Francis Bacon: In CameraExhibition dates: 27 March – 20 June 2010
This important new exhibition will focus on Francis Bacon’s work relating to film and photography. It will include significant oil paintings, archival material from Bacon’s original studio (now in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane), and film footage and stills, all of which shed new light on the visual references to film and photography in his work and his transformation of these images in oils.
In 1949, Bacon’s fusion of a Velázquez portrait with stills from the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein’s iconic film Battleship Potemkin was crucial to his developing agenda to make figurative art ‘modern’. The influence of films by directors such as Buňuel and Resnais will also be explored, together with photographs by Muybridge and John Deakin, which informed Bacon’s reconfigurations of the human body. For the very first time, items from the vast array of images that Bacon absorbed will be shown in close proximity to the paintings they inspired.
Volcano
Exhibition dates: 24 July – 31 October 2010
This is the first exhibition to celebrate the extraordinary outpouring of artistic genius that volcanic eruptions have triggered over the past five centuries. From sixteenth century engravings, showing imagined cross-sections of the fiery centre of the earth, to an explosive series of paintings by Joseph Wright, J M W Turner and Andy Warhol, the exhibition will include important loans from public and private collections in volcanic regions such as Naples, Reykjavik and Honolulu, as well as works from museums in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome and New York.
The exhibition will be truly eye-opening and spectacular, taking as its route the sequence of volcanic eruptions – from the calm volcano in the landscape to the first ominous rumblings; to cataclysmic explosion; through panic and death; to aftermath, and then quietly back to dormancy and extinction. The show will compare and contrast the approaches of artists long dead with contemporary artists whose own approaches to eruptions may be analytical and elliptic rather than dramatic.
For more information visit www.comptonverney.org.uk or call 01926 645500.
Pictured is a painting by Pierre-Jaques Volaire (1729 - about 1792). Vesuvius Erupting at Night.
