![]() As the curator Okwui Enwezor explains, “by staking a ground around the idea that abstraction need not be disunited from content, especially as it intersects cultural experience and historical subject matter, Bowling boldly experimented with diverse modes of building a painted surface.” In these expansive, chromatic canvases, thin soaks of acrylic provide the ground for images of re-oriented continental landmasses spray-painted with stencils. ![]() Subsequently, Bowling began his groundbreaking series of Map Paintings (1967–71). He would go on to create a number of these works in the following years, embedding personal narratives into the surface of his paintings. In 1964, the artist began screen-printing personal photographs onto canvas, notably a 1953 image of his mother’s general store in Guiana, Bowling’s Variety Store. His long friendship and intellectual sparring sessions with the renowned art historian and critic Clement Greenberg opened up further conversations about painting and politics.Ĭoncurrent with his move towards abstraction, Bowling sought inventive ways in which to continue incorporating pictorial imagery into his work. He was also a frequent contributor to publications, including Arts Magazine, where he was a contributing editor, and wrote incisive texts on race and artistic production. As the art historian Mel Gooding remarked, “for Bowling, the complexities and complications of New York art were compounded by the problematic issues of personal expression and public representation that much occupied the thoughts and discussions of his Black friends and associates in a largely segregated art world.” It was in this environment that he became a unifying force for his peers-he curated the seminal 1969 exhibition 5+1, which featured his work alongside pieces by Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Al Loving, Jack Whitten, and William T. In 1966, he moved to New York to immerse himself in post-war American art, and his practice shifted towards abstraction. Emerging at the height of the British Pop movement, his early practice emphasized the figure while experimenting with expressive, gestural applications of oil paint. For over five decades, his distinct painting practice has been defined by an integration of autobiography and postcolonial geopolitics into abstraction.īowling moved to London in 1953, where he studied painting at the Royal College of Art from 1959–62. Sir Frank Bowling Kt OBE, RA (b.1934) was born in British Guiana and maintains studios in London and New York.
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