Francis Bacon “Late Paintings”

"Image: The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2015. Photography by Robert McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery".

Gagosian New York presents “Francis Bacon: Late Paintings.” This will be the third exhibition of Bacon’s work following “Francis Bacon: Triptychs” (Gagosian London, 2006) and “Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers: Portraits by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon” (Gagosian New York, 2008).

Encompassing more than twenty-five paintings that Bacon made in London and Paris during the last two decades of his life, this will be the first in-depth exploration of the innovations in his late work.

In Bacon’s art, modernity and tradition converge. His ectoplasmic figures strain like savage forces of nature against shallow fields of intense color and strict armatures that bind them to the picture plane. In his gut-wrenching serialization of the human form and its sensations, he shows himself to be the unflinching witness of the hysterical reality of bodies and the primal fear of those who inhabit them.

In his late paintings, Bacon refined themes that had long obsessed him. He quoted reflexively from his oeuvre, reworking subjects to strip them to the bare essentials. In his last act, Bacon found inspiration in the portraits of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. He sprayed paint to achieve a chiaroscuro entirely different from the visceral brushwork of the 1940s to 1970s, ingeniously redressing the brute force of earlier portraits and figure studies in light of Ingres’s delicate, fleshy curves. Distilled figures lurk in voids that oscillate between bleak shadows and riots of color. Charged with implied narrative, Bacon’s stark paintings of self-representation mark significant departures in his technique.