Frank Bowling

Frank Bowling the Guyana born British trained artist graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1962. Since the mid-60s, the abstract painter has spent part of each year between London and New York where he's maintained studios. Mr. Bowling's paintings continue to be exhibited in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States and are included in important private and corporate collections worldwide, in addition to the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the Tate Gallery in London, and Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the National Gallery of Jamaica. (Full bio available here.)

For many years, early in his career, Bowling felt pressure as a “Caribbean artist” to create socio-political works as part of the postcolonial discussion. Once Bowling moved to New York in the mid-1960s he shifted away from this style in favor of abstract work. For Bowling, the abstract work that dominated his career for decades isn’t, “hidebound by colour or race.” In the 1970s and 80s, his work was loose with poured paint built-up on the canvas. By the 90s and 2000s he had tighten up his style. His paintings were now smaller, and the paint is controlled and often contained sutured, collaged elements. Squares, strips and rectangles of brightly painted fabric are cut out and stapled into place.

This bright canvas is an excellent example of Frank Bowling's collaged canvases from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The artist's compositions balanced large areas of saturated color with surface, collage and painterly punctuations. This later period was exhibited just as the artist's earlier career began to be celebrated - with the first of several retrospectives, including Bowling Through the Century, a British touring exhibition organized by Eddie Chambers in 1996-97, and Frank Bowling: Bending the Grid at Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ in 2003.