and the hubbub of street life. The drawings, the bulk of the show, are dominated by charcoal lines that match the thick oils in the paintings for expressive vigour, their hurried scratchings and gouging lines describing not just what Kossoff sees, but the feeling of being in the cityscape.

Seventeen recent drawings of Arnold Circus, the red-brick, late Victorian estate in Shoreditch, where Kossoff grew up, are hung together and read as a single work. He takes different viewpoints around the circus and from its central bandstand and explores them repeatedly. They conjure his past, but show him immersed in the present — a wonderful close to a memorable show.

Until July 6 (020 7629 7578, annelyjudafineart.co.uk)