Exhibition Preview: Francis Bacon Prints

To coincide with the National Portrait Gallery Human Presence
November 3, 2024
 Exhibition Preview: Francis Bacon Prints

To coincide with the highly anticipated exhibition, "Francis Bacon: Human Presence" at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Andipa Editions presents over 20 Francis Bacon signed prints for sale split between our Knightsbridge gallery and online exhibition. We have been actively dealing in Bacon prints for several decades and delighted to release these prints from our collection.

 

Francis Bacon defied the dominant trend of abstraction during his time, favouring instead a unique and unsettling form of realism. His tumultuous relationship with his parents, particularly his father, who had difficulty accepting his son's emerging homosexuality, contributed to a troubled childhood. As a result, Bacon rebelled, running away from school and spending the late 1920s and early 1930s in cities like London, Berlin, and Paris. During this period, he lived off allowances and odd jobs, while immersing himself in the bohemian lifestyle of London's Soho district. By the mid-1940s, Bacon began gaining critical acclaim, solidifying his reputation as one of the most significant painters of the 20th century.

 

Francis Bacon, after Second version of the Triptych (1944), 1989

 

Bacon’s path to becoming an artist was unconventional. He didn’t attend art school or undergo a traditional apprenticeship. Instead, he started his career in interior design but shifted to painting after being deeply moved by Picasso’s works at an exhibition in Paris in the late 1920s. Picasso’s depictions of the human body as distorted, bone-like structures opened Bacon’s eyes to the potential of painting, and Picasso became a major influence on his work.

 

Francis Bacon, after Seated Figure (1977), 1992

 

 Francis Bacon’s works, with its brutal exploration of both the human form and human condition, plays with colour, shape and perspective as he strips back his subjects to their most pained and tortured. A hauntingly savage beauty can be found in Bacon’s art, often grouped together in diptychs and triptychs as, through the grotesque, balloon-like figures, he explores what it is to be human spiritually, physically and emotionally capturing the vivality and density of the human presence. Turning the living into the dead and the dead into the living, Bacon’s deft technical mastery of form and subject blend the sensitive vision of an artist with the ferocious self-destructive reality of post-war art, society and the deeply personal. 

 

Francis Bacon Prints opens 11th Niovember at Andipa and online. View Francis Bacon prints for sale.

About the author

Alex Yellop