Bacon's Women. Ordovas, New York (2018-19)

Excerpt from essay in the exhibition catalogue by Martin Harrison

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'THE WOMEN IN BACON'S LIFE

Bacon’s paintings of women have received less attention than those of men. Art history’s turn to questions of gender and identity, and academic specialisms in gay studies and queer theory, may account, in part at least, for the privileging of masculinity in studies of Bacon. Yet while it is true that Bacon’s homosexuality meant men were more likely to be portrayed as sexually desirable in his paintings, he had many close female friends and he painted portraits of seven of them. He also painted more female than male nudes, a statistic that still surprises many people. Moreover, in Bacon’s paintings conventional boundaries between representations of male and female tend to be elided, or, in his androgynous depictions, effectively nullified. Clearly, to focus on Bacon’s relationships with women carries the potential to illuminate his art in significant ways. [...]'

exhibition catalogue, Bacon's Women, Ordovas: London, 2018

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All material provided by and shown with kind permission of Ordovas Gallery