Making Faces

The third in the highly successful series of touring exhibitions organised in collaboration with our regional partners, the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne. These exhibitions, supported by a generous grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, allow us to exhibit masterpieces from the National Gallery outside London.

‘Making Faces’ takes 22 works, 15 from the National Collection, and explores representations of the face from the profile portraits of 15th-century Italy to the abstracted portraits of Frank Auerbach (‘Julia’, Laing Art Gallery).

The exhibition includes works by artists as diverse as Cranach, Goya, Hogarth, Renoir and Warhol, and focuses on the way in which artists have manipulated, idealised and distorted faces to indicate character, suggest type and communicate emotion.

The show will culminate with a selection of narrative paintings that use faces to intensely expressive ends including Rembrandt’s eye-popping tour de force, ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ (National Gallery) and culminating with Francis Bacon’s stooped and screaming ‘Figure Study II’ (Batley Art Gallery, Huddersfield). Pressetext

Making Faces
Werke von: Frank Auerbach, Lucas Cranach, Francisco de Goya, William Hogarth, Auguste Renoir, Andy Warhol
weitere Stationen:
Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery: 24 January - 4 April 2004
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle: 17 April - 4 July 2004