Faggionato Fine Arts is pleased to announce their forthcoming exhibition Francis Bacon Studying Form. The exhibition focuses on Bacon’s core concern in art – the representation of the human body. Six works, ranging in date from 1959 to 1988, demonstrate his radical and varied approach to the subject. The exhibition includes three works belonging to a series of paintings and sketches of lying and reclining figures that Bacon completed between 1959 and 1961. Lying Figure 1959 and two works on paper from the Tate collection (Reclining Figure No.1 and Reclining Figure No.2, c.1961) are shown as representative of a period when Bacon undertook a fundamental reassessment of ways of staging the figure in space. These are cited as illustrating a pivotal moment in Bacon’s art in which he investigates new pictorial formats and paint handling techniques. Here for the first time he experiments with articulated limb positions, sexually ambiguous figures, thinned pigments and fluid brushstrokes. The three remaining works stand as further examples of Bacon’s varied response to painting the human body. Kneeling Figure (c.1982) draws on a theme Bacon investigated between 1979 and 1984: Oedipus and The Sphinx. In these fragmented torsos, painted with a complex blurring of gender distinctions, Bacon incorporated some of his most powerful representations of shifting sexual orientation. In Study for a Portrait of John Edwards (1988) we have a monumental, deceptively simple, yet subtly compelling late work, which demonstrates his ongoing exploration of portraiture. Finally the iconography of Triptych 1987 reveals Bacon’s continuing preoccupation with themes of violence and injury which had been an obsession throughout his career. The catalogue, published by Faggionato Fine Arts and The Estate of Francis Bacon, will include David Sylvester’s final contribution to Bacon studies Francis Bacon and The Nude, written shortly before his death and delivered at the Dublin Symposium in 2001. These proved to be his last words on an artist who had been his close friend for more than forty years. Mr Sylvester was too unwell to deliver the lecture in person, but both the transcript and the illustrations are printed here for the first time in full. The catalogue also includes an essay by Martin Harrison whose book In Camera – Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practise of Painting will be published on 7 March 2005. ------------------------------- Gallery Hours Monday - Friday 10-6pm Saturday 12-4pm Closed all bank holidays For further information and images please contact Bunny Turner at info@faggionato.com