Exposition Frank Bowling @ Hauser & Wirth Paris - « Frank Bowling. Collage »

Frank Bowling. Collage

Hauser & Wirth Paris

22 mars – 24 mai 2025

« Frank Bowling. Collage », la première exposition personnelle de l’artiste en France, s’intéresse à sa pratique du collage en tant qu’outil à la fois conceptuel et technique. Cette exposition rassemble des oeuvres réalisées depuis le début des années 2000 jusqu’à aujourd’hui — de fait, à l’âge de 91 ans, Frank Bowling continue de peindre quotidiennement. L’exposition s’articule autour de quatre nouvelles peintures monumentales, présentées dans la galerie du rez-de-chaussée. Ces oeuvres de grand format, dont l’impressionnante « Skid » (2023) de 4,4 mètres de haut, composées de plusieurs panneaux, renouvellent son usage des toiles collées et du marouflage, des techniques qui occupent depuis longtemps une place importante dans son processus artistique. L’exposition s'accompagne d’un programme éducatif, le premier du genre pour la galerie parisienne de Hauser & Wirth. Porté par la passion commune de l’artiste et de Hauser & Wirth pour l’éducation et la pédagogie, ce programme propose une journée d’étude le lundi 28 avril 2025 dans les espaces de la galerie, ainsi que des ateliers dédiés aux élèves des écoles de la région parisienne. (voir ci-dessous).

L’attirance de Frank Bowling pour le collage s’inspire en partie des découpages d’Henri Matisse, qu’il découvre pour la première fois à la fin des années 1950, puis à nouveau lors de la rétrospective organisée par le MoMA à New York en 1992. Dans un article paru dans le numéro d’hiver 1999 de « Modern Painters », Bowling est invité à réfléchir sur sa carrière et à sélectionner une oeuvre ayant profondément nourri, voire transformé sa vision artistique. Il choisit « L’escargot » (1953) de Matisse, dont il rend hommage à travers plusieurs de ses collages qui font directement référence au motif en spirale, notamment « Back to Snail » (2000). 

Les premières expériences conceptuelles de Frank Bowling avec le collage se retrouvent dans ses créations dès les années 1960. En évoquant ses ambitions matérielles, il explique : « Je voulais marier tous ces éléments disparates – la couleur, le maniérisme, le lieu où l’on peint, ce fandango de styles – pour composer une oeuvre puissante qui rassemble des aspects de la peinture, de la sculpture et de l’architecture [...] s’associant pour former quelque chose de nouveau ». 

Les oeuvres sélectionnées pour cette exposition témoignent également de l’évolution de l’intégration d’objets trouvés dans la pratique de Bowling. Depuis les années 1980, divers matériaux, tels que des jouets d’enfants ou du matériel médical, ont été incorporés dans ses peintures. Dans « Skid », par exemple, on distingue des fragments découpés dans un sac en plastique médical, un tube en relief, des ficelles et des bandes de toile détachées. Ces éléments, extraits d’un quotidien spécifique, offrent un premier point d’accès à l’oeuvre, tout en portant une signification personnelle pour Bowling, dessinant ainsi une sorte de document autobiographique. Ces objets, intégrés directement à la surface plane de l’image avec la fluidité translucide du gel acrylique et de la peinture, rompent et jaillissent de la toile. « J’ai envie d’y jeter des détritus et de les regarder nager avant qu’ils ne se fixent », confie Bowling, « cela me donne l’impression d’avoir une vue d’ensemble sur ce que j’ai traversé dans ma vie ». 

Programme éducatif

L’exposition sera accompagnée d’un programme éducatif, dans le cadre des activités d’éducation globales de Hauser & Wirth. Coorganisée par les universitaires Altair Brandon-Salmon et Ed Kettleborough, cette journée d’études s’articulera autour de trois tables rondes thématiques consacrées à plusieurs facettes de l’œuvre de Frank Bowling : la peinture et le processus, un art transatlantique et le modernisme. Des spécialistes tels que Ben Bowling, Leon Wainwright, Indie A. Choudhury, Ana Teles, Kate Keohane et Artie Foster interviendront au cours de ces discussions tandis que le public sera encouragé lui aussi à s’exprimer librement en présence des peintures exposées.

