Francis Bacon at James Hyman Gallery

4th September 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, from the 1970s and 1980s.

As with Bacon, the other artists in this exhibition all 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 engaged in radical ways with the possibilities of figure painting, and this impact continues in the paintings and drawings by which Tony Bevan and Hughie O'Donoghue established their reputations.

The exhibition includes works on loans and for sale, and is the third in a series of British Figurative Painting, 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 widely acclaimed book The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold War (1945-60), is published by Yale University Press.