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Francis Bacon

FRANCIS BACON

Human Presence National Portrait Gallery 10 October 2024–19 January 2025 London
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Press Release

Featuring more than 55 works from the 1950s onwards, this exhibition will explore Francis Bacon’s deep connection to portraiture and how he challenged traditional definitions of the genre.

From his responses to portraiture by earlier artists, to large-scale paintings memorialising lost lovers, works from private and public collections will showcase Bacon’s life story. Accompanied by the artist’s self-portraits, sitters include Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne and lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer.

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About the Artist

Perhaps best known for his infamously jarring series of ‘Screaming Popes’ made in the 1950s, Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon is a key figure of modern 20th-century painting. His acclaimed and internationally sought-after abstracted figurative paintings collectively explore the anxieties of the human condition.

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About the Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery is a major art museum in central London dedicated to telling the story of Britain through portraits. Founded in 1856 as a public institution devoted exclusively to portraiture, it has become a key reference point for understanding British history through images of the people who shaped it. The Gallery sits just off Trafalgar Square, adjoining the National Gallery, in a building originally designed in an Italian Renaissance style by architect Ewan Christian and opened on this site in the mid-1890s.

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Address
St Martin's Place
London
United Kingdom
Opening Hours
Daily
10am – 6pm

Fridays
10am – 9pm
(1)
London St Martin's Place
National Portrait Gallery contemporary art institution in London United Kingdom
National Portrait Gallery
St Martin's Place, London, United Kingdom
+44 20 7306 0055
http://www.npg.org.uk

Opening hours
Daily
10am – 6pm

Fridays
10am – 9pm
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