Frank Bowling
Works from the Studio
Skoto Gallery, New York
Curated by Spencer Richards
September 25 - November 1, 2003
Skoto Gallery presents Works from the Studio – an exhibition of paintings by Frank Bowling curated by Spencer Richards. This is the third occasion that Frank Bowling’s work are on display at the Skoto gallery.
One of the most important artist of his generation, Frank Bowling has spent over forty years in total dedication to the practice and career in art. The axiom of his consumate skill as a master has been over these years gloriously articulated, with a non-flagging intensity and energy on the surfaces of his pictures. Through them, he has extended the paradigms of abstraction, which by 1971 had become the mainstay of his vision.
His pictures are creations that seem to evolve from the collision of chance – chance which is conjured up then assembled through placement of color, drops of paint, rhythm of brushstroke or splash of beer to further explore expressions inherent but still hidden in abstract painting. Their construction is verified in many places – in his head, on the floor or on the wall – before they are stitched canvas to canvas, yielding surfaces which offer themselves to viewers scrutiny masked behind constantly surprising subtlety and occasionally capturing those fleeting moments of magic in picture making.
The pictures in this exhibition illustrate Frank Bowling’s longstanding preoccupation with recolonization of space, of weaving new commentaries around the narratives of the tradition in painting. There is a great deal of critical experience, of knowledge and admiration of other artists’ researches in his dynamic abstractions as well as an ever sensitive deftly balanced interaction between modernism’s formal concerns with a belief in the emotive potential of painting. In the arena of modernism, Bowling as an “outsider” clearly has not only mastered its tenets but extended them, and like the powerful phalanx of Black artists (some of whom have been on the scene since the dawn of the genre) has brought into the arena a different declaration and a new way of making art.
At the Royal College of Art in the 1960s Frank Bowling was one of the brightest of a young generation of painters which included David Hockney, Boshier and Peter Phillips who were soon to initiate the next phase in the evolution of British art. Bowling’s famous painting “The Staircase” synthesized into one huge canvas all the stylistic concerns of the period and in doing so created a new pictorial strategy, namely, making a unified pictorial field with compositional elements belonging to different formal styles.
Frank Bowling’s work works are in several public and private collections around the world including the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, West Indies; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; De Menil Foundation, Houston, Texas; Lloyd’s of London and The New Jersey Museum of Art, Trenton, New Jersey. Some of his “map” paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s were included in FAULTLINES: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes at the recent 50th Venice Biennale.
SKOTO GALLERY
529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
