VIOLENCE AND SENSATION. FRANCIS BACON AND THE REMAKING OF APPEARANCE - 2008

PRESS RELEASE 04/08/2008

gallery one

Violence and Sensation. Francis Bacon and the Remaking of Appearance

Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Tony Bevan, Michael Clark, David Hockney, R.B.Kitaj, Hughie O’Donoghue

5 September - 4 October 2008


To coincide with Tate Britain’s major Francis Bacon retrospective, James Hyman Gallery presents an exhibition of Francis Bacon and some of the most powerful figurative artists of our time to explore the impact of the greatest British painter of the twentieth century.

James Hyman says: “As this exhibition demonstrates, Bacon’s legacy was not stylistic so much as conceptual: an encouragement to take risks, an art of extremes, a heightened sense of mortality.”

James Hyman Gallery will also be presenting a series of rarely seen prints by Francis Bacon.

As with Bacon, all the artists in this exhibition combine an awareness of the vulnerability of the body with the suggestion of actions upon it. Hockney and Kitaj's early paintings, made at the beginning of the 1960s, make obvious Bacon's impact on young painters, even those more usually associated with Pop art, who were engaged in radical ways with the possibilities of figure painting. This impact continues in the paintings and drawings by which Tony Bevan and Hughie O'Donoghue established their reputations.

The exhibition includes works on loan and for sale. It is the third in a series on British Figurative Painting staged by James Hyman Gallery, following on from Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, Kossoff (2000) and From Life. Radical Figurative Painting from Sickert to Bevan (2003).

James Hyman specialises in British Figurative Art, and is an acknowledged expert and author on Francis Bacon. His book The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold War (1945-60) was nominated for a prize and is published by Yale University Press. He is the author of the Francis Bacon biography for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.



Press Enquiries
Roz Arratoon: 07941 027921
roz@margaretlondon.com
www.margaretlondon.com

Sales Enquiries
Anthony Hartley at James Hyman Gallery on 020 7494 3857