Frank Auerbach

'll never forget seeing a misshapen wad of peaked, coagulated paint prised from Frank Auerbach's notoriously messy studio floor. It was a strange, organic object, seemingly built up over countless years. Thick tides of impasto oil paint cover every inch of his work too, so it's no surprise that he would quickly consider the solidity and endurance of architecture as appropriate subject matter for his striated style of painterly accretion.

Between 1952 and '62 Auerbach - who is of Lucian Freud's generation if not quite of his artistic stature - produced a series on 'London Building Sites', sketching the regeneration of a city recently razed by German bombs. Fourteen of his earliest paintings are in this show, but even then he laid on paint in his now familiar, claggy swaths. Over time these canvases have dried (some of his deeper paintings never do) and become frosted with airborn dust - the bumpy, rutted paint resembling grubby cake icing. Scaffolding, cranes and ladders peek out from this murky melange and crowd out London's familiar skyline, but these pictures were always conceived as alien vistas in comparison with views of our city by previous artists. Indeed, there's no sign of Monet's Big Ben or Hogarth's Covent Garden and only the wall labels help to identify Bethnal Green's railway arches from Auerbach's rendering of a nascent block of flats in King's Cross.

Despite his satisfyingly tactile technique, it's hard to say whether Auerbach's pictures succeed or not, simply because the shapeless blobs and splodges are so at odds with the machined lines of steel and brick that he depicts. Instead, there's an abstract mood in the Courtauld's uppermost galleries that's immediately evocative of adverse weather or light conditions, as well as of hustle, bustle and hard, menial work. These qualities alone confirm that these works couldn't have been painted anywhere else but London. Auerbach himself saw mountains and precipices in these building sites, which explains how he came to apply such brooding peaks and troughs to canvas.