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| Frank Bowling, O.B.E., RA, Head, 2013. © 2014 Frank Bowling, O.B.E., RA. Image via spaniermanmodern.com. |
At Eighty
April 24 – May 28, 2014
625 West
55th Street, 5th Floor
New York,
NY
From
spaniermanmodern.com:
Spanierman
Modern is pleased to announce an exhibition and sale of abstract canvases by Frank Bowling, O.B.E., RA, an
artist whose commitment to the primacy of the creative act of painting
resonates throughout all of his art. His paintings, in which he blends together
aspects of Abstract Expressionism, Process Art, Color Field Painting, and the
craftsmanship tradition (to which his mother contributed through her work as a
seamstress), have long been recognized for their optical and surface
complexities. He continues to break new ground in the works in this
exhibition, taking risks and exercising compromise and authoritative control in
the exploration of new avenues. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue
with an essay by Jim Hunter, Professor Emeritus of Painting, The Arts
University, Bournemouth, England.
Bowling,
who currently divides his time between London and New York, was born in British
Guyana. In the 1960s, he was at the forefront of a new generation of
British artists. Among his classmates at the Royal College of Art, London, were
David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, and Derek Boshier. On graduating
in 1962 Bowling won a silver medal to Hockney’s gold, but departing
stylistically from his contemporaries (who moved in the direction of Pop Art),
Bowling found a basis for his work in the legacy of Jackson Pollock and Mark
Rothko, while drawing on the influence of Francis Bacon. Bowling’s art has
received high honors throughout his career. He was the first black artist
to be elected to the Royal Academy, London, and he was honored in 2008 with the
Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) for his service to art. In 2011, a
monograph on Bowling by Mel Gooding was published, and his work was featured in
a solo show at the Royal Academy. In 2012, he was included in an important
group exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and featured in a
solo display at the Tate Britain, London.
Bowling’s
method consists of working on unstretched canvas, which he often cuts or
reassembles, stapling and gluing parts together. At times, he folds and rolls
up a work to be finished at a later time in a different place, encompassing the
theme of temporality. Receptive to new methods, he has developed many
ways of pouring paint, including the use of a tilting board platform controlled
by pegs, which enable him to determine the velocity of the paint’s downward
movement. This exhibition includes works in which Bowling has deployed a
number of new compositional and technical means. In Shadow Under and Yellow
L and Rowers, he used a horizontal alignment of poured colors, producing a
suggestion of propulsion through space and time. Strong landscape references
are present in El Dorado, providing a reminder that Bowling has
always been conscious of the Romantic painters and shared their ambition to
create images of the sublime. The blue area at the bottom of the picture
confounds our expectations, with its sense of aerial space. In some paintings
such as Blue Top and About Yellow, by turning his
poured paint to read right to left, Bowling has established a more frontal
formation, in which bands of more naturalistic colorings are held in place by
light, weightless space.
While each
work is an individualistic experience, when seen together Bowling’s paintings
seem part of the “artist’s laboratory” They carry on a dialogue in which their
differences answer and support each other, affording a rich array of perceptual
engagements.
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