Leon Kossoff, at Annely Juda Fine Art, review By the mid-Sixties, decades before Eurostar regeneration, Kossoff was capturing the disused railway lands behind St Pancras station. He returned to the area in 2005, to capture George Gilbert Scott's derelict Midland Hotel on the eve of renovation. The once-dazzling Grand Staircase resembles a spider's web of charcoal swirls. Kossoff's London never stands still. Indeed, in paintings like City Building Site (1961), there's so much activity it's hard to decipher who's doing what where. His trademark method is to deposit a lorry-load of paint on a board, trowel it, daub it, gouge it, remove it and reapply it - until (months down the line) finally he's happy with the result. In a way, his style matches his city. Both are in a state of flux: of appearance, disappearance and reappearance, of construction, destruction and reconstruction. Kossoff's surfaces are so thickly impastoed they're as close as painting gets to sculpture - his muddy scenes never making for a clear, straightforward view. In middle age, he moved to Willesden, where his scenes continued to deal with movement and transition: whether underground and overground trains passing on the tracks at the bottom of his garden; or commuters buzzing around Kilburn tube station. Perhaps my favourite painting is Children's Swimming Pool, 11 o'clock Saturday Morning, August 1969, a teeming image inside Willesden Leisure Centre. A mass of bodies dissolve and reform, as they bob to the surface and duck under again. Verrucas must be spreading like wildfire, as parents coax their infants into the water, and bigger boys show off their dives. Alas, there are many more drawings on display than paintings, and this medium-sized show represents a snapshot of Kossoff's London rather than a comprehensive survey. With his earthy palette and agitated surfaces, Kossoff is often considered a melancholic, existential artist. One who, perhaps responding to the horrors of war, has always stressed the substantiality of his paint over the flimsiness of human figures and life. His most recent series, however, is suffused with brightness. It marks Kossoff's return, full-circle, to the Shoreditch of his youth (now exclusively as a draughtsman, for he lacks the strength to paint). He depicts a proud Arnold Circus bandstand, amidst plane trees in full leaf rising into turquoise skies. Dogs are walked and, tellingly, a mum saunters by with a pram. London may be forever changing and bringing forth new life, but Kossoff himself seems to have found peace at last. 'Leon Kossoff: London Landscapes', to July 6; www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk