Francis Bacon Prints

A chronicler of the human condition, Francis Bacon became one of the most acclaimed artists of the 20th century through his exploration of themes such as the human figure, animals, Greek mythology and religion. Born in Ireland in 1909, Bacon’s career as an artist began in his late twenties reportedly after attending an exhibition of drawings by Picasso at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg in the summer of 1927 and throughout the next four decades he would go on to be one of the most important British artists of his era. Francis Bacon’s art, 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.