If you only see one major exhibition this year, it’s got to be Francis Bacon. Distorted, macabre, and utterly fascinating, Bacon’s work shows us life from the inside out, put together by the Tate Britain to celebrate the artist’s centenary next year.
Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the 20th Century, Bacon rose to fame in 1945 with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. His works successfully convey the anxieties of the 1940s, the inner workings of a man troubled by sexual repression and perhaps most vividly, Bacon’s philosophy that without God, humans, like any other animal, are subject to natural urges of violence, lust and fear.
I really can’t decide which of Bacon’s paintings excites the most; his beautiful and startling self-portraits, the evocative Man on Blue series, or his abstract references to Greek mythology and poetry towards the end of his career. Perhaps, in the end, it is Bacon’s brutally honest approach to his subjects that make him such a triumphant artist, the way in which he conveys eroticism, apprehension, threat, loss, without any restraint or caution. Life and death, Bacon lets us escape nothing.
The Bacon exhibition is on at The Tate Britain until January 4th, 2009
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