Frank Auerbach

Known for: heavily impastoed figurative painting of London

Frank Auerbach was sent from Berlin to England as a child to escape Nazism; his parents died in the camps. He began studying with David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic in London in 1947 and spent the following seven decades painting the same small group of subjects — Camden Town building sites, portraits of his studio sitters — with an impasto so thick it approached relief sculpture. He has almost never left London and has worked consistently in the same studio for decades.