Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents Auras, an exhibition exploring connections and divergences between two generations of figurative painters working in Britain. Central to each of the artists on display is the portrayal of women. Among the works included are images of friends and lovers, models and muses, empowered individuals and anonymous enigmas—articulated in ways that range from forceful realism to the symbolic and allegorical.

Starting with the 20th century School of London, the exhibition will show paintings by Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, and Leon Kossoff. In the postwar period, the practices of these artists radically reformulated approaches to the human figure, foregrounding personal connections and an immediacy of sensation. Adjacent to this grouping, Paula Rego championed a painterly mode suffused with literary allusion and storytelling, paralleling developments in feminist thought and theory in the 1970s and ’80s.

Also spotlighted is a selection of contemporary artists coming of age in the 1990s and early 2000s—Jenny Saville, Alison Watt, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Maintaining dialogues with their School of London predecessors, these painters simultaneously engage and question traditional tropes and images. Each in their distinct style demonstrates that depicting the human figure—and, in particular, women’s bodies and identities—remains an important and enthralling project, at once timeless and inherently anchored in the present moment.

With Auras, Lévy Gorvy Dayan celebrates a diverse grouping of artists connected through their visual reinventions of the human figure and incisive portrayals of women. This theme will correspond to the exhibition The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh, opening in New York in April 2025. Also on display at Lévy Gorvy Dayan in London from March 6 will be a presentation of new works by Alison Watt.