Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix is pleased to present Breakdown, the first solo exhibition in a London commercial gallery of work by Yvonne Mabs Francis (b. 1945, Oxford – d. 2025, Bicester), featuring paintings from her Breakdown series alongside a body of related drawings. A survivor of long-term mental illness, Francis described her work as an attempt to make the experience of psychosis visible, commonplace and survivable for those living through it. This exhibition marks an overdue recognition of a body of work whose subject remains as urgent today as when it was made.
The four vividly saturated paintings of the Breakdown series are installed on the ground floor. Dramatic in scale and rich in symbolism, each is a visual reckoning with the psychotic breakdown Francis suffered in 1969 following the death of her father. Admitted to a mental institution at the time, she did not return to painting for some eleven years, eventually beginning the Breakdown series in 1999. Through works titled The Bodily Time Machine, The Electric Bed, The Impossibility of Being in the Brain of Someone Living and Breakdown, Francis confronts the struggle of managing her mental health, using creativity to untangle the obsessive thoughts and demons living inside her head.
The downstairs gallery presents Francis's exquisite monochrome and coloured drawings: studies of female bodies subjected to seemingly forced or violent medical intervention. Despite their dreamlike, otherworldly settings — bucolic landscapes delicately rendered with floating birds, flowers and fish — the merciless, piercing gaze of the central female figures and the skulls and inauspicious motifs scattered throughout reveal the complex, layered meanings of these intricate drawings.
