Gagosian Paris Brings Together Three Late Francis Bacon Paintings
Paris is about to see a concentrated glimpse of Francis Bacon’s final decade: three late canvases will be shown together at Gagosian next month, a small exhibition that doubles as a portrait of the artist’s long, complicated attachment to the French capital.
The presentation, titled simply “Francis Bacon,” runs April 11–May 30, 2026, at Gagosian’s space at 9 Rue de Castiglione, near Place Vendôme. On view are “Study from the Human Body — Figure in Movement” (1982), “Study from the Human Body” (1986), and “Man at a Washbasin” (1989–1990). The gallery has framed the installation as a first-time grouping of these late works in Paris, a city Bacon returned to repeatedly and where key chapters of his career unfolded.
That relationship is inseparable from a moment of public triumph and private catastrophe. In 1971, Bacon was given a landmark retrospective at the Grand Palais, an institutional milestone that was immediately shadowed by the death of his partner, George Dyer, who died on the eve of the opening. In the years that followed, Bacon continued to travel to Paris frequently, visiting between 1974 and 1987. He became a familiar presence at the storied Hôtel La Louisiane in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and, during that period, maintained a studio at 14 Rue de Birague in the Marais, just off Place des Vosges.
Larry Gagosian positioned the new show as both a homecoming and a public encounter. “I have had a number of important Francis Bacon exhibitions in New York and London over the past 20 years, and Paris feels like the perfect place to bring these late paintings together for the first time,” he said. He added that the city “had a profound effect on the artist and his work,” and described the Rue de Castiglione gallery as an unusually open setting: the three canvases will be visible from the street arcade, turning a discreet exhibition into something closer to a civic display.
Each painting carries its own Parisian afterlife. “Study from the Human Body — Figure in Movement” (1982) is set against a cadmium-orange field and reflects Bacon’s fascination with cricket. A truncated nude body perches on a pedestal near a mirror, a staging device that heightens the sense of performance and dislocation. The work appeared in Bacon’s 1984 exhibition at Galerie Maeght-Lelong in Paris, a show remembered for the crowds it drew. It was last exhibited in “Francis Bacon: Unsichtbare Räume” at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart in 2016–17.
“Study from the Human Body” (1986) revisits a closely related composition: a distorted figure in three-quarter view is set beside a mirror that opens to the right, as if the room itself were slipping out of alignment. Here, a vivid yellow ground floods the scene with a harsh, sunlit intensity. Rarely shown, the painting was included in “Bacon en toutes lettres” at the Musée national d’Art moderne–Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2019–20.
“Man at a Washbasin” (1989–1990), also seen in that Pompidou exhibition, later appeared in Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992, which opened only weeks after Bacon’s death in Madrid on April 28, 1992. The painting returns to a motif Bacon first explored in 1954, but with a crucial reversal: where the earlier, darker version places the figure leaning left over the basin, the later work shifts the body to the opposite side. The palette is more saturated, and the figure’s blue shorts remain caught around the left foot, a detail that reads as both comic and unsettling.
In a catalogue essay, Sebastian Smee links the image to Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic sequences, noting that the pose derives from a frame of a man boxing — a source Bacon revisited repeatedly. Smee also observes that the figure’s position over the washbasin can suggest vomiting, “an extreme, involuntary action, both physical and psychological,” a reading that inevitably circles back to Dyer’s death.
The exhibition arrives alongside renewed attention to Bacon’s own statements about representation and invention. In the recently published book “Francis Bacon, le réel mis à nu,” by Majid Boustany and Eddy Batache (Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, March 2026), Bacon is quoted reflecting on the artist’s license to remake reality: “It is the privilege of the artist and the writer to give form to characters that are fully alive, fully real, whatever may separate them from everyday truth.”
In Paris, where Bacon’s public legacy and private grief have long been intertwined, these three late paintings offer a compressed, street-facing encounter with an artist still testing how far an image can bend before it breaks — and what, in the process, it reveals.
Francis Bacon April 11–May 30, 2026 Gagosian, 9 Rue de Castiglione, 75001 Paris
