We round up the reviews for this latest exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery which is on display until the 19th January 2025.
The Observer: “Uneasy, harrowing, claustrophobic: that’s what people say about his art. And at one point Bacon himself is quoted as wondering whether Lacy’s neurosis has somehow crept into the pictures. But how can anyone really tell, when he is as compacted and distorted as everyone else? And what about the ebullience, energy and overwhelming beauty of Bacon’s art?”
The Guardian: ***** “It’s the joy of paint. Right through the show, free splashes fly across perspective scenes. You are made aware, not of the picture, but the painter. When he fell in love with petty thief George Dyer, whose portraits are the show’s climax, he found his favourite model. But the shadow didn’t go away. It grew, assuming the shape of an evil bat in the show’s final masterpiece, Triptych May-June, 1973.”
Time Out: **** “Do we need another show of this major artist’s work? Absolutely not. Could you argue that almost all of Bacon’s work is portraiture, making this show a little pointless? Totally.
But it’s Francis Bacon; you know the deal. It’s full of viscerality, the anguish of existence, the torment of love, etc etc etc, over and over. It’s great.”
The FT: “It’s a rewarding, fresh approach, intimately chronicling the lives of the artist and his close friends and sitters, historically setting his innovations against centuries of tradition in the NPG’s collection.”
The Upcoming: **** “Francis Bacon: Human Presence offers a compelling exploration of the artist’s enduring obsession with the interplay between mind and body.”
The Telegraph: **** “This exhibition of the gloom-merchant’s unconventional portraits is as powerful and perverse as the man himself.”
iNews: ***** “The life stories are dramatic and the work arresting, but what to make of these twisted depictions of often damaged people we barely recognise? Bacon reanimates their ghosts until there is something positively swashbuckling about the swirling, oozing, devil-may-care characters. It is as if he takes all the pulp and churn of human organs and slaps them on the outside, displaying the essence – the presence – of a being. His portraits, like our internal workings, are terribly vulnerable, but disarmingly complex.”
The Standard: **** “Every portrait is imbued not just with the sitter’s presence but with Bacon’s own, like a novelist who ruthlessly mines his own life for material. Each canvas is full of feeling, soaked in volatile emotion. What could be more human than that?”
To book tickets visit:https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2024/francis-bacon-portraits