The Guggenheim Museum located in Bilbao has set up an amazing exhibit, showcasing work by the world renown 20th century modern artist Francis Bacon. Titled “Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez” the event is curated by Martin Harrison as the exhibit recalls Bacon’s artistic originality with 80 works that stretch across six decades, and as an added bonus the museum is bringing in some very exclusive, very rarely exhibited paintings.
The exhibition reexamines not only Bacon’s unique imagination that he cleverly conveyed to the canvas, but also what stirred up and bolstered his view of the art world. Bacon’s earliest influence first began from Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, as well as Picasso’s biomorphic Cubism. As the timeless significance of Picasso’s oeuvre in the 1920’s-1930’s later turned toward Velázquez, whose portrait of the Pope Innocent X developed into a career wide obsession for Bacon, as he created over 50 works based on that portrait. The devotion to that painting along with other references, by Sergei Eisenstein’s film “Battleship Potemkin” to “Allusions to Paintings” by Chaïm Soutine.
Francis Bacon’s style of painting was mainly focused on the human physique or figure, drawing them disfigured on the canvas, after all his distorted view of reality is what made his work so interesting and full of creativity. He wanted to enhance the expressiveness of his painting to an even higher degree through the practice of contorted details and mangled silhouettes.
Francis Bacon said this as for his introspectively exposed concept: “Of course, one does put in such things as ears and eyes. But then one would like to put them in as irrationally as possible. And the only reason for this irrationality is that, if it does come about, it brings the force of the image over very much more strongly than if one just sat down and illustrated the appearance. I always hope to be able to make a great number of figures without a narrative.”
Bacon was the second living artist after Picasso to be given a contemplative at the Grand Palais, Paris in 1971, and was also the first western artist displayed in the former Soviet Union during 1988. The Exhibition “From Picasso to Velázquez” will be open from September 30th, 2016 to January 8, 2017.
For more information visit: TheGuggenheimMuseum
