Starting from an iconic photograph of Francis Bacon in his studio, taken in 1971 by Francis Goodman, Shahin Afrassiabi brings together more than seventy paintings in the immersive installation Francis – Paintings drawings sculptures 2023–2025. The single image becomes a lasting point of reference and generates endless variations. The works unfold in space as an open painterly process without hierarchy, forming a dense field where no work dominates and the image keeps recomposing itself.

Installed without hierarchy or focal centre, the exhibition forms a dense constellation of faces, fragments and “earthscapes” that continuously echo and transform one another. Bacon becomes less a subject than a vehicle – a figure through which painting tests its own limits, oscillating between humour, absurdity and tragedy.

In conversation, Afrassiabi speaks about Bacon as a method, about repetition without resolution and about painting as a space of testing rather than depiction.