The National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition will explore Francis Bacon's deep fascination with portraiture and how he challenged the traditional definitions of the genre.
On show will be 55 works from the 1940s onwards including some of his own self-portraits, plus sitters such as Isabel Rawsthorne, his fellow artist Lucian Freud, and his former lovers Peter Lacy and the tragic gangster George Dyer.
Also on show will be paintings from private collections and others that are rarely seen in the UK, such as his multicoloured head in sunglasses, and two works that drew inspiration from Van Gogh's The Painter on the Road to Tarascon.
The paintings are all immediately recognisable as Bacon's... heavily colourised and contorted heads peering out of the gloom, squashed and twisted as if they're grimacing in pain. Some people are howling, screaming out in anguish, their bodies writhing with dramatic expressions on their faces.
The final triptych is particularly brutal, depicting Dyer's suicide in a Parisian bathroom and showing the moments before, during and after his fatal overdose.
What the critics say...
The Times: "Magnificent"
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