After the success of ‘You’re Not Alone: Women in Art 2025’ BEAF are excited to announce an exhibition presenting the work of Yvonne Mabs Francis whose work was in the 2025 exhibition before she sadly passed away.
Breakdown at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix gallery will be the first solo exhibition in London of the work of artist Yvonne Mabs Francis (1945 – 2025, Oxford, UK, lived and worked in Bicester, UK), featuring paintings from her Breakdown series alongside a body of related drawings.
‘Breakdown’ is curated by Carol Maund, Director BEAF, and is part of the London Gallery Weekend, 2026, 5-7 June.
Francis trained at the Slade School of Art in the 1960s and went on to lecture in Contemporary Art at Wolverhampton College of Art. In the summer of 1969, following the death of her father, she suffered a severe psychotic breakdown and admitted herself as a voluntary patient to the Warneford Hospital in Oxford, where she spent three months ― much of it on a locked ward, undergoing deep sleep treatment and, ultimately, ECT. What struck her most during her recovery was the silence: no doctor ever spoke to her about what she was experiencing. Three decades later, in 1999, she began to paint her way back through that summer, determined to give form to an illness she felt neither professionals nor the wider public understood. The Breakdown paintings, and the drawings that accompany them, are the result of that long undertaking ― an attempt, as she put it, to make the experience of psychosis visible, commonplace and survivable for those living through it. Showing this work in a London commercial gallery for the first time, in the year following the artist’s death, marks an overdue recognition of a body of work whose subject remains as urgent today as when it was made.
Yvonne Mabs Francis (b. 1945, Oxford, d. 2025, Oxford)
Her work featured in the British Council 2025 UK/Poland festival exhibition, You’re Not Alone: Women in Art 2025, B.A.D. Gallery Boscombe, Bournemouth and Muzeum Śląskie, Katowicach, Poland, curated by Carol Maund, Director, BEAF Arts, Bournemouth, UK. Francis’s work featured in many group exhibitions in London and Oxford, notably What Goes On In The Mind, The Gallery Oxford Town Hall, 2016; The Mind Machine, Menier Gallery, London, 2016; Dare to Wear, St Pancras Crypt, London, 2010; The Jam Factory, AIMS group show, Oxford, 2009; Wild Old Women Wow!, Novas Gallery London, 2008; Oxford Open, Modern Art Oxford, 2008; Mexico Gallery, London, 2004; Young Contemporaries, London, John Moores, Liverpool, 1966-1968. Barbara Herbin’s article on the artist appeared in Raw Vision, 2017.
‘Breakdown’ is curated by Carol Maund, Director BEAF.
The gallery opening hours during the London Gallery Weekend:
Friday 5 June : 11am – 6pm
Saturday 5 June : 11am – 6pm
Sunday 7 June : 12 noon – 5pm, guided tour from 2pm
The 7 June tour will be guided by Carol Maund, the curator of the show, and who has interviewed the artist on several occasions shortly before her untimely death. Tour will run approximately 45 minutes.
Image – Yvonne Mabs Francis, The Impossibility of Being in the Brain of Someone Living, Circa 2010, oil on canvas.
