Francis Bacon at the Palazzo Strozzi

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The Palazzo’s recently restored cellars, traditionally known as ‘La Strozzina’, are Palazzo Strozzi’s main platform for contemporary culture, hosting a broad range of events, activities and exhibitions representing the entire spectrum of contemporary creative activity.

Francis Bacon and the Existential Condition in Contemporary Art

Nathalie Djurberg | Adrian Ghenie | Arcangelo Sassolino | Chiharu Shiota | Annegret Soltau

5 October 2012 to 27 January 2013

Organized by the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina (CCCS) in conjunction with Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane

Francis Bacon and the Existential Condition in Contemporary Art, co-curated by Franziska Nori (Director of the CCCS) and Barbara Dawson (Director of the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin), hosts work by contemporary artists who breathe life into states of mind and into the kinds of questions we ask ourselves in our relationship with our own interior being, our own body and the outside world, especially today as we face the crisis in values that is gripping contemporary society.  The exhibition gets off to a masterly start with a core of paintings by the great Francis Bacon, whose work dialogues with that of five contemporary artists of international renown – Nathalie Djurberg, Adrian Ghenie, Arcangelo Sassolino, Chiharu Shiota and Annegret Soltau – all of whom share Bacon’s reflection on man’s existential condition and on the depiction of the human figure.

Alongside major works from international collections, the exhibition presents, for the first time in Italy, four unfinished works by Bacon which he kept in his workshop for many years and which have been on display in the DCG The Hugh Lane since 2005.  They include what is thought to be the artist’s last work, discovered on an easel in his Reece Mews workshop in London while he was on his deathbed in Madrid in 1992.  These canvases bear witness to one of the typical workprocesses espoused by the artist, involving setting aside but holding on to a partly finished painting in order to then return to it and complete it later on. Bacon used time as a tool for working on images and on the decaying process of his support materials, causing traces of the passage of time to build up in layers.  These traces went on to become ‘scars’, which play a crucial role in helping us to understand the creative process on which his work is based.  The individual human figures, incapable of finding complete definition in the space offered by the painting, become effective visual syntheses that condense and reflect the traces of memory of the artist’s troubled life.

Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina (CCCS)

Palazzo Strozzi,
Florence, Italy

Tel. +39 055 2645155