Francis Bacon changed the art world with his raw, powerful images of abject bodily distortions. The figures that populate his paintings express not only the collective cultural anxieties of post‐war Europe, but also Bacon’s intimate emotional struggles.

Born in Ireland to English parents, Bacon moved to London in 1926 with no formal education and a modest weekly allowance. The following year Bacon travelled to Berlin, where a visit to an exhibition of drawings by Picasso at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg kindled his interest in art. It was perhaps this first encounter that inspired Bacon’s renderings of the human body as a permeable, malleable matter onto which he could project raw and grotesque emotions. Another site of inspiration from the Berlin years is Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potëmkin, which resurfaced constantly over Bacon’s oeuvre.

Bacon's transformative subjects combine formless accumulations of flesh and bodily metaphors of human suffering. Paintings such as Head I from 1948, inspired by Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), exemplify the figures that populate Bacon’s images, strange bodies reduced to their essentials. Vacant expressions, grotesque details that exaggerate human anatomy (including his celebrated screaming mouths) and a restricted palette of greys and blacks are features that resurface in his most celebrated paintings.

The silent screams emblematic of Bacon’s paintings have generated lively debates in art historical scholarship. Blurred, intense and seemingly eternal, the screams have been associated with Bacon’s reminiscences of his authoritarian father, his tortured love stories, memories of war and even sexual climax. It is precisely this combination of collective and personal references that makes Bacon’s works so powerful and suggestive. Tensions, frustrations, fears and desires merge into disturbing figurations that are at once horrific and alluring.

By the late 1950s his reputation was international, later elevated, in 1962, by his influential Three Studies for a Crucifixion. Yet, over the course of the next decade Bacon’s pictorial language became increasingly simplified. In the 1970s, Bacon projected personal loss, the suicide of his lover George Dyer, into his so‐called Black triptychs, characterised by a bleak and sombre simplicity.

In later paintings he started producing enigmatic, intellectual landscapes. However, he never stopped exploring the human body. Bacon progressively reduced the body to parts and even turned it into residues, employing new tools to expand the communicative potential of his images. These include innovative techniques such as spray paint, which produces a tactile, granular surface suggestive of physical traumas such as bruises or cuts.

International exhibitions of Bacon’s paintings have continued since his death in 1992, as he remains one of the most important British painters of the 20th century. The tactile quality of Bacon’s pictorial subjects finds a counterpart in their emotional intensity. He attempted to unveil the trail that emotions leave in the human body, translating it onto the canvas and revelling in its repulsiveness. The pulsating energy of his grotesque forms speaks of both life and death. Through their blurred limbs and open mouths, these bodies present us with primordial urges in which pure feeling, be it the deepest sorrow or the most intense enjoyment, can be expressed.