Francis Bacon’s distorted forms, caught in hellish moments, are etched into the brain of those with only a passing interest in the art canon, an eerie familiarity that still doesn’t prepare you for the sheer emotionality of his major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery.
Taking you from Bacon’s early portraits in the 1940s, through self-portraits and portraits of friends in the 1950s, to the personal relationships that defined his work in the 1960s, the exhibition documents Bacon’s relationship with representation in his dismantling of both traditional power structures and tortured memorialisations of departed lovers.
