FRANK BOWLING AT THE TATE BRITAIN 2019

 FRANK BOWLING AT THE TATE BRITAIN

 

12th of June 2019

 

Today I am at the Tate Britain to cover the retrospective of paintings by Guyanese artist Frank Bowling OBE (b.1934).  Bowling works with eclectic materials and methods but he mostly rejects subject based art in favour of colour and structure. In his earliest works, Bowling uses the swan as a subject or an image wrought with many personal connotations.  It seems to imply an escape, perhaps to freedom. Bowling began with traditional subject based art before moving to abstraction.

An early work by Bowling titled Cover Girl (1966. Acrylic paint, oil paint and silkscreened ink on canvas) summarises his early preoccupations. The girl is Japanese, the image is taken from a magazine cover. Above her is an outline of Bowling's mother's store in Guyana, Bowling's Variety Store. His mother was a seminal influence on Bowling, a seamstress, but his father, a policeman, was rather cold and absent.  The image of Bowling’s mother’s stores hovers like an apparition in his early works, signifying a point of origin for the artist and juxtaposed with other disparate images that indicate a broadening of his subject matter and interests.

Bowling completed large abstract works in New York, his second home.  One work incorporates images of southern hemisphere continents like Africa which are often enlarged beyond their actual size to compensate for the false cartographical images of the world made by western imperialist powers. Bowling moved to New York city in 1964 and completed another canvas My Guyana there in 1966-7.  Above the man on crutches is yet another image of Bowling's mother's store. Bowling moved from Guyana to London where he studied and met fellow students like David Hockney. But he had to move again, because he believed that he could never develop as an artist in Britain. Bowling was conscious of his African roots, but he never wanted to be a black artist which he regarded as a kind of marginalisation.  

Frank Bowling was influenced by abstract expressionism when he went to live in New York in the 1960s and began to complete a series of poured paintings which are on display at the Tate Britain.  Exponents of the style were artists like Jackson Pollock, renowned for using ordinary household paint and splashing and dripping paint onto his canvases.  The unique status of the artist as an inspired visionary possessing traditional techniques and using established materials had begun to be undermined.  The notion of “inspiration” was now an exhausted trope, signifying the monopoly of white middle class, middle aged, male artists who only passed on their skills and techniques to trusted members of their circle.  Being an outsider to this magic circle of influence, Frank Bowling was willing to experiment with the new techniques of the abstract expressionist movement.  This was a movement away from content of any kind towards an emphasis on form and the structure of colour.

Paul Murphy, Tate Britain

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