What a thrill that Francis Bacon, an artist widely regarded as one of the most influential, innovative figurative painters in post-war Britain, is being honoured with his first major retrospective in Australia.
The Art Gallery of NSW has announced it will be exhibiting five decades worth of Bacon’s extraordinarily bold and visceral paintings covering his dramatic – at the time shocking – brutal abstract portraits and existentialism-informed depiction of figures screaming from the 1940s, through to his violent visual exploration of religious motifs, to the large-scale intimately captured portraits of friends and loved ones in the latter part of his career.
With over 50 paintings as well as archival material from his studio, films and photographs, the exhibition will feature works drawn from private collections and Australian and international institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate Britain in London, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and the Francis Bacon Estate.
“Francis Bacon: Five Decades” will run exclusively at the Art Gallery of NSW from 17 Nov 2012 – 24 Feb 2013. For more visit www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au
Main image: “Three Studies for Self-Portrait” by Francis Bacon (1973)
