Study from the Human Body, 1986

The striking yello background of this painting is unusual – it was an isolated return to a colour Bacon had employed on three paintings in 1969. The imagery continues the fetishisation of the lower half of the body that is a recurrent strand in Bacon’s large-scale paintings in 1980s. The feature-less upper body is scarcely more substantial than the shadow it projects onto the curved mirror at the right. Francis Bacon: The Catalogue Raisonné, 2016, p. 1314.