British painter, born in Ireland. In 1925, he settled in London and, in the following year, in Berlin. Between 1927 and 1928, he worked as an interior decorator in Paris. His first works were strongly influenced by Picasso. In 1928, he returned to London and started painting in oil. In 1944, Bacon decided to destroy all his work and start a new style of painting, distanced from contemporary artistic tendencies. A decade later he was, with Nicholson and Freud, one of the British representatives at the Venice Biennale and, in 1955, he had his first one-man show at the Rive Droite Gallery in Paris. Between 1959 and 1992, he participated in "documenta" 2, 3, 6 and 9, in Kassel. In 1962, he made his first great triptych called "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Cruxification". In 1967, he received the Rubens Prize in Siegen and, in 1971, he had a great retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palais, in Paris. His work is an unusual mixture of Realism and Surrealism, the Figurative and the Abstract, individual, subjective experience and universal and collective expression.