Francis Bacon/Bruce Nauman. Face to face.

Francis Bacon/Bruce Nauman. Face to face. 1 July 2017 - 5 November 2017

This exhibition brings together two artists of conflicting tendencies in order to allow a renewed reading, a revivified understanding of these two major 20th century figures. Francis Bacon and Bruce Nauman came from two different generations and shared little in terms of background . Yet both share an experimental conception of art and developed parallel themes, such as a fascination for the body and its distortions, transformations, and aggression. Notions of both physical and psychological constraint and hindrance, in real or fictional spaces, are another common field of exploration.

This exhibition, conceived by one of the Centre Pompidou curators, Cécile Debray, is organized around an important group of a dozen works from the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne, lent for the Centre Pompidou’s 40th anniversary. Other works generously lent by important museums and private collectors, allow the presentation of sixty works - paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs and graphic works. Spectacular and confusing, just like those two major artists of the 20th century.