About the
exhibition

Francis Bacon is acknowledged as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. Visceral and compellingly raw, his paintings generate powerful emotional responses which continue to fascinate and demand our attention.

This exhibition for the first time focussed on Bacon’s source material and working methods. Besides significant oil paintings from 1944 to 1989, it included archival material from Bacon’s studio, now in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and film footage and stills which shed new light on the visual references to film and photography in his work and his transformation of these images in fluid oil paint. Photographs by Muybridge and John Deakin were displayed alongside the paintings they informed – in particular, his reconfigurations of the human body.