Both fascinating and yet disturbing, is what best describes the oeuvre of the painter Francis Bacon, born in Dublin in 1909. Obliged to figurative painting throughout his life, man was his preferred subject. Franci Bacon used cultural and art history as a source of inspiration for his motifs. In doing so he created images that became unmistakable, disfigured faces with distorted contours in a powerful stroke of the brush.
Besides photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, Francis Bacon also took on sequences from avant-garde films, as well as paintings by Vincent van Gogh or Diego Velázquez, which he merged to nightmarish pictures. With piles of sketches and a motley crue of materials, the artist's chaotic studio perfectly illustrates his unruly struggle with and for art. Today the replica can be observed in the artist's hometown in the Hugh Lane Gallery.
The artist had achieved extraordinary fame, for he had participated in several documenta shows as well as in innumerable other exhibitions, before he died in 1992. Renowned collections all over the world show works by the artist.