The excellent ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna features Picasso – Bacon: What It Feels Like to Be Human, a major exhibition bringing together Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon, two of the most influential figurative painters of the 20th century. The exhibition is on view through January 31, 2027.

The exhibition examines the connections and differences between the two artists, focusing on their approaches to the human figure, portraiture and the representation of the body. Although Picasso and Bacon belonged to different generations, geographies and developed distinct artistic languages, both repeatedly used the human figure as a way to explore identity and the human condition.

Their practices converge around ideas of the body, death, violence and rawness, while their very different approaches to colour, distortion and technique reveal unexpected points of connection. Picasso and Bacon each transformed the representation of the human figure, pushing it beyond conventional ideas of portraiture and anatomy. The exhibition makes these connections particularly clear through the ways both artists used colour, fragmented forms and physical gestures to convey psychological and existential states.

Picasso’s fragmented and transformed figures are presented alongside Bacon’s distorted bodies and portraits, highlighting their different approaches to figurative painting. The exhibition also considers their engagement with art history and the ways both artists reinterpreted established forms of representation. The dialogue of two genius!

By placing their works side by side, Picasso – Bacon: What It Feels Like to Be Human offers a focused comparison of two artists whose work fundamentally shaped modern figurative painting.

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