FRANCIS BACON / DARREN COFFIELD

FRANCIS BACON / DARREN COFFIELD
                                
13 April - 21 May 2016

Private view: Tuesday 12 April 6-8pm 
RSVP essential: [email protected]
 

Herrick Gallery is proud to present Francis Bacon drawings and new paintings by Darren Coffield. Although there is an age difference of sixty years, both artists moved in the same demi-monde of the louche drinking clubs of Soho, specifically the infamous Colony Room Club. Coffield met Bacon and his close friend and sole heir John Edwards there and is currently completing his next book on the Colony Room Club. Both artists 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 evolve from painstaking and logical pursuits to non-predetermined ends, becoming paradoxical puzzles playing with perception.
 
This exhibition features Bacon drawings and pastel collages, 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. The large-scale pencil & graphite drawings on Fabriano paper, mostly 100x70cm, feature distraught faces and distorted bodies in spatial frameworks typical of Bacon’s oeuvre. Francis Bacon drawings donated to Ravarino form the Francis Bacon Collection and 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.
 
Bacon and Coffield are also linked through David Sylvester who was a fan of the younger artist, describing him as: “Another of those magicians who (probably without knowing) know how to imbue pieces of matter with light”. Coffield has an interest in the field of human cognition. His work deals with how we perceive and process the world around us and subverts the viewer’s instinctive faculties for reading the apparently familiar to create stimulating and provocative paintings. 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. 

 
Gallery opening times: Tuesday - Saturday 11am-6pm
nearest station: Green Park