Francis Bacon has become the “iconic artist de nos jours”, said Alastair Smart in The Daily Telegraph. Any museum exhibition of his paintings will “attract visitors by the lorryload”, and his “disturbed” and “isolated” works command “multiple millions” at auction: recently, one of his diptychs sold for $35m (£24m) at Sotheby’s. Indeed, Bacon’s legacy has been so thoroughly explored that you could be forgiven for thinking there was nothing left to say about his work. This “revealing” exhibition at Tate Liverpool sidesteps the problem by focusing on an often “neglected” technical aspect of his career – namely, the ghostly “transparent cages” he used to frame the figures in his compositions. The show brings together 30 paintings realised over the course of his career, and by concentrating on Bacon’s technique, reveals…
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The Week United Kingdom (Digital) - 1 Issue, V. 1076