FRANCIS BACON / DARREN COFFIELD

About

Bacon and Coffield both do figuration with a twist: Bacon’s reinterpretations of the human form are some of the most ground breaking and influential images of the twentieth century, while Coffield’s equally disturbing images are paradoxical puzzles that play with perception. Despite an age difference of sixty years, their paths crossed when they met in the infamous Colony Room Club, in London’s Soho.

The large-scale pencil & graphite drawings and dynamic colour pastel collages by Bacon were made between 1977 and 1992 and donated to his good friend in Italy, Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino. The subjects are often related to the themes of some of Bacon’s most iconic paintings, such as his crucifixions and those after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, and feature distraught faces and distorted bodies in spatial frameworks typical of Bacon’s oeuvre.

Drawings by Francis Bacon from the Francis Bacon Collection have been exhibited extensively around the world, including the Kaoshing Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan; the Municipal Art Gallery, Ferrara, Italy and the Centro Cultural, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In Coffield’s new series of paintings the images are first painted then broken up and dispersed in to one another. All the information is contained in the painting but not necessarily displayed in the expected cognitive order. The information is consumed and resolved; creating a new form that can be read in terms of creation, consumption or corruption.