Francis Bacon
Diptych, 1982
Panel of a Diptych, 1982
Francis Bacon drew on artistic tradition to create imagery evocative of the anguish and fragmentation of contemporary human experience. Truncated, naked human forms occupy ambiguous, empty spaces in the two-paneled diptych format, which derives from Renaissance altar paintings. The distorted bodies, reduced almost solely to sexual organs blatantly demarcated by red arrows, are offered up as deranged sculptural objects on pedestals in a room erotically charged with sensuous red and orange walls.
Inspired by a photograph of famed British cricketeer David Gower, the male figure dons shin pads and extends his stumpy arms, encased in sporting gloves, in the position of a crouching wicket-keeper. His female companion, the amputated torso, poses absurdly in the provocative pose of one of the central figures from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's "Turkish Bathers" (1859-63). These sexualized yet repulsive beings stem from Bacon's broader investigation into the human body and movement, inspired largely by Eadward Muybridge's nineteenth-century photographs of figures in motion.