A Francis Bacon/Bruce Nauman exhibition at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier

The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation is taking part in the ‘Francis Bacon/Bruce Nauman. Face to face’ exhibition to be held at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier from 1 July to 5 November 2017.

This exhibition brings together two artists who worked using quite distinct, sometimes even opposing, means, in order to allow a renewed reading, a revivified understanding of these two major 20th century figures. Francis Bacon and Bruce Nauman came from different generations and had little in common in terms of background. Yet both share an experimental conception of art and developed parallel themes, such as a fascination with the body and its distortions, transformations, and assaults, its animality. Notions of both physical and psychological constraint and hindrance, in real or fictional spaces, are another common field of exploration.

This exhibition, conceived by one of the Centre Pompidou curators, Cécile Debray, is organised around an important group of about ten works from the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne, lent within the framework of the Centre Pompidou’s 40th anniversary.

Other remarkable works generously lent by important museums and private collectors complete the selection to offer the public a show of about sixty works - paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs and graphic works; a voyage as spectacular and disconcerting, as the two artists.

On this occasion our institution is lending two works by Francis Bacon: Figure with Monkey (1951) and Study for a Portrait (1979). It has also supplied several photographs for the exhibition catalogue and the museum website.