Francis Bacon

Finding that the physical presence of his subjects could prove inhibiting, Bacon painted his figures and portraits both from memory and from photographs—his own, as well as Eadweard Muybridge’s dynamic studies of people in motion, including male wrestlers. Although Bacon was sometimes reluctant to specifically identify the subjects of his paintings, a number of the works in Couplings (a term the artist himself used) were inspired by his fraught, often violent and passionate relationships. His affair with Peter Lacy, a former fighter pilot whom he met in 1952, cooled off after Lacy moved to Tangier, Morocco, in 1956, where Bacon visited him every summer until 1961. But even after Lacy died in 1962, Bacon continued to paint portraits of him, recalling intensely intimate moments in their relationship. In 1963 Bacon met George Dyer, a petty criminal from London’s East End. Dyer succeeded Lacy as Bacon’s lover and model and was the inspiration for many of Bacon’s grandest and most emotive paintings of the male nude. Three works in Couplings suggest a startlingly erotic and sometimes violent relationship between two men, such as the one Bacon and Dyer had: Two Figures on a Couch, the triptych Three Studies of Figures on Beds (1972), and Two Figures with a Monkey (1973)—the last two painted after Dyer’s suicide in 1971.

This is Gagosian’s third exhibition dedicated to Bacon’s work, following Francis Bacon: Late Paintings (2015) and Francis Bacon: Triptychs (2006).

The gallery is deeply grateful to the private lenders to this exhibition, as well as to Leeds Art Gallery, England, and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a previously unpublished interview with Bacon by Richard Francis; an essay by Martin Harrison, author of the acclaimed Bacon catalogue raisonné; and an introduction by Richard Calvocoressi, senior curator at Gagosian. The catalogue will be released in October 2019, to coincide with Frieze London.