Francesca Bayegan

Before pursuing a masters in painting Francesca Bayegan (she/her) was an instructor for middle school and college undergraduates in the field of history, art history and classics. Francesca has a lifelong commitment to advancing arts education and imparting her passion for an immersive and experimental pedagogical experience. In addition to being a graduate of the MFA program at SAIC she has a masters from the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland in the History of Art and Architecture. Francesca is also a lifelong art maker; she has over ten years experience producing anatomical and skeletal art works. Her body of work at large embraces abstraction and her past pursuits in academic drawing and painting.

The themes of chaos and emptiness are reoccurring themes that she channels to produce an aesthetic experience for her audiences. As a graduate student, she researched art and architecture of Roman Britain that referenced images of the cosmos as a means to express the classical conception of eschatology. Her work uses the art historical references which are drawn from the periods that mark the great progressions of the centuries such as the Roman, the early modern period, the Baroque as well as the Edwardian periods. The poetics of the loss of power construct a pictorial celebration of dereliction which permit the viewer to explore his own infinite smallness and infinite greatness. Her body of work focuses on Sacred dismemberments, the visual tropes of sacrifice used in the ancient world as a means to connect the earthly with a greater cosmology and bring about a golden age. In our current society we are disconnected from the notion of sacrifice and as a result we have lost the consciousness of the value of things. This body of work delves into the nexus between banality and refinement as a means to invite viewers to question the value of an aesthetic experience.

Francesca has been featured in group shows and in two person shows in Houston and Chicago. Francesca manages her own gallery in Houston within the Hardy and Nance art collective and she is the chief creative officer at the Matthew Heberlein Contemporary art advisory. She has a passion for connecting artists and creatives and for community building within the greater fine arts ecology. She has curated many large scale exhibitions that include international artists and have site specific installations.