Francis Bacon

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of three major late paintings by Francis Bacon at its rue de Castiglione gallery in Paris, on view from April 11 through May 30. These commanding works crystallize the radical economy and psychological intensity of the artist’s final period while reaffirming his enduring dialogue with the French capital—a city in which he maintained a studio and intellectual foothold between 1975 and 1987, frequenting, among other places, the storied Hôtel La Louisiane.

Widely regarded as one of the most incisive painters of the twentieth century, Bacon forged a singular visual language that collapses the boundaries between modernity and tradition. His figures—simultaneously constrained and exposed within fragile geometric armatures—seem to convulse against saturated chromatic fields, rendering the human body as a site of existential tension rather than stable form.

The three large-scale canvases presented—Study from the Human Body—Figure in Movement (1982), Study from the Human Body (1986), and Man at a Washbasin (1989–90)—are marked by a striking formal austerity. Sparse architectural frameworks and distilled compositions reflect what Bacon himself described as “a kind of shorthand” with which to approach the complexity of lived experience. These works do not merely depict movement, they register its psychological residue, capturing the body under duress through distortion and powerful color. As Gilles Deleuze observed, Bacon’s painting “does not represent violence, it makes visible the violence of the forces exerted on the body.” Across these canvases, the human figure oscillates between flesh and sculpture, presence and dissolution. Bacon’s use of saturated color—at once seductive and destabilizing—reveals a uniquely visceral engagement with the legacies of Color Field and hard-edge abstraction.