This powerful exhibition focused on Bacon’s enduring fascination with animals, which shaped his approach to the human body and lay behind some of his distortions of it. it shows how, caught at the most extreme moments of existence, his figures are barely identifiable as human or animal.
It also explored how mesmerised he was by animals’ movements, observing animals in the wild during trips to South Africa, filling his studio with wildlife books and constantly referring to Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century photographs of humans and animals in motion. Bacon felt he could get closer to understanding the true nature of humankind by watching the uninhibited behaviour of animals, be they chimpanzees, bulls, dogs, or birds of prey.
The major artworks on display spanned the five decades of Bacon’s career, and included youthful works, his last-ever painting and a trio of bullfight paintings which had never previously been exhibited together.
Further information can be found at https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/francis-bacon
