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The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum is hosting a retrospective on the artist and the work of the British painter, Lucian Freud (1922-2011) from 14 February to 18 June in collaboration with the National Gallery to mark the centenary of his birth.

The exhibition, which opened in October 2022 at the National Gallery, is coming to Madrid in February 2023 to display around fifty works that review the career, spanning seven decades, of one of the most important European artists of the 20th century.

His work reveals a series of allusions to the great masters of the past, from Egyptian art to Ingres, Courbet, Rodin and Cézanne and encompassing Grünewald, Hals, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Daumier, Watteau or Géricault,  What really interested the artist was to reveal his personal meta-artistic reflection to the spectator and “the intensification of reality” which he always aspired to achieve.   

The New Perspectives exhibition is divided into various sections that offer a chronological survey of the painter’s evolution and subject matter: Becoming Freud, devoted to the artist’s early works which are notably figurative in the face of the prevailing abstract trends of the period; Early Portraits, which reveal Freud’s desire to capture the essence of his sitters; Intimacy, which focuses on his preference for depicting people from his close circle; Power, presents portraits of individuals who he agreed to paint on the basis that they accepted his working conditions; The Studio, his creative space which became a subject in his art; and finally, Flesh, featuring the artist’s naked portraits, that reveal his profound observation of the human body. 

Image Credit:

Lucian Freud. Reflection with Two Children (Self-portrait), 1965. Oil on Canvas. 91 x 91 cm. © The Lucian Freud Archive