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Francis Bacon
Paintings April 6 - May 18, 2002 Artist Bio Press Release Images Back to Exhibition List |
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Francis Bacon
Paintings
April 6 - May 18, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A Dedication to John Edwards
The Tony Shafrazi Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of Francis Bacon.
Francis Bacon was the 20th century's preeminent painter of flesh. These ten works depict an astonishing range of bodily actions, gestures, and postures. Of course, the artist's concern was the meaning of these poses. We are drawn with such force to Bacon's howling, grinning, or calmly sitting figures because each of them reflects "the violence of reality" that the painter once described as the ultimate subject of his art. The light, space, color, and pictorial structure of these canvases compel us to focus on anatomies that have mutated under the pressure of Bacon's relentless gaze. Rather than depict an entire body, he shows us only as much as is necessary to let us know what the body is doing-and thus the significance it has acquired as an object of his attention.
This exhibition includes work in his little-known blue palette of the early 1950s, among them a canvas long thought to have been destroyed. Next come single canvases and a triptych keyed to the hard orange-vermillions of his middle period. Bacon was known to have struggled, sometimes violently, with each of his canvases. That intensity continued to the end of his career, yet the most recent paintings in this exhibition-both from 1988-show that he had become less frantic, more magisterial, in his approach to his abiding subject. These later works achieve a gorgeous serenity, without sacrificing any of the passion that gives his images of flesh their always shocking immediacy.
A fully illustrated catalogue is available.
For further information please contact Hiroko Onoda at 212.274.9300.
Paintings
April 6 - May 18, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A Dedication to John Edwards
The Tony Shafrazi Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of Francis Bacon.
Francis Bacon was the 20th century's preeminent painter of flesh. These ten works depict an astonishing range of bodily actions, gestures, and postures. Of course, the artist's concern was the meaning of these poses. We are drawn with such force to Bacon's howling, grinning, or calmly sitting figures because each of them reflects "the violence of reality" that the painter once described as the ultimate subject of his art. The light, space, color, and pictorial structure of these canvases compel us to focus on anatomies that have mutated under the pressure of Bacon's relentless gaze. Rather than depict an entire body, he shows us only as much as is necessary to let us know what the body is doing-and thus the significance it has acquired as an object of his attention.
This exhibition includes work in his little-known blue palette of the early 1950s, among them a canvas long thought to have been destroyed. Next come single canvases and a triptych keyed to the hard orange-vermillions of his middle period. Bacon was known to have struggled, sometimes violently, with each of his canvases. That intensity continued to the end of his career, yet the most recent paintings in this exhibition-both from 1988-show that he had become less frantic, more magisterial, in his approach to his abiding subject. These later works achieve a gorgeous serenity, without sacrificing any of the passion that gives his images of flesh their always shocking immediacy.
A fully illustrated catalogue is available.
For further information please contact Hiroko Onoda at 212.274.9300.
