Francis Bacon as a Rubens Prize Winner
Lecture and talk with curator Ines Rüttinger

Francis Bacon is considered one of the most important representational painters of the 20th century. In his works, he dealt primarily with the depiction of the deformed human body in narrow, sometimes even interlocking spaces. Bacon is especially known for his paintings of popes and portraits of his closest friends. His sometimes grotesque figures and daring depictions are charged with emotion. Bacon did not work with models or in front of originals, but with photographs or illustrations in books and magazines or other material. Even the painting of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velázquez, which he dealt with intensively in his own work, the artist never saw in the original, but always worked from a black and white image.

The lecture deals with the life and work of Francis Bacon, the third Rubens Prize winner of the city of Siegen, and his works contained in the Lambrecht-Schadeberg Collection. Only recently, the 1963 oil painting "Turning Figure" found its way into the exhibition rooms of MGKSiegen. The studiolo "Francis Bacon, In the Mirror of Photography", which presents the new acquisition and thus the seventh painting in the collection, is currently not on view due to the reconstruction of the second floor for the purpose of the new exhibition "New Discoveries".