Two giants of painting, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud together for the first time in an exhibition in Italy. One of the most fascinating, broad and significant chapters of world contemporary art with the London School . An extraordinary city in a revolutionary period.

Bacon, Freud, British art in over seven decades, the spirit of a city on display at the Chiostro del Bramante in Rome from autumn 2019 until February 2020, curated by Elena Crippa, Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate and organized in collaboration with Tate, London.

Together with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Paula Rego, artists who marked an era, inspired generations, used painting to tell life.

Thanks to an extraordinary loan from Tate, the paintings of six artists with works from 1945 to 2004 reveal, in a direct and shocking way, human nature made of fragility, energy, opposites, excesses, escapes, no filters, truth.

Many topics were addressed: the war and post-war years, stories of immigration, tensions, miseries and at the same time, desire for change, research and introspection, the role of women, cultural debate and social redemption. At the center of all this is reality: inspiration, subject, instrument, to the point of being an obsession.

A topic that is more current than ever, in an era, ours, of filters and #nofilter.

On display over forty-five paintings, drawings and etchings by artists grouped in the “School of London”. Heterogeneous artists, born between the early twentieth century and the thirties, immigrated to England for different reasons who found their city in London, the place to study, work and live.