Francis Bacon
Tate Britain
Millbank
September 11, 2008–January 4, 2009
Museo Nacional del Prado
Calle Ruiz de Alarcón 23
February 3–April 19, 2009
Curated by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens
This fall, in honor of Francis Bacon’s hundredth birthday, Tate Britain will mount the first retrospective of the artist’s work in the UK since 1985, on a scale befitting the occasion. Curators Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens anticipate no less than a complete reassessment of Bacon’s oeuvre, drawing in part on new findings that have emerged since scholars gained access to Bacon’s studio shortly after his death in 1992. Featuring seventy paintings spanning his sixty-year career—including icons Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953, and the personal-existential In Memory of George Dyer, 1971—the retrospective will center on Bacon’s conditio humana: that is, on the fragility of life’s violence, sexuality, and isolation.