Frank Auerbach will be the subject of a homecoming exhibition in Berlin, with some of his final paintings on display in the city he fled as a child.

Auerbach, who died last November, never played a show in the city of his birth, which he left amid persecution by the Nazis. Both his parents were later killed in Auschwitz.

Frank Auerbach's Galerie Michael Werner in Berlin will open on May 2 with 25 to 30 works in what will be the artist's first posthumous exhibition , the artist continued to create until his death last November at the age of 93.

Catherine Lampert, curator and former director of the Whitechapel Gallery, said some of Auerbach's last self-portraits, portraits of his wife Julia and works from the 1960s will be included.

She said: "There's a photo from 2024 and then there are photos from the last five years. Julia's paintings are acrylics, greens, pinks and blues, very unusual colors - nothing like he painted in oils time color.

"Julia's photos are very poignant because she was not well at the time. They are very free, as if they are floating in the air, airy and beautiful."

Auerbach arrived in Britain in 1939, one of six children sponsored by Antonio and Iris Origo. He attended Bonscourt School in Kent, a progressive boarding school for Jewish refugee children, before studying at London's St Martin's and the Royal College of Art.

He describes his artistic approach as "trying, then erasing, then trying again to make an authentic image," while using a bold color palette and a heavy painting style.

In the last years of his life, he had a highly successful solo exhibition at the Courtauld, London, where his iconic charcoal portraits created between 1956 and 1962 attracted large audiences and positive reviews.

Although Auerbach never returned to Germany, he remained connected to the country of his birth.

While at Bangs Court, he studied with the exiled German actor and theater director Wilhelm Marckwald, who was working in Berlin and once said that Auerbach's appearance in one of the school's theater productions was "his One of the best young performances ever seen".

His cousin was the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto who went into hiding during the war and eventually emigrated to Germany, becoming a culturally important figure in the 20th century Characters and Critics. Angela Merkel described him as "an incomparable friend of literature, but also of freedom and democracy."

Lambert said Auerbach "had memories of Berlin, but he never came back and although the city had many fans of his work, no shows ever took place".

“When I visited his exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn in 2015, a lot of people were talking about what Germany lost because Frank had to leave, but as far as we know there are no Auerbach works in German museums. Look at him It will be interesting to see how the work is received.”

Lambert is one of what Auerbach calls "persistent seated figures" and appears frequently in the works he created in his studios in Camden and Finsbury Park, north London.

"I started in May 1978," she said. "I always left the studio very happy, and his company was great. In his later years he talked more and more, and in the early years he used to talk to himself about painting, or recite poetry."