Cet évènement est la première rencontre académique dédiée à Frank Bowling depuis sa rétrospective à la Tate Britain à Londres en 2019. Elle représente une opportunité précieuse d’enrichir les perspectives de l’histoire de l’art sur son travail.

Dans un souci d’accessibilité et de sensibilisation à l’art, des ateliers destinés aux élèves de cinquième et quatrième des écoles de la région seront organisés dans le cadre de l’exposition. Animés par Susi Sahmland, responsable des programmes éducatifs du Frank Bowling Studio, en collaboration avec l’équipe éducative de Hauser & Wirth, ces ateliers stimuleront la réflexion et l’expérimentation artistique en lien avec l’œuvre du peintre. 

Frank Bowling - Brève biographie

Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA est reconnu comme l’un des grands peintres contemporains. Né au Guyana en 1934, il arrive à Londres en 1953 et obtient la médaille d’argent en peinture au Royal College of Art en 1962. Dès le début des années 1960, Bowling se distingue sur la scène artistique londonienne, en développant un style singulier alliant figuration, symbolisme et abstraction.

Après s’être installé à New York en 1966, son adhésion au modernisme le conduit à se concentrer davantage sur le matériau, le processus et la couleur, si bien qu’en 1971, il abandonne le recours à l’imagerie figurative. Les emblématiques « Map Paintings » (1967-1971), qui présentent des étendues terrestres reconnaissables d’Amérique du Sud, d’Afrique et d’Australie peintes au pochoir, figurent sa transition vers l’abstraction pure. Il expose six de ses grandes « Map Paintings » dans le cadre d’une exposition personnelle au Whitney Museum of American Art en 1971. De 1973 à 1978, Bowling expérimente avec les notions de hasard et d’« accidents contrôlés » avec ses saisissantes « Poured Paintings », réalisées en déversant la peinture d’une hauteur de deux mètres.

Frank Bowling devient membre de la Royal Academy en 2005, reçoit l’Ordre de l’Empire britannique pour sa contribution aux arts en 2008 et est nommé chevalier à l’occasion de l’anniversaire de la Reine en 2020. Ses œuvres figurent dans une soixantaine de collections à travers le monde et ont fait l’objet de nombreuses expositions collectives et individuelles, notamment l’exposition itinérante « Mappa Mundi » de 2017 à 2019, la très populaire rétrospective à la Tate Britain en 2019 et l’exposition magistrale « Frank Bowling: Americas », qui a voyagé du MFA Boston au SFMOMA entre 2022 et 2023. En 2022, il est lauréat du prix Wolfgang Hahn, qui récompense des artistes d’exception de la scène de l’art contemporain.

Aujourd’hui, la grande maîtrise de Frank Bowling en matière de peinture et ses explorations de la lumière, de la couleur et de la géométrie intègrent l’utilisation innovante d’ammoniaque et de lavis multicouches. Son incessante réinvention de la surface peinte se poursuit dans ses œuvres récentes, expérimentant avec des empâtements texturés, des gels acryliques, des collages, des toiles cousues ainsi que des pigments métalliques et nacrés. Travaillant quotidiennement dans son atelier du sud de Londres, Frank Bowling demeure inlassablement animé par sa fascination pour les possibilités infinies et radieuses offertes par la peinture.

HAUSER & WIRTH PARIS

26 bis rue François 1er, 75008 Paris

www.hauserwirth.com

Frank Bowling @ Hauser & Wirth, New York & London

Frank Bowling – London / New York 

Hauser & Wirth New York 

Through 30 July 2021 

Hauser & Wirth London 

Through 31 July 2021 

Reflecting the scale and scope of a prodigious six-decade career that has unfolded while criss-crossing the Atlantic Ocean, Sir Frank Bowling’s inaugural exhibition with Hauser & Wirth is presented in both the gallery’s London and New York locations simultaneously. With works on view spanning over 50 years of the British icon’s career from 1967 to the present day, ‘Frank Bowling – London / New York’ celebrates the ways in which one artist’s inventive approach to the materiality of paint has expanded the boundaries of abstraction.

