Leon Kossoff passes away aged ninety-two

Piano Nobile is greatly saddened by the recent news of Leon Kossoff's death. He passed away on 4 July 2019 at the age of ninety-two, bringing to an end an extraordinary creative life which included some of the finest achievements by a painter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The gallery would like to extend our most sincere condolences to Leon's family. During the recent exhibition, Leon Kossoff: A London Life, his friends and sitters all spoke with the highest regard about his personal warmth and insight. It has been an unmatched privilege to hear their stories, to welcome Leon himself to the gallery, and above all to celebrate his career by displaying his work.

Leon Kossoff spent his entire working life in London. His cityscape paintings are of immediate relevance to everyone living in the city today. It is so rare that an artist communicates something wholly original about the things we experience on a day-to-day basis. Yet that is what Leon did. In his paintings of post-war building sites, the railway lines of Willesden Junction and York Way, Christ Church, Spitalfields and, most recently, the cherry tree in his own garden, he captured the rhythm and the atmosphere of his city and created works of profound artistic and historical importance. In marking his death, we acknowledge a great loss to British artistic culture.

July 12, 2019