An image can be made far more immediately if one doesn't know how it happened
Few thinkers pursued the image with the intensity of Francis Bacon. In doing so, he fashioned not only a body of work, but a distinctive existential style: a way of confronting chance, obsession, vulnerability, and the contingencies of life through the image.
How can an image escape illustration, narration, and cliché? How can it acquire a force of its own? These questions run through Bacon's paintings, interviews, and reflections on art, and reappear in the conceptual traces left by his oeuvre.
His paintings are often described as violent, distorted, or unsettling. Bacon himself preferred a different vocabulary: obsession, sensation, accident, fact.
This reading group follows Bacon through four encounters generated by his work – with David Sylvester, Gilles Deleuze, Alenka Zupančič, and Michel Leiris, four thinkers who sharpen our view of Bacon's project.
Fridays
03, 10, 24, 31 July
18:30–20:30
Galerie Linger – Art, Books & Press
Four sessions: €120
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Session 1 – Obsession
Bacon in his own words. Through David Sylvester's interviews, we encounter a form uniquely suited to the articulation of essential artistic problems. Again and again, Bacon returns to the same questions, disturbing familiar answers.
Session 2 – Sensation
With Gilles Deleuze, Bacon emerges not only as a painter but as a thinker who compels thought to operate differently. The image is freed from narrative and symbolism, allowing the Figure to reorganize the pictorial field according to a different logic.
Session 3 – The Real
Drawing on Alenka Zupančič, we approach Bacon through the question of obsession. Things and people appear before us every day, yet something about them continues to haunt us. Bacon's paintings pursue these appearances as they insist and return.
Session 4 – Exposure
Michel Leiris was one of Bacon's closest friends, and his literary work shared a similar spirit of daring. The question becomes not only what an image reveals, but what must be risked in order to bring it into being.
Bacon never stopped asking what an image can do.
The question remains open.
SESSION HOST
Pawel Jankiewicz is a writer, curator, and researcher based in Berlin. He is the founder of Galerie Linger – Art, Books & Press, a gallery, bookshop, and discursive space devoted to the unfinished questions of the avant-garde.
A graduate of the University of Łódź's Faculty of Law, his early research explored artistic freedom, censorship, and art scandals. His work ranges from poetry and artistic research to studies of ruins, heritage, and cultural transformation. Together with Pablo Arboleda, he initiated the call for Ruin Studies in The Munich Social Science Review (MSSR), making the case for ruination as a field of inquiry in its own right.
*To sign up for this workshop, inquire at galerielinger@gmail.com
**All materials are included and will be provided upon registration.