Refugees: German Contribution to 20th Century British Art: Eva Frankfurther

Refugees: German Contribution to 20th Century British Art - Eva Frankfurther

Selected Works by Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959)

Eva Frankfurther was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Berlin in 1930. Following the rise of National Socialism in Germany, she escaped to London with her family in 1939. From 1946–51 she studied at St Martin’s School of Art, where her contemporaries included Frank Auerbach, who recalled her work as ‘full of feeling for people’.

After graduating, disaffected with the London art scene, Frankfurther moved to Whitechapel in London’s East End, home to successive waves of migrant communities. For the next six years, she earned her living as a counter-hand working evening shifts at Lyons Corner House, Piccadilly, and, later, in a sugar refinery, leaving herself free to paint during the day. She took as her subject the ethnically diverse, largely immigrant population among whom she lived and worked, and her studies of the new communities of West Indians, Cypriots and Pakistanis, portrayed both at work and at rest, and with empathy and dignity, are her greatest achievement. Between 1948–58 Frankfurther also travelled extensively in Europe, and in 1958, spent eight months living and working in Israel, painting both Arab and Jewish sitters.

The exhibition brings together rarely-seen works, predominantly oils on paper, together with a selection of lively drawings from the artist’s sketchbooks, the majority from private collections, covering all the major motifs of Frankfurther’s brief career in 1950’s Britain.

Duration 29 March 2017 - 18 June 2017
Times Monday to Friday 10am – 5.30pm. On Saturday and Sunday we’re open 11am – 5pm.
Cost Free
Venue Ben Uri Gallery
Address 108A Boundary Road, London, NW8 0RH
Contact / info@benuri.org.uk / www.benuri.org.uk

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