In Francis Bacon’s Trois études pour un autoportrait,
the artist presents three depictions of his own face from shifting
perspectives, isolated against an abyss of black. His face has been
illuminated in three disparate flash-bulb moments, his features both
emerge from and are invaded by the surrounding void of darkness. This
ambivalence evokes a dizzying sense of motion, revolving around the
central panel in which the artist’s melancholic face is directed
outwards, mirroring the viewer looking in. Blurred and distorted, the
restlessness of the composition elicits a sense of psychological
distress in the subject.

Mortality is an ever-present theme that underpins Bacon’s oeuvre and in
his self-portraits it comes to its zenith. In a 1975 interview, Bacon
said to David Sylvester ‘I loathe my own face… I’ve done a lot of
self-portraits, really because people have been dying around me like
flies and I’ve nobody else left to paint but myself.’ In the mid-1970s,
many of the people closest to Bacon passed away, causing him to begin
his most prolonged and intense period of self-portraiture in his career.
Painting his own face almost obsessively, after hours of close
self-examination from either photographs of himself or from staring in
the mirror, the self-portraits are highly analytical investigations into
his inner psyche. Intensely ruminating on mortality, the works are
windows that reveal an undeniable existential truth about the human
condition.