Join us for an exclusive Frieze 91 London Private View of Francis Bacon: Man and Beast at the Royal Academy of Arts, followed by Drinks & Canapés at The Wolseley.
6-7pm | Private View
Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, W1J 0BD
7-9pm | Drinks & Canapés
The Wolseley, 160 Piccadilly, London, W1J 9EB
The Royal Academy is run by Royal Academicians; artists and architects elected by their peers in recognition of their exceptional work. The Academy is home to Britain’s longest established art school, the RA Schools. Every year since 1768 they have held the annual Summer Exhibition, the largest open-submission art exhibition in the world. The Royal Academy presents their collection of art and architecture in free displays throughout their home on Piccadilly, and put on world-class exhibitions of art from around the world, welcoming hundreds of thousands of people to the galleries each year.
Irish-born artist Francis Bacon was the horse-breeder’s son who became one of the most important painters of the 20th century. An openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal, he was banished from his conservative family home by his father at 16. After that, he drifted through Berlin and Paris before establishing himself in London, with his formative years running parallel with some of the 20th century’s most profoundly disturbing events. This powerful exhibition will focus on Bacon’s unerring fascination with animals: how it both shaped his approach to the human body and distorted it; how, caught at the most extreme moments of existence, his figures are barely recognisable as either human or beast. It also explores how Bacon was mesmerised by animal movement, observing animals in the wild during trips to South Africa; filling his studio with wildlife books, and constantly referring to Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century photographs of humans and animals in motion. Whether chimpanzees, bulls, dogs, or birds of prey, Bacon felt he could get closer to understanding the true nature of humankind by watching the uninhibited behaviour of animals. Spanning Bacon’s 50-year career, highlights include some of Bacon’s earliest works and his last-ever painting, alongside a trio of bullfight paintings which will be exhibited together for the first time. Seen together, these raw expressions of anxiety and instinct – both animal and human – feel poignantly relevant today.
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