The exhibition charts Frank Bowling’s life and work between the UK and the United States. Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1934, Bowling arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1962. He later divided his time between the art scenes in London and New York, maintaining studios in both cities. London is the city where Bowling trained as a painter and achieved early acclaim. New York is the city that drew him to itself at , art, artistthe height of the Civil Rights movement, where he became involved in discussions of Black Art – New York was a place of fresh energy and ideas for an artist in search of new ways to make paintings.

Frank Bowling’s transatlantic orientation reveals itself in a shift from his early engagement with expressive figuration and pop art, to an immersion in a uniquely poetic abstraction that continues to evolve even today. Visible in his work are the legacies of both the English landscape tradition and American abstract expressionism. Developing in and between two cities over the course of decades, Bowling’s exploration of light, colour, and geometry can be understood as profoundly influenced by the two great rivers of his life: he has maintained studios close to The Thames in London and the East River in New York, absorbing the brilliance of the rivers’ light into his vision. Bowling would often begin a work in one city and finish it in the other, merging the atmospheres of both. In his own words, ‘I would just roll the lot up and move. And I knew that when I got to the other end, I could roll them out again and continue to work.’

Frank Bowling’s restless innovation on the painted plane endures in his latest works. He continues to break ground through the use of thick impasto textures, acrylic gels, collage, stitched canvas, and metallic and pearlescent pigments. The complexities of his upbringing in Guyana and his constant journeying between London and New York have only served to activate the richness of the different influences of each location. His paintings are a celebration of life lived in varying lights and colours.

A new publication will be released by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, to mark the occasion of this exhibition. In July 2021, Arnolfini, the International Centre for Contemporary Arts in Bristol (UK), will open a solo exhibition of Frank Bowling’s work as part of the institution’s 60th anniversary.

London

Upon arriving there in 1953 at the age of 19, Frank Bowling immediately recognised London as home. He trained as a painter at the Royal College of Art and was struck by the achievements of such towering British artists as Constable, Turner, and Gainsborough. From their classic landscapes he learned to use translucent gel, a substance that adds body to paint for impasto technique. As Frank Bowling himself said, ‘The fact is, it’s exciting and challenging to work in London, Turner’s town, and the pressures of the weight of British tradition are exhilarating’.

FRANK BOWLING

Frank Bowling with Fishes Wishes and Star Apple Blue, London, 1988

© Iona Scott

By the beginning of the 1980s, having taken up a studio near the Thames in Pimlico, Frank Bowling was sharply attuned to the purely abstract aspects of traditional painting and the rich tradition of European painterly engagement with land, sea, cloud, and sky in their abstract forms. This is visible in works like ‘Rockface’ (1987) and ‘Sand Circle’ (1983), in which the artist used thick mixtures of acrylic gel and strips of polyurethane foam to create relief structures, evoking textured landscape and geological strata. By the late 1980s, when his passion for historical European painting had been further enriched by an immersion in the theories and practice of American colour field abstraction, Bowling embarked on a period of experimentation: ‘I was trying to invent ways of using the traditional methods of applying paint – spilling, dripping, marking, measuring’. He wanted to achieve a modernist expression of natural phenomena whilst conveying his formalist intentions, leaving room for the viewer’s interpretive imagination.

Recent works on view include ‘May Shimmer’ (2018), a canvas of muddy-pink tones surrounded by vibrant yellow, and green made visually dynamic by light refracted from bits of jagged straw packing material embedded in the paint. In this work, Bowling achieves a delicate radiance by using drops of pearlescence, a pigment which produces shimmering and iridescent effects.

New York

In 1961, while attending the Royal College of Art, Frank Bowling visited New York. It would be the first of frequent visits over the years, when he stayed and worked at the infamous Hotel Chelsea, the city’s unofficial clubhouse for artists, writers, poets, photographers, and musicians. Recognizing that New York City was the centre of the art world, and the home base of an organized effort to achieve greater representation of Black artists in public institutions, Frank Bowling felt compelled to migrate there.

In New York, Frank Bowling befriended likeminded artists and was inspired to explore the medium of painting devoid of any figurative references, advancing his journey toward pure abstraction. The work of Jasper Johns, whose paintings with stencilled words and enigmatic images, made a significant impact upon Frank Bowling in his search for new ways to experience and make art. As he says, ‘New York beckoned, and the toughness, competitive edge, and excitement drove me and my work to rise to new horizons’. Frank Bowling’s position in New York was secured when he took a permanent studio on Broadway and was given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. 

FRANK BOWLING

Frank Bowling in his studio at 535 Broadway Studio, c.1971

Courtesy Frank Bowling Archive

FRANK BOWLING

Frank Bowling New York loft, 1999

Courtesy Frank Bowling Archive 

© Spencer Richards

Frank Bowling moved to New York in 1966, a charged historical moment in which Black American artists were seeking commitment from the larger art world to the civil rights movement. Major museums were just beginning fledgling efforts to represent the richness of Black art and culture. As an active instigator of dialogue, Frank Bowling addressed the critical invisibility of Black artists through a series of writings for Arts Magazine (1969 – 1972), making a significant contribution to intellectual discourse around Black art in America with essays on fellow artists Jack Whitten, Mel Edwards, and Al Loving.

In the summer of 1984, Frank Bowling spent nine weeks as a resident artist-teacher at the renowned Skowhegan School of Art in Maine. It was here that he began to gather natural materials from the surrounding property, gluing them to the surface of his canvases and painting over them. In this magical rural setting, Frank Bowling’s impressions of rivers, natural light, and terrain fused with his memories of classical English landscape painting. The effects can be seen in such works in the exhibition as ‘Armageddon’ (1984) and ‘Swissvisit I’ (1983). It was Frank Bowling’s constant movement between New York and London that led him to cut up canvases in order to transport them more easily; he would sometimes even attach a canvas to another work, with extra strips added to the cropped edges. In works such as ‘Jamsahibwall’ (1990), a seven part work, this formal framing device extends into the painted ground area itself, and demonstrates the pioneering spirit of Frank Bowling’s approach to technique.

About FRANK BOWLING

Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA has been hailed as one of the greatest living painters. Born in Guyana in 1934, Frank Bowling arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art with the silver medal for painting in 1962. By the early 1960s, he was recognised as an original force in London’s art scene with a style combining figurative, symbolic and abstract elements.

After moving to New York in 1966, Frank Bowling’s commitment to modernism meant he was increasingly focused on material, process and colour, so that by 1971 he had abandoned the use of figurative imagery. Frank Bowling’s iconic ‘Map Paintings’ (1967-71), which include the stencilled landmasses of South America, Africa and Australia, embody his transition from figuration to pure abstraction. In 1969, Frank Bowling organised, curated, and wrote the catalogue essay for the notable exhibition, 5+1, at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and Princeton University, which showcased the work of five African American abstract artists as well as his own recent paintings. Bowling exhibited six large ‘Map Paintings’ in a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. From 1973 to 1978, Frank Bowling experimented with ideas of chance and ‘controlled accidents’, pouring paint from a two-metre height to create his visually arresting ‘Poured Paintings’.

Frank Bowling became a Royal Academician in 2005. He was awarded the OBE for Services to Art in 2008 and a knighthood in the Queen’s birthday honours in 2020. His work is represented in collections worldwide and has been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the 2017 – 2019 touring exhibition, Mappa Mundi, and the hugely successful retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. Frank Bowling is the subject of a BBC documentary, 'Frank Bowling’s Abstract World', which coincided with the opening of the Tate Retrospective. At the age of 87, Frank Bowling works most days in his South London studio, accompanied by his wife, Rachel Scott, other family members and friends, forever driven by his fascination with pushing the vast and radiant possibilities of paint.

HAUSER & WIRTH

23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET

542 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.hauserwirth.com

Frank Bowling, Skoto Gallery, NYC - Works from the Studio - Curated by Spencer Richards

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

www.skotogallery